AVI, MPEG, DIVX, MP3, WAV player with screenshot, broken AVI support and detection of needed codec.

Light Alloy comes as an alternative to the Windows Media Player. It brings simplicity and a few useful options – for example Global Hotkeys enables control of playback from outside the application’s main window.

During our tests, Light Alloy opened almost all multimedia files and it behaved remarkably. Video controls posed no problems, but the detection of codecs feature didn’t work as well as we’ve expected. For example, we couldn’t open a DIV3 format movie, even though the application tried to download specific codecs.

Furthermore, the player doesn’t support subtitle scripting. Having special characters in a subtitle file can result in displaying spaces or strange symbols, thus making it unusable. Although it supports skins, there is no add skin menu. In order to change Light Alloy’s looks, users must go to the installation folder and actually copy-paste the skin file themselves (.bmp).

Apart from this, Light Alloy has even a special screenshot function (missing in BSplayer and Windows Media Player). It works as simple as can be. At a press of a button (on the player’s menu or F12) the video screen is captured and automatically saved in the My Documents folder with the movie’s name and time in the filename.

Global Hotkeys is another feature not supported by the big majority of today’s players (except Winamp). Play/pause, mute, restore, minimize, increase/decrease volume, previous/next in playlist at a simple key combination.

With these in mind, Light Alloy proves itself to be a worthy multimedia player. Options like Drag-and-drop support, WinAMP general plugins support as well as the ability to play broken AVI files (or partially downloaded) bring it closer to being a Windows Media Player replacement. On the other hand, there is free software doing almost the same great job but benefiting of a better interface. In the end it is only a question of choice.

Light Alloy 3.4 can be downloaded here.