KMPlayer has been around and it is well known for being an alternative for viewing media in place of Windows Media Player that comes bundled with every Windows operating system. There are other alternatives but they are either too simple or too slow because they too many features. KMPlayer finds itself in between these two. It is also free and can be downloaded from www.kmplayer.com. You can find it in this month’s CD/DVD.

Switching Quality And Performance Presets
Almost all of the media we view has been compressed to keep the file size small and in this process there is some visible quality loss. While some users would like to use enhancements to improve this, there are always some who need the best performance because of their slower computers. There are presets that can be enabled which can either lower system resource consumption and some which can improve quality. These presets can be enabled by right clicking on the interface and then on Video (Advanced). You can choose from Preset: Speed, Normal and Quality.

Using KMPlayer as a music player
Like any other media player, KMPlayer can also play audio files of all kinds. When you drag and drop a music folder into KMPlayer, it immediately transforms its interface to something similar like Winamp.

Loading Winamp Plugins Into KMPlayer
KMPlayer can even also pick up Winamp plugins and skins from the Winamp folder. This means you can use visualizations and other effects plugins in KMPlayer without having to sacrifice anything.
Open KMPlayer’s Preferences window by right clicking on the KMPlayer interface and clicking on Options > Preferences. Click on Plugins. Here you can choose on the type of plugins you want to use—Input, Audio and Video DSP, Visualizations, and so on. Click on the button next to the mentioned path and select the one with the Winamp plugins—\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins. The Winamp plugins should be visible in the list. To change the settings for any of them, click on them and click Setup.

Selecting Decoders For Formats
There are times when we might want KMPlayer to handle all the formats and codecs by itself. Some users may have bought commercial decoders and would want to use that. KMPlayer gives easy access and allows users to change decoders for all kinds of formats. Click on Preferences and then on Filter Control. Click on Internal Video Decoder and then uncheck the codecs and formats you don’t want KMPlayer to handle, then click on External Video Decoder and select the ones you want to use from the dropdown menus. External decoders not visible can be added by clicking on the External Decoder Search button. Repeat the same steps for the audio formats.

Turning On Image Quality Enhancements
We have talked about enhancements that people like using to improve the image quality in videos. All the filters available can be configured by starting KMPlayer’s Preferences window and then clicking on Video Processing. Enabling and disabling of these filters can be done quickly by right clicking on the KMPlayer window and then on the filter of your choice under the Video (Advanced) submenu.
One of the filters worth enable is post processing which has the deblocking features in it. It must be said this is a very CPU intensive filter but its main purpose is reducing pixilation in videos of very low resolutions and quality playing on a larger screen. There are similar features for audio such as normalisation and resampling of tracks.

Colour Correction
Very few monitors give you the perfect colour so some amount of colour adjustments might be required. The adjustments can be made by clicking on Colour Controls in the Preferences window. You can choose from a hardware or software colour correction technique. Once that is done, you can make changes to the colours levels, saturation, brightness, contrast and gamma.

Capturing Audio And Video
KMPlayer can grab screenshots like any other advanced media player but it can also grab audio and video tracks. This is done by right clicking on the KMPlayer window and then on Capture. Here you can choose to capture screenshots, audio or video. Advanced features such as setting up the codec for encoding while capturing is also available but that requires a pretty high end system. There’s even a feature that allows you to create a storyboard out of a video.