SMPlayer 26.8.29

Most media players forget you the moment you close them.

SMPlayer does not, and that single habit is why people who switch to it tend to stay - it remembers exactly where you stopped in every file you have ever opened, and it keeps remembering after you have started and abandoned twenty other things.

The rest of it is a capable, unfussy player that opens almost anything without a codec pack, which is table stakes now, but the memory is the reason to bother.

The Feature People Actually Stay For

Stop a film halfway through. Come back five minutes later, or five months later, open the file again, and it picks up exactly where you were - no dialogue box, no "resume?" prompt, no hunting along the timeline.

It does this per file rather than for the last thing you watched, so a half-finished documentary, three episodes of something and a two-hour film can all sit in your library at different points and every one of them opens where you left it.

Other players have added versions of this since, but usually as a prompt you have to answer, or only for the most recent file. Here it is simply how the player behaves, and it has been that way for over a decade.

SMPlayer also stores your per-file settings alongside the position, so an audio delay you dialled in on a particular file, or a subtitle track you chose, comes back with it.

As of 26.8 the same idea covers playlists. A playlist you were partway through reopens at the point you left it rather than starting from the top.

What Is Running Underneath

SMPlayer is a front end rather than a playback engine of its own, and it can drive two different engines: mpv, which is the modern default and where the development attention goes, and MPlayer, the older project it was originally built around.

Both are bundled, so there is nothing to install separately and no codec pack to hunt down. You can switch between them in preferences if a particular file misbehaves on one, which is a genuinely useful escape hatch that almost no other player offers.

That relationship is worth understanding if you are choosing between them. mpv on its own has no interface at all and is configured by editing a text file, and SMPlayer is essentially that same engine with a conventional window, a playlist and a settings panel wrapped around it.

It matters for one practical reason: the available image and audio filters come from the engine, not from SMPlayer. The deblocking, denoise, sharpening, equaliser and voice-removal filters you will find in the menus depend on which backend is active, so if a filter you expect is missing, the backend is the first thing to check.

YouTube Playback, and Why It Sometimes Stops

SMPlayer will open a YouTube URL directly and play it in the player rather than the browser, and it will download the video too. This is one of the oldest reasons people install it.

It is also the part that breaks, and the reason is worth knowing. SMPlayer has not contained its own YouTube code since version 20.6 - it hands the job to an external tool, and since 21.10 that tool has been yt-dlp.

YouTube changes how it delivers video constantly, so yt-dlp is updated almost weekly to keep up. When YouTube playback in SMPlayer stops working, the player is almost never the problem - the bundled yt-dlp copy has simply gone stale, and updating that component fixes it.

Subtitles That Find Themselves

SMPlayer searches OpenSubtitles from inside the player, so a film with no subtitle file gets one without you opening a browser. It moved to the current OpenSubtitles API in version 23.12, which matters because a number of players' built-in subtitle search quietly stopped working when that changed.

Timing is the other half. Subtitles that run ahead of or behind the dialogue can be nudged into place with a keypress during playback, and the same applies to audio that does not match the picture - both offsets are then remembered with the file.

It will also display two subtitle tracks at once, which is genuinely useful if you are learning a language and want the original alongside a translation. Since 26.8 that second track has its own on and off switch rather than being tied to the subtitle settings around it.

For anything beyond nudging - retiming a whole file, fixing encoding, converting between formats - Subtitle Edit is the tool, and MKVToolNix is what you want if the goal is to mux the subtitle permanently into the file.

The Rest of What It Does

• Speed control from slow motion up through 2x and 4x, with preset steps at 0.25x, 0.5x, 1.25x, 1.5x and 1.75x for the ones people actually use.
• Mouse wheel seeking and configurable shortcuts throughout, so the whole player can be driven without going near a menu.
• Thumbnail previews on the seek bar, added in 26.8, so hovering over the timeline shows the frame you are about to jump to - switch it on in Preferences under Interface.
• A thumbnail generator that builds a contact sheet of stills from a video file, which is a rare thing to find built into a player.
• Auto-rotation for footage shot vertically or upside down on a phone, so it plays the right way up without you fixing the file.
• Skins and themes, plus a choice between the classic interface and a more modern one.
• AV1 playback, including as an option for YouTube - if you are wondering whether that matters, we looked at whether AV1 beats H.265.

