Top 10 Best Free Media Players

Enjoy music, movies, TV shows and streaming, like never before.

Yes, your PC or Mac has a built-in media player, but there are a whole lot of alternative free media players out there that will take your enjoyment to the next level.

The right media player helps you enjoy music, movies, and TV shows like never before. Whether you love streaming, downloading, or playing media from a USB, disc, or external hard drive, a great media player is a thing of joy.

The programs in our Top 10 Best Free Media Players list can handle a huge range of audio and video formats; help you organise your media library; tag movies and songs; integrate with online streaming services; add album art, and so much more!

If you’ve got a favourite free media player that’s not made it on our Top 10, we’d love to know. Just leave a comment below. Enjoy!

Media Player Classic-Home Cinema

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Media Player Classic-Home Cinema, or MPC-HC as it’s often known, is an extremely light-weight, open source media player for Windows. It supports all common video and audio file formats and proudly proclaims to be ‘100% spyware free’ with ‘no advertisements or toolbars’. Its main features include built-in codecs for MPEG-2 video and LPCM, MP2, AC3 and DTS audio; improved MPEG splitter that supports playback of VCDs and SVCDs using the VCD, SVCD or XCD Reader; plus AAC decoding filter making MPC suitable for AAC playback in MP4. On a technical note, in order to run MPC-HC you must have an SSE capable CPU. MPC-HC will work on Windows XP Service Pack 3, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10, both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64).