Development state

How actively are they being maintained?

The state of a video player project’s development is an important consideration mainly because new codecs and hardware keep emerging and a video player needs to keep up to stay relevant.

A good example of what can happen when development isn’t ongoing is the well-known YouTube API changes which occurred earlier this year. This change stopped the integration code in many third-party apps from working and developers were forced to roll out fixes. As of today, YouTube integration uses a separate utility called youtube-dl, which enables users to download a video and then play it locally – and currently this is the only decent workaround.

Bomi, QMPlay2 and SMPlayer support youtube-dl very well while for VLC feature is not supported. Generally, all four contenders have good support and release updates quite frequently. Bomi breaths new life into the older CMPlayer with an actively updated Git repo. QMplay2 is updated every couple of weeks and has gone a long way since 2012, while SMPlayer has longer delays between releases, but continues to progress. There’s also a large community around the Videolan project, which ensures that its news site ( http://www.videolan.org/news.html) is updated regularly. VLC is a very popular cross-platform player, eg it’s the only easy-to-use solution for downloading movies to iPads as you can’t access the filesystem. There are also many other reason why VLC support will remain rock-solid for a long time. In contrast, the future of Romp is very uncertain, as the development team haven’t updated the player for a couple of years now.