SMPlayer is a great media player for language learners

I just switched to SMPlayer from VLC and I think I’m just going to make it my default player for all my foreign language videos. VLC, despite its popularity doesn’t have any really great features except for playing videos.

However here’s what SMPlayer does very well.

  • Dual subtitles!!
  • Hotkeys to seek to previous or next subtitle
  • Hotkeys to show last subtitle again or show the next one (it saves having to pause all the time)
  • All video settings are saved for each video forever. If you have dual subs on one video and single subs on another it will remember this and you never have to change this again!
  • Resume works on every video. This was hit and miss with VLC, but works perfectly with SMPlayer
  • Individual bookmarks are saved for each video so they’re there next time you load the video.

Bonus - Youtube

  • Dual subtitles with youtube videos! (with a slight configuration change)
  • All features apply to youtube videos as well.

It’s open source and I don’t have any connection with it. I just thought I’d share because I have a huge library of videos that I watch and take notes on incrementally and this was so difficult with VLC.

The only downside is that there are only Windows\Linux versions. I don’t think there is a Mac version yet.

https://www.smplayer.info/

4 Likes