It opens network streams too, so a direct stream URL can be pasted in and played - the same technique covered in our guide to opening a stream URL in VLC works here. Internet radio stations now show their current track title as well, read from the stream itself.

Playlists are supported in the usual formats. If M3U is unfamiliar, what an M3U file is covers it, and our Playlist Builder assembles one from files you already have.

Installer, Portable, and Other Platforms

On Windows there is a normal installer and a portable build that keeps its configuration in its own folder, which makes it a reasonable thing to carry on a USB stick or run on a machine you cannot install software on. Since 24.5 the portable build keeps its settings in a config folder beside the program rather than anywhere on the host machine.

It is not Windows-only. macOS builds have been published since version 21.8, and 26.8 adds native arm64 builds for Apple Silicon alongside the existing Intel ones, so an M-series Mac no longer runs it through translation.

On Linux it comes as a distribution package, an AppImage, a Flatpak and a Snap. One thing changed in 26.8 worth knowing: it now forces the xcb backend to avoid display glitches, which means it runs through XWayland on a Wayland desktop rather than natively.

Because both playback engines are bundled, nothing else needs installing - no codec pack, no filters, no system components. That is the same reason it does not care what Windows itself can decode, which is a different question covered in what Media Foundation is.

If It Will Not Start At All

If SMPlayer opens with a dialog saying no Qt platform plugin could be initialized, it is almost never a broken install - it is one file in the wrong folder, and on the portable build it is usually your unzip program that put it there.

Our guide to fixing the Qt platform plugin error has the two-minute version, including why a flattened extract quietly deletes files as well as misplacing them.

Worth knowing before you go looking: 26.8 is the first release to offer experimental Qt 6 packages for Windows and macOS. The established builds are still Qt 5, and the Qt 5 advice is what applies unless you deliberately went and fetched the experimental one.

What Changed in 26.8.29

This one is worth reading rather than skipping, because it is the biggest release in several years and the previous few genuinely were maintenance.

• Playlists now remember their position between sessions, which extends the thing this player is known for from single files to whole lists.
• Seek bar thumbnail previews, off by default and switched on in Preferences under Interface.
• A pause button in the playlist, so stopping playback no longer means going back to the main window.
• Secondary subtitles can be switched on and off on their own.
• Native Apple Silicon builds for macOS, alongside the existing Intel ones.
• Zoom, video aspect ratio override and the black borders option all behave correctly again.
• Playlist numbering and sorting fixed - items renumber properly after a removal, and the list re-sorts itself when you add files.
• Internet radio track titles are read more reliably from the stream metadata.

Further back, the releases that changed something are easy to summarise. 23.12 implemented the new OpenSubtitles API and fixed play and pause against mpv 0.37, and 23.6 fixed YouTube playback being capped at 720p.

Before those, 21.10 moved YouTube support onto yt-dlp, which fixed buffering and age-restricted videos, and 21.8 brought the macOS build and the Linux AppImage, Flatpak and Snap packages.

How It Compares

If you would rather keep the player you have and fix what it cannot open, the K-Lite Codec Pack covers most gaps system-wide, and the HEVC Video Extensions deal specifically with H.265 files refusing to play on Windows.

For a single file you just want to check without installing anything, our browser-based HEVC Player will open it, and our guide to playing HEVC in VLC covers the player-side settings.

What It Runs On

• Windows, macOS and Linux, plus FreeBSD. Installer and portable builds on Windows; AppImage, Flatpak, Snap and distribution packages on Linux.
• Both playback engines bundled - no codec pack, no filters and no system components to install alongside it.
• YouTube support is a separate optional component on Windows, and it needs updating independently of the player.
• Free and open source, with no adverts, no bundled extras and no paid tier.

Quick questions

More players are in the rest of Media Players.

Download SMPlayer 26.8.29 and leave something half-watched to see the point of it, or tell us how you got on - the most recent review here is from 2017.