Try any 720p H264 file with subtitles to see how in under five minutes it becomes unwatchable :( P.S. Heck, Mplayer - after so many years - still can't properly sync A/V. That's all on M$Wind0ze - but not on Linux. The combo can play literally any file you can scout on web right now. None of Linux players I have tried to date couldn't even close come to unbeatable Wind0ze combo: MPC + Haali + DirectVobSub.

1080p resolution files are norm rather novelty now. Anime now more or less exclusively MKV with H.264 + Vorbis + ASS.

Wow! It can play >5yo media formats! What'a surprise!! Seriously, guys, while you slept, world has changed. > SMPlayer basically plays anything video or audio, including DVDs, VCDs or DVD ISO images, audio CDs, MPEG, AVI or ASF. To sum it up, SMPlayer is a very impressing application and one of the most powerful video players for Linux, together with Kaffeine or VLC. As for speed, comparing to players for KDE 3 like Kaffeine, it is a little slower (I'm referring to the interface's response only), but I hope this will get fixed as the time passes though.

Since it uses Qt 4, integration with KDE 4.x is very good and the interface blends smoothly in the environment. Also, I encountered a crash on MPlayer when trying to play a DVD from the drive, but the second time it ran just fine. I noticed that MPlayer takes up quite some CPU resources when playing a movie with a big resolution, and it was around 20% when playing Big Buck Bunny at 1920x1080 encoded as MP4, on my Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz running Debian Lenny. Subtitle support is also powerful: SMPlayer allows any subtitle sizes, it provides the possibility to automatically load subtitles which match a specific criteria, the position of subtitles on screen and the language encoding to use.

How to use subtitles in smplayer linux