KMPlayer, best video player ever!

Posted on June 12, 2010 22 Comments
Filed under Animation, Life hack

It’s like Magic!

If you don’t know about KMPlayer, you probably think that VLC IS the best player ever. Very wrong! VLC is alright, but KMPlayer is much better, especially if you happen to be an animator.

KMP is a Korean Windows Media player on Steroids. It has thousands of features but for animators, the ones that makes it standout are the following:

– Opens and play XVID/Divx footage frame by frame, forward and backward …. with sound feedback. Except Premiere, do you know any player that does that? This function alone makes it perfectly suited for troubleshooting lipsync.
– Plays H264 quicktimes
– Setup In and out points and loop between the two (A-B function)
– Takes automatic screenshots (great for generating colorscripts)
– Hotkeys that make sense! Space bar to toggle the playback, 1 to play in half size, 2 original and 3 double size.
– You can autohide the interface so only the video is visible
– You can loads as many videos as you want and have them all playing, it is great to pretend you are the master of the univers.
– Displays subtitles even in step frame mode which is amazing for learning lip sync from animated features.

I made a walkthrough as a PDF file. Check it out:

KMPlayer walkthrough v. 1.5

Direct download link
http://en.kmplayer.com/

Comments

22 Responses to “KMPlayer, best video player ever!”

Richie on June 14th, 2010 02:00

KMPlayer can easliy grab sound and video clips as well.
Great for getting dialogue from an dvd/divx

Richie
Akif Kücet on June 14th, 2010 09:18

Thank you!Seems quite well.
Jonathan Hearn on June 16th, 2010 16:20

looks great! is there a mac equivalent? :)
Olivier Ladeuix on June 17th, 2010 04:46

no idea Jonathan
mohinder on July 28th, 2010 07:18

How do you frame by frame ONE frame at a time? When I press F key to go forward it jumps 2 frames not. It also does this when selecting the Frame Step in the right-click menu.
Olivier Ladeuix on July 28th, 2010 07:44

Mohinder, you need to read my Pdf. There is a section where I explain how to change/setup the hotkeys/shortcuts
mohinder on July 29th, 2010 07:37

Thanks a ton Oliver. Last time I tried to open the pdf it would not work but is ok now.
Olivier Ladeuix on July 29th, 2010 08:08

great news
mohinder on August 20th, 2010 11:42

Hey Oliver, have you figured out a way to display frame numbers or a frame counter in the display?

I have searched google but with no luck so far.
Olivier Ladeuix on August 21st, 2010 01:35

well I do things a bit differently Mohinder ;-) Instead I use a Maya mel script from my friend Alfonso Sicilia so the frame counter is always in my viewport.

Check it out, it is free
http://alfsici.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html
mohinder on September 2nd, 2010 13:47

I should have been a little clearer but I meant for displaying frame numbers in videos played in KM Player. For example when framing through and studying animations/cartoons such as bugs bunny etc If you see what I mean!
Olivier Ladeuix on September 2nd, 2010 14:54

ah okay. To be honest I have never felt the need for frame numbers when going through classic cartoons, I usually go through them frame by frame just to study the poses and spacing. Sorry I have no idea Mohinder
Olivier Ladeuix on July 23rd, 2011 05:46

well there could be a contender for KMPlayer. Some people complained about KMPlayer buggy updates when sold to Pandora and the original KMPlayer creator made a new player called PotPlayer.

Check out the thread on Doom9
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=148745

I just downloaded it and will be testing it from today.
Olivier Ladeuix on July 23rd, 2011 15:19

nope PotPlayer is nowhere near KMPlayer, at least not for now, a lot of features dear to animators have been left out like the full audio playback when frame stepping
Charles on January 10th, 2012 15:56

Thanks for your tuto Olivier.
You should integrate your own Url in it. It would easier to come back to the site!
Olivier Ladeuix on January 11th, 2012 06:08

good idea. Strange I didn’t think about it.

I haven’t re-installed KMPlayer for a long time, I hope it is still relevant
Olivier Ladeuix on January 11th, 2012 16:03

still KMPlayer as it it the only player that gives audio feedback when step framing and I love the fact it plays Xvid and Mkv files so easily.
[update]KMPlayer doesn’t loop mp4 files anymore or maybe it never did so I also use Windows Media player and Quicktime pro sometimes. Too bad there isn’t just one perfect media player.
Charles on January 11th, 2012 11:15

Yes, it is.
BTW, what is your current multimedia player henceforth? (if not KMP). I’m me too, not a PotPlayer fan.
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Si Bean on February 8th, 2013 12:16

Hey Olivier,
Love KMPlayer – I’ve been using it for years but have found the setup pretty non-intuituve. This pdf is a life saver! Thanks for taking the time to do it :)
Olivier Ladeuix on May 8th, 2013 14:37

excellent. Yeah that was the reason I did it. I often swap computer and adjusting the preferences is always a pain. Good thing we can also export the preferences but I am not sure how compatible this is with the different versions and it is better if people know where things are.
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