| User review:
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I have been using The KMPlayer for *years* now on all my PCs and have unreservedly recommended it to everyone I know. It used to work fantastically, and although the settings were a real PITA to understand and configure properly, it offered a great experience OOTB as well.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end. Ever since the developer left (check out his ever improving new offering called PotPlayer!) the company responsible for The KMPlayer has slowly but surely driven it into the ground in a desperate attempt to monetise it. The latest version (3.7.0.113) I tried came as a real shock to me. Multiple scammy toolbars and sundry "offers" that you have to carefully opt out of unless you want your PCs overrun with crapware/malware, plus the headache of remembering to opt out of the company's own Pandora service which IMO is nothing better than spyware.
Even after going to all this effort, you still end up with a player that shows you ads prominently in the main window now, and there's even an entire sidebar for pushing even more crap at you. Yes, with even more effort you can figure out how to block the ads and disable the sidebar and so on, but my point is, *WHY SHOULD YOU NEED TO*? There comes a point where it's just not worth the effort, and that, my friends, is now. No matter how good the core player remains, there's just too much slime coated around it now and it has lost my trust forever. After all, how does one truly know that all the connections it makes have been blocked, or that it's not sending your data for the company to exploit/sell? Yeah, perhaps monitor its outgoing connections with Wireshark or whatever, but tell me, do you *really*, *truly* wish to waste your time and energy doing this repeatedly after *every* update?
I have personally moved on to PotPlayer, and I encourage those looking for an alternative to do so as well. If that doesn't tickle your fancy then there's always the good ol' VLC to fall back on, or MPC-HC or a whole host of alternatives that won't overload your PCs with malware and leave you feeling dirty. It's high time you join me in dumping this POS. Trust me, you'll thank me for it. And as for Pandora, the company responsible for perverting and destroying a fine piece of software, eff you. |
