ALL SCI-FI

[Rocky Jones]

Since a lot of us here watch old sci-fi movie on YouTube now and then, I thought this might be of interest here.

Lately, for some inexplicable reason the YouTube videos I watch in Firefox, my browser of choice, all run out of sound sync. It begins gradually and after a couple of minutes it's way off. I decided rather than going back to IE or trying Chrome to look into alternatives. I found a free stand alone open source video viewer called SMPlayer that shows YT videos extremely well-- better than ever with a browser, in fact.

SMPlayer is a video player that, I believe, as originally designed for Linux users that's been adapted for Windows as well. It has it's quirks, for sure but I find them well worth putting up with. Not only does it show YT streams with the sound synced, but it, by default, shows them in the highest resolution quality-- with no loading lags or any problems I have found. I just copy/paste the video's page URL into SMPlayer's URL box and it comes up. There is an add-on "YouTube Browser" for it but it's just a lame search box that I find pretty useless. It's easy enough to just copy in a URL from a browser page-- even from a search. The only problem I've had with it is that if I pause a video for a couple of minutes the video crashes and has to be restarted. This is kind of annoying, but now I just note my stopping point and come back to it manually after I restart.

SMPlayer has not only improved the way I watch YT vids, though, it's improved the way I watch TV. As far as I can tell the player doesn't include a way to access a TV tuner card, but I found that it does play video files I've saved from my TV tuner using Windows Media Center. SMPlayer runs those WMV files much, much better than Media Center does. With Media Center I was usually having to watch recordings in a reduced window because at full screen the video is too sluggish. I figured it was because I needed a faster processor. Nope. SMPlayer shows Media Center's recordings at full screen gloriously-- in super sharp high res with no video lag.

As I said, SMPlayer isn't perfect. It has DVD playing capability, but the couple of DVD's I've tried somehow didn't work right with it. That's OK, though. I hardly ever watch DVDs on the computer, anyway. This player had changed the way I watch YouTube and TV recordings, which is enough. Firefox can now screw up YouTube all they want with their endless update tinkering.

[Rocky Jones]

Oh, I didn't include any link there. You can find SMPlayer at most of the big file download sites, but I just got it through the author's website: http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

[Bud Brewster]

Thanks, Rocky. I downloaded the player, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)