It's not often I get really excited about a piece of software, but since discovering UMPlayer I've been spreading the word about this mighty bit of media player goodness.UMPlayer stands for Universal Media Player, and for once Universal really means Universal! It will play anything you throw at it right out of the box, and what's more, that box is a free one!
You can download UMPlayer from www.umplayer.com and find out for yourselves what a great bit of software this is. It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac and I use it as the default player on both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04.
How does it perform? Well, the first thing you notice is that it is damn fast. No sooner as you click on a song or a video and it loads up instantly! This makes so much of a difference, not having to wait a second while the player loads up. Secondly, it looks really nice in its default "modern" skin and has all the buttons in all the right places.
UMPlayer will play anything, and its not let me down yet. I ripped a DVD in a wrong codec accidently and nothing would play it (I tried Windows Media Player, VLC, WinAMP, Quicktime, iTunes and Real Player) and that's when I fell in love with UMPlayer, because it played it perfectly with brilliant quality picture and the sound in sync. As far as audio codecs go, again everything is covered, even those .flac files that some people use!
Another great feature is the ability to search Youtube or Shoutcast from within the player. This is particularly useful in Ubuntu where fullscreen flash doesn't always perform well. With UMPlayer, fullscreen videos are perfect, and streaming radio stations from Shoutcast sound brilliant.
I can see no downsides to UMPlayer, other than the fact that it's little heard of at the moment. So, after reading this I'd like you to try it out and discover your media in a new, quick and reliable way that you have always wanted to.
