Most under-rated media player?

[Edvard]

Okay, ignore the BIG SHINY BUTTONS and Self-Aggrandizement at FMod.org and go to Downloads, scroll down to FMod 3.75, download and unzip. Now, take fmod.dll from \api and FMod.exe from \samples\fmod and put them in the same directory. Open FMod.exe.
A very clean smallish media player that supports a whole bunch of formats without too many bells and whistles. Oh, and there's a bunch of stuff in there for the coder types to make their own player, or use the FMod sound engine for whatever. Just thought I'd mention it as this seemed to work on all my ragtag second-hand systems that had real problems throwing up WMP.

[Innuendo]

I haven't looked at it yet, but it'd have to go a long way to beat Media Player Classic.

[allen]

I'm partial to VU Player, myself -- largely unknown and definitely underrated -- but might have to give your baby there a try.

[Edvard]

I didn't say it was great. It barely has a playlist. I just have a special place in my heart for the small and straightforward with a little nerdiness thrown in. That being the fact that Fmod proper is actually a drop-in sound engine for adding (according to the adver... um... documentation) killer sound support to your own apps/games/whatever and they just wrote an example GUI for it. I don't know what it is, those kind of things turn my crank every time... Like finding a treasure chest on a desert island and it's full of tinfoil origami animals.
I'll check out VU Player.

[allen]

I started using 'player' when back before "gracenote" was gracenote -- and it was the best of the free, non-winamp players that supported CDDB/gracenote.  When digital music became a thing and he released vuplayer, I switched to that.  It does everything I need, is nice and small and the price is right

http://vuplayer.com

[superboyac]

SOmeone here mentioned a player called Light Alloy (for video files and DVD playback).  I tried it and it is really good.  Very lightweight and lots of customizable, powerful features.  The only problem is that it costs $30, which is a bit much considering that MPC is free and you've probably already payed for a DVD player.

As a sidenote, I think more developers should find a kind of middle ground as far as pricing of software goes.  There's a lot of good freeware out there, and there are a lot of good shareware programs that usually cost $30 and above.  But there isn't much in the $5-10 range, which is what would be attractive to a lot of guys like us who like cool little programs here and there, but don't want to shell out $30 a pop.  That's why this site is so cool, because we get a lot of useful little programs for however much we want to donate.  But you can't expect everyone to have the same philosophy as mouser (you're one of a kind, man).  Anyway, that's my rant for the day.