14 DAY TRIAL // SMPlayer, a complete media player for Linux that is based on MPlayer as the playback engine and which uses its own codecs, is now at version 14.3.0.
SMPlayer 14.3.0 might seem like a joke, but it's actually not. You might think that you have awoken in a parallel universe or in a Twilight Zone episode where Linux developers switch from versions like 0.8.6 to 14.3.0 over night.
The SMPlayer software got quite a few releases in the 0.8, before the developers chose to change the way they numbered their versions. The jump from 0.8.4 to 0.8.6 for example was not huge, but the new version that has been put forward is actually quite a major update.
There's nothing fishy about the new numbering system and the developers have confirmed that, which means that the features in the new release are the most important aspect.
"The fullscreen control has been improved. The annoying font scanning in Windows has been fixed. New presets for the audio equalizer. It has been added the possibility to play non-protected blu-ray discs (experimental). Better support for Youtube. Many bugfixes. Previous version was 0.8.6, this new release is 14.3... What happened? Now the version is just the year and month of the release," reads the official announcement.
According to the developer, the control for the fullscreen mode has been rewritten and improved and it is now displayed over the video, a number of presets have been added to the audio equalizer, users are now able to play (non-protected) blu-ray discs, the support for multimedia keys has been improved (this also means that it's easier to control SMPlayer with a remote control), and a new option has been added in the playlist preferences for automatically adding other files in the folder to the playlist.
Also, the option "Move the window when the video area is dragged" has been fixed and it should now work properly, the support for Youtube has been improved, and users can now compile it with Qt 5.
SMPlayer 14.3.0 also comes along with a Youtube browser, which has also received a number of improvements. For example, a new option to record audio has been added, it's now possible to download 1080p files in the DASH format, the “Most Rated” tab has been replaced with “Sports,” and an option to add the URL to the SMPlayer playlist has been implemented.
A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official announcement. You can also check out out review of SMPlayer 0.8.4. You can download SMPlayer 14.3.0 right now from Softpedia.