I recently about a 1.6Ghz Atom, 1GB RAM netbook I was wondering what media player would be best for it, I obviously need something light weight. On my Laptop and desktop PC, I use Windows Media Player with the CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack). That combo works very well and plays every format I throw at it without any problems.

However, I'm not sure if that's the best choice for a netbook. I heard that VLC Player is very god, lightweight and good for netbooks. Opinions please?

Imo, the VLC player is the best player on any machine. But on the other hand, it has been ages since I tried a different player.

Hmm, how is it with subtitles, .srt files etc?

Excellent, should work out of the box. And I guess you won't need to mess with unicode settings, so no worries about subtitles.

For Videos i'd say VLC handsdown

for music I always used foobar2000 when i was still using windows.

I also strongly recommend VLC. I'm using it on my MacBook, laptop, and desktop computers. For .srt subtