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!

VLC Media Player

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VLC Media Player is the most popular and robust multi format, free media player available. Available for PC and Mac, the simple UI and huge array of customisation options have enforced VLC Media Player’s position at the top of the free media players. The open source media player was publicly released in 2001 by non-profit organization VideoLAN Project. It plays almost any video or music file format you can think of, including MPEG, AVI, RMBV, FLV, QuickTime, WMV, MP4 and a shed-load of others! Not only can VLC Media Player handle loads of different formats, VLC can also playback partial or incomplete media files so you can preview downloads before they finish. Don’t let its simple interface fool you though, within the playback, audio, video, tools and view tabs are a huge variety of player options. A true classic.