Here’s a Lifehacker article on their opinion of the Five Best Desktop Video Players.

For the most part I’ve always avoided Windows Media Player and gone straight to VLC since it’s very lightweight and quick to start up lacking all the overhead of other media players. Plus Windows Media Player only works on the bulk of my video files (I primarily have .mkv files) after I install VLC, which adds the proper codecs.

I’ve used VLC on Mac and Windows and have had nothing but good results.

• VLC for Windows download
• VLC for OS X download
• VLC for Ubuntu download