Daum PotPlayer playing a Blu-ray backup of "Ghost Rider"

      Before downloading it, you should really read this article entirely, especially the last section. This is an article we wanted to post for our readers a long time ago, but only now we discovered a great piece of software worthy of such a noble title. We know that everyone has a favorite multimedia file player, but today we are going to have a closer look at the new King of Software Multimedia Players. He (actually it’s an “it”, but we use “he” to enhance the drama-effect) was born from the “ashes” of his “father”. The previous King of Software Multimedia Players was The K-Multimedia Player, a piece of free software, originally developed by YoungHuee Kang. The earliest version of this player that we could find was 1.0.250 (year: 2002) – and the latest is 2.9.4.1437 (year: 2010). During the early versions, the player had installed and worked only in the Korean language, but due to an increasing interest of the Internet users from various other countries, the player got soon an English translation and became very popular. At the moment, the player has its menu translated in over 15 languages, Romanian included. Ok, let us get to the point – how did The K-Multimedia Player become the King of Software Multimedia Players? And which player is the King now?

The K-Multimedia Player skin modes

      We are the ones giving it this name, but if you pay attention to what this player has been (and still is) able to do you will understand our reasons. First of all, the whole concept of this multimedia player was to be able to play smoothly any media file you throw at it without the help of any audio or video codec packs installed on a Windows PC. Since the early versions 2.x.x.xxxx, the player became widely known since it impressed large communities of users on the Internet with its abilities. The player provides both internal and external filters with a fully controlled environment in terms of connections to other splitters, decoders, audio/video transform filters and renderers without grappling with the DirectShow merit system. Internal filters are not registered into the system's registry to prevent the operating system from confusing system filters with K-Multimedia Player's filters.

The K-Multimedia Player on HDTV

Here is the official description given on its main site:

      “The KMPlayer is a versatile media player which can cover various types of container format such as VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg Theora, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, and QuickTime among others. It handles a wide range of subtitles and allows you to capture audio, video, and screenshots in many ways.

      The player provides both internal and external filters with a fully controlled environment in terms of connections to other splitters, decoders, audio/video transform filters and renderers without grappling with the DirectShow merit system. Internal filters are not registered to user's system to keep it from being messed up with system filters.

      The KMPlayer includes almost all the essential decoders required for media playback. Furthermore, to get beyond the limitation of internal decoders, the external ones such as commercial H.264 decoders or Cyberlink/Intervideo audio decoders can be specified, so that KMP works optimally by the users' own customization. Even though the KMP is based upon directshow structure, it supports Winamp, Realmedia and Quicktime by the internal logic. Thus, it is possible to specify where to try to connect firstly the media in the preferences panel.

      In short, the player provides a strong hybrid structure efficient for interconnecting various directshow filters, winamp input&dsp plugin, and internal filters. The most outstanding feature is that the player has the full control of filter connections to prevent