Watching movies or videos on your PC has now become a common practice but today finding a video media player that suits us is not really an easy thing.

There are many players on the internet, many of them are free or open source but which is the best to download for windows?

Windows Media Player is available for all operating systems, over time has become increasingly heavy but still cannot play all the video extensions of the movies that we download from the network.

One of the most widespread players today is undoubtedly VLC, supports virtually any format, recording/streaming transmission but has a non-user friendly interface.

Here is a list of the best free media player programs to download and to watch videos and movies on a Windows PC.

Media Player programs to watch videos and movies on Windows

VideoLanClient (VLC)

It is the most famous player in the open source world. Even if there are many good alternatives to VLC, it still remains one of the most advanced players in the world.

Maybe its interface is not user-friendly (although its very customizable if you use it for a while).

VLC has many features, it has an index rebuilder for corrupted files, file conversion, streaming recording and playback, it is completely self-sufficient and does not need external codecs to play videos, so sometimes files that other players can not read can be read by VLC.

PotPlayer

PotPlayer is a Korean player, well it is unknown to most of the users worldwide. It is developed by the creator of KMPlayer.

Pot Player is the best player ever supporting many video formats also supports post-processing, 3D video also uses GPU acceleration, it uses very less CPU during playback.

With Pot Player you can also watch TV if you have a DVB Digital Terrestrial TV receiver and it supports automatic upload of files into playlists.

In short, it has many options and is very light, the only flaw is that it is officially distributed only in Korean. Fortunately, a group of willing people translate it into English and kept it updated.

KMPlayer

KMPlayer is a powerful open source Windows player, available in many languages supports many video formats, supports 3D video is light and full of advanced options. It seems as the little brother of PotPlayer despite having been developed before.

It has good interface, editable graphics, light and easy to use but you do not miss anything, there many options are available, as PotPlayer supports automatic loading of files in playlists.

Crystal Player Pro

Crystal Player Pro has been for years one of the best players in circulation, developed by a Russian company.

It is currently one of the best players on the market especially in terms of usability and the look and feel has integrated codecs that allow it to open many videos.

It good for especially those who are using the classic codecs of Windows.

The strength of Crystal Player is definitely the menu it allows you to access all the options while we are watching a video without the need to navigate through complicated menus, thanks to an Over The Screen interface you can access the flight to the audio equalizer.

You can change color, brightness, blur and much more with a few clicks, has many integrated filters that are activated with very few clicks, supports zoom, frame by frame and much more.

UMPlayer

It’s an alternative version of the famous MPlayer player, UMPlayer is much more usable than its little brother, works on Windows, Linux and OSX, supports many formats and integrates support for YouTube (even if it does not work) and for Shoutcast radios ( Winamp).

Kantaris Media Player

Kantaris is a player derived from VLC and tries to solve usability problems by making the interface more pleasant and reorganizing the video options, if you want a VLC with some less but more usable function Kantaris is the player that suits you.

Gom Media Player

It is a freeware Video Player very easy to use, fast with a good interface. Natively supports the most popular video formats (flv, mp4, mov, mpg, ts, avi, divx, asx, wmv, m4v, dat, ifo, vob, 3gp / 3gp2, rm / rmvb, mkv) other formats is obviously able to support them via windows codecs.

Windows Media Player Classic (MPC – HC)

It’s an old-fashioned version of the classic Windows Media Player, without too many frills and very light, it allows you to see the most popular movies on the PC without excessive use of resources (as long as the necessary codecs).