When it comes to media players that are feature-rich, easy to use, and conflict-free, KMPlayer is without a doubt one of the best. If all you want is to enjoy watching movies or listen to your audio files, you will most likely never have to change any of the default settings – simply run the player, open your files and enjoy. However, the more advanced users will find anything that they need as well – KMPlayer supports plugins, internal and external filters, various subtitles (including text to speech for reading subtitles), and most of the media file formats such as VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg Theora, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, and QuickTime amongst others.

Miro is a cross-platform, open source software that provides you with a free high definition media player and video podcast manager. It allows you to search for video files on the most popular movie sharing sites, organize your local media files into libraries, subscribe to audio and video feeds, build playlists, and get access to legal torrents.

Winamp is by far one of the most popular media players, downloaded by millions of users Worldwide. It can playback all popular media file types, comes with built-in equalizer, the sound quality is good, can be expanded with the help of the countless plug-ins and allows you to easily save and organize your playlists. The latest release comes with portable device sync support, more language packs, support for classic and modern skins, iTunes library import and other exciting features.

If you want to download files of any kind: movies, music, video clips, documents, software, games and books, then Vuze is the tool that you need. With this based on the bittorent protocol application even the largest files can be downloaded in a matter of minutes, providing that you have fast Internet connection and there are enough people seeding them; this allows independent producers and musicians to share their work with millions of users Worldwide without having to spend huge amount of money on bandwidth and servers. It also lets the regular user share any of his files with all his online friends or the entire community.

Foobar 2000 is an oddly named freeware music player that’s built on the philosophy of being simple but highly configurable, lightweight but powerful. If you’re fed up with the memory usage of popular players like iTunes and MediaMonkey, Foobar is a great alternative – not only does it sound great when playing music, it offers a huge level of customisation. Take a look at our full review.

If you’re tired of Windows Media Player, PowerDVD and all the other resource hungry players out there, you might want to take a look at this next review – VLC is hands down the best media player for Windows and Linux. Not only is it free and lightweight, it supports a much wider range of features and codec support than many of it’s peers. We take a look at everything the player offers.