One of the new changes in the latest release of SMPlayer is the version system, which changed and now follows a two-digit year and month number, in a similar way to Ubuntu for example. Hence, the latest version is 14.3, and was put out a few hours ago, while the previous version was 0.8.6.

SMPlayer is a powerful Qt-based video player with a lot of features, support for subtitles, video resizing, possibility to remember settings like position, volume, subtitle size on a per-movie basis. SMPlayer is based on the powerful MPlayer backend, and together with VLC is probably the most powerful movie player available for Linux.

The previous release was 0.8.6, which has been around for quite some time, so let’s see what’s new in SMPlayer 14.3 (only the Linux-specific changes are included):

• Possibility to play (non-protected) blu-ray discs.
• The control for fullscreen mode has been rewritten and improved. Now it is displayed over the video.
• Some presets have been added to the audio equalizer.
• Better support for multimedia keys. This can help control SMPlayer with a remote control.
• The option “Move the window when the video area is dragged” has been fixed.
• Better support for Youtube.
• Many bugfixes.
• Possibility to compile with Qt 5.

The YouTube Browser has received some improvements too.

There is a PPA which has already been updated with the latest SMPlayer, so type the following into a terminal to install it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install smplayer

For the source tarballs and other downloads see this page or the SourceForge.net page.