Best, Light Video Player : MPlayer

What application that you need to install in order to play Xvid, DivX mpeg file, etc? In Windows, we usually use free K-Lite Codec pack which is not light (IMHO) as it eats your memory alot. In Ubuntu Linux, we usually use Totem movie player with additional codecs.

Actually in both operating systems, we can use VLC player. But, I kind hate using mouse just to do simple and common tasks when watching videos (like seek for scenes or increase volumes). So I prefer MPlayer without GUI (graphical interface) which is so light and use keyboard arrow to seek for scenes (instead of using mouse).

Here are the basic commands of MPLayer:

• Seek and navigate time frame: Left or Right, Down or Up for bigger jump, Page Down or Page Up for biggest jump
• Full screen mode: f
• Pause: Space
• Adjust volume: / and * (numlock on)
• Time information: o (alphabet after n)
• Switch subtitle: j
• Adjust audio video synchronization: + and -
• Adjust subtitle delay: z and x
• Exit: Esc or q

So, if you have slow machine or old PC but still want to watch new-codec-encoded movies, you'd better consider using MPlayer instead of K-Lite Codec Pack.

You can download MPlayer for Windows in http://kovensky.project357.com. Just drop your movie in mplayer.exe to play a movie.

Actually there are many binary distributions (the build) of MPlayer out there. It's true since it is an opensource software. The Konvesky's distribution is so cool that it gives you only single exe file which doesn't need to install at all. For the first time run, it will configure your mplayer (creating config file) that takes a moment.

It is recommended to put the following additional configuration option in the config file:

# If your system too slow, it will cut frames to synchronize with the audio
framedrop=yes

# Tells MPlayer to handle the subtitle file as UTF-8. It makes Japanese subtitle writen in UTF-8 readable.
utf8=1

# Search subtitle with the same basic name with the movie file. Kungfu.avi will be loaded with Kungfu.srt or Kungfu.id.srt
sub-fuzziness=1

# Subtitle text size
subfont-text-scale=2.5

Read in http://www7.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html for more configuration options.