An article posted on the SMPlayer blog yesterday points out some of the new features that will be available in the next SMPlayer version, like support for high DPI screens, an option to send the video to the second screen while controlling the application from the primary screen and more.

You can try this SMPlayer version right now in Ubuntu, Debian 8, Fedora (22 and 23), openSUSE (13.2, 42.1 and Tumbleweed) and Windows. See the instructions and links below.

SMPlayer, a Qt front-end for mplayer, has reached version 15.9.0 recently, this being the first stable version to support mpv. There are various other new features as well, like support for 3D stereo filter, MPRIS v2 support, a new default theme and more.

SMPlayer, a Qt graphical front-end for mplayer, added mpv support a couple of months ago however, because there are some missing bits, it will take a while until a new stable version with this new feature is released.

But you can already install SMPlayer with mpv support in Ubuntu or Linux Mint, by using the official SMPlayer Testing Stable PPA.

For those not familiar with mpv, this is a media player based on mplayer2 (and mplayer), which comes with numerous extra features and improvements compared to mplayer2, such as:

VA-API is an open source library/API which enables hardware accelerated video processing. It uses the GPU to accelerate video processing in order to offload the CPU.

Supported hardware includes Intel HD Graphics and G45 chipsets and newer as well as AMD Radeon GPUs (there's also a Nvidia VDPAU backend for VA-API). You can find a list of supported hardware, drivers and video codecs HERE.

Here's an example: on my laptop (Ubuntu), the CPU usage is around 40-50% when watching an 1080p H.264 video using MPlayer without VA-API and around 2-5% when watching the same 1080p video using MPlayer with VA-API. You can see some screenshots below:

ffDiaporama is a multi-platform application for creating videos from photos or movie clips. It supports various transition effects, titles/annotations, music and more.

SMPlayer may have been dead for a while, but it seems very active now, with two releases in just one month. The latest SMPlayer 0.7.0 brings basic support for YouTube and MPlayer2 as well as other new features.

SMPlayer is a popular front-end for MPlayer and can play videos, DVDs and VCDs, featuring configurable subtitles, audio track switching, video equalizer, filters, playlist, audio and subtitles delay adjustment and much more.

After almost 2 years, a new SMPlayer version has been released: 0.6.10. The new version only brings some minor new features like: