Many of you will be familiar with Media Player Classic and VLC. The author of Media Player Classic has stopped working on it some time ago. Now it has been resurrected and enhanced at Source Forge. Like VLC it also has codecs built into it reducing or eliminating the need to download/install codecs separately. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available.

Media Player Classic - Home Edition

It should not say only Vista ready but also Win7 ready - did not want to say WinXP ready after my bad experience with Win7 lovers here in this forum :-)))

It is great that there seems to be an alternative to VLC and that the software is still kept alive and this for free.

Yep, I use it daily. Great video player.

Music is a different story.

Music is a different story.

I agree with that, so I use WinAMP.

VLC comes in a distant third to GOM Player and MPC IMO. GOM uses much less CPU resources to play high def video than VLC. In fact, when playing some Full HD content from my laptop to the TV, VLC just couldn't handle it while GOM was able to play it without a hiccup.

KMPlayer is number one, followed very closely by Media Player Classic - Home Cinema.

GOM is also very good.