If you’re looking for a new video player that provides great picture quality and is light on system resources, you might want to take a look at SPlayer. SPlayer in unique in that it utilizes the GPU in your video card and saves your CPU and RAM for other multitasking. SPlayer After installation, start up SPlayer (short for Shooter Player) and you’ll be given the opportunity to make it your default player or select manual settings. They offer a portable version as well which is nice if you want to use it on multiple machines. If you want to try it out and make sure you’re happy with the player first, then pick Manual Settings and then you can choose the types of media files to associate it with.

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Video File Thumbnails Update: One Caveat we noticed is if you do change your file associations it may remove some of your thumbnails and replace them with the SPlayer logo. Here are a few different thumbs you might see…

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Like the geek mentioned in the comments…”The file associations killing the thumbnails are definitely a problem, though I’d like to point out that video thumbnails are always flaky in Windows, even if you use VLC. There’s just too many codecs out there”.

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Playing a Video File Select a file to open up and play in SPlayer.

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Here we take a look at running a video in SPlayer. Notice the player controls are at the bottom of the video screen.

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The playback controls are only displayed when you hover the mouse over the video screen near the bottom.

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Right-click on the video screen to access different menus to adjust settings of playback, Audio, access files, and more.

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There’s a 10 band equalizer that you can adjust manually or use one of the several presets included.

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  There is a cool Transparent Control feature that could actually help you out while you’re watching videos at work. Here is an example of the regular video screen over Firefox.

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Now in this shot we’re sliding the Transparent Control slider…

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Adjust the brightness and contrast of the video…

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Video control features that let you tweak the display to perfection.

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If you’re a Keyboard Ninja you’ll love all of the customizable hotkeys available.

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SPlayer does subtitles really well too.

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You can also play your music files in SPlayer as well, but its main function is being a video player.

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  This is a very nice video player that is easy to use and plays most video formats. If you’re looking for a new video player that looks great, has several options, and is light on system resources, you might want to give SPlayer a try. Download SPlayer including Portable Version