"What is the best movie player for Windows 8? The Windows Media Player often fails to recognize video files and asks me to install additional codecs."

Windows Media Player is the default free movie player for Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10. However, only supporting a few video formats, Windows Media Player sometimes fails to play certain videos like MOV videos. Turning to a 3rd-party free movie player app would be a wonderful choice. This post would introduce you some free movie players. You could download movie player freeware freely according to your own preferrence. These movie viewer software are all freeware.

Part 1: 5 Free Movie Players for Windows

The below 5 best movie players are the top popular free movie players online.

1. Leawo Free Blu-ray Player

Leawo Free Blu-ray Player is an all-inclusive movie player freeware that could play back all kinds of movies, like Blu-ray, DVD, 4K movies, 1080P videos, ISO image file and even movie audios. As a region free Blu-ray player software program, it could help you easily play back the latest released Blu-ray discs without quality loss. It's also a free DVD player to play back DVD discs/folders, an ISO player to directly play back ISO files, a free video player to play up to 1080P HD videos and a free audio player to play even DTS-5.1 audio in lossless quality. During playback, this professional Blu-ray player software allows you to select/load subtitles and adjust video and audio. It even provides detailed playback navigation to let you fully control media playback.

blu-ray-player

Leawo Free Movie Player 

☉ 100% free movie player to play Ultra HD 4K, 1080P Full HD and 720P video without quality loss.

☉ Free 4K Blu-ray disc player to play 4K Blu-ray disc, regardless of disc protection and region code.

☉ Support multiple audio decoding systems like Dolby, DTS, AAC, TrueHD, DTS-HD, etc.

☉ Adjust subtitles, video and audio during media playback for better movie experience.

2. VLC Media Player

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It has multiple versions for different platforms, including: Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, iOS, etc. Therefore, you could download movie player to various devices as you get in hand.

VLC for Mac

3. KMPlayer

KMPlayer is another choice of Windows 10 media player. With KMPlayer, you are able to play any mainstream media files because this free media player for Windows 10 has its own internal codec which makes it supports MPEG 1, MPEG 2, AAC, WMA, OGG, ect. And it also supports matrix function and normalized function as well when internal sound codec is being used. But the most important feature that KMPlayer should really be working on if it wants to compete with the other media players for Windows 10 is to play H.264/H.265 ultra high definition videos.

KMPlayer

4. SMPlayer

SMPlayer doesn't have the prettiest of interfaces (it almost turned me away, actually) but it has some great functionality that may prove enough for you to overlook the lacking aesthetics. Fortunately, SMPlayer does have a skinning system that helps there. With built-in codecs, SMPlayer will handle almost anything you throw at it right away.

SMPlayer

5. Media Player Classic

Media Player Classic is designed to be a compact, no-frills sort of program, yet it does pretty much everything you'd expect from a media player. It works straight from installation without requiring any additional codec packs, except maybe for the most obscure formats. It's extremely lightweight and uses very few resources while playing. It supports VCD, SVCD and DVD playback, and with the support of DirectShow, it could play media files in a vast array of video format families including: AVI, MPEG, MKV, MP4, MOV, FLV, RM, WMV, MP3, AAC, FLAC, and a whole lot more.

Media Player Classic

Any of these free movie player download is available for any people. They are all free movie players, no extra dollar needed.

Part 2: Comparison chart

If you're not sure about which free movie player to download, let the below comparison chart help you make the decision. The below free movie player comparison chart would compare these movie player apps mainly on their main features. You could take it as a referrence.

Features Leawo Free MKV Player VLC Media Player KMPlayer SMPlayer Media Player Classic
Play Blu-ray files free
Play 4K videos free  
Play 1080P videos free
Play audio files lossless
Region-free Blu-ray disc player      
Play DVD disc    
Virtual remote control        
Power manager      
Customize skin    
Change Blu-ray palyer region codes      
Select subtitles and audio tracks
Add external subtitles
Windows 8
Windows 7
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Mac