I can't say enough good things about VLC. It has its quirks (the glitch when switching between videos in a playlist is annoying as hell), but when it comes down

I can't say enough good things about VLC. It has its quirks (the glitch when switching between videos in a playlist is annoying as hell), but when it comes down to it, there is nothing comparable, at any price. I use it professionally in an audiovisual company I started a few years ago, for screening films on huge screens outside, and I've tried several alternatives (often to address problems that turned out not to be VLCs fault, like the fact that Apple ProRes format literally cannot be played back reliably on a laptop computer at high resolutions, including in Apple's own players) only to be horribly disappointed in them. The playlist features are great. It's smart about multiple displays, and can be configured in such a way that it always get's the right display...we have two different types of projector (one is 1920x1200 resolution the other is 1280x800), and VLC is the only player that can be configured to always open the video fullscreen on the projector and put the controls on the primary display. I can't say enough about how important this one is. It's incredibly configurable...it's kinda stupid how busy the display is, by default, and it can be a little tricky to find all of the various OSD options, but once the configuration is right, it's perfect. It looks as good as any player I have for nearly every format, including DVD and Blu-ray, so even if the client brings me a film the day of the event, I can pop it into a playlist and expect it to Just Work(tm) (with the exception of high res, lossless, ProRes, which has to be converted to a compressed mp4 or similar, first). I've often considered making a custom version just for my kind of use case...it wouldn't take much to make it perfect for professional cinema usage (well, maybe there's the DCP question which I haven't researched lately), or at least for low and mid-range type cinema options, for indie film events and such. An automatic compression option for loading files that are in lossless formats, no glitch on switching between videos and images in a playlist (assuming the video mode doesn't have to change, the import step could normalize videos to one resolution and color depth, as well), and maybe some built-in auto-calibration options (with a video input). Would be amazing.