VLC is one of the most popular media player. It is free, open source, and usually can play all the files that won’t play in other players. But, if you find VLC sometimes not very suitable for you, then you might look for other alternative media player.

I sometimes found that VLC cannot play x264 video very well on my slower Pentium 4 machine if the web browser that I use uses a lot of CPU and memory. The playback is not smooth and sometimes stuck.

If you use VLC a lot, and have the same problem as me, then SMPlayer might be the alternative for you. I highly recommend it. SMPlayer is a front-end for MPlayer, which is an open source media player. You can get almost all the features from VLC in SMPlayer (so far, I cannot find the option to play video files as wallpaper). SMPlayer is very lightweight, and it can play x264 files very well even when my web browser is on heavy load.

SMPlayer is free and open source, available for Windows and Linux.

[SMPlayer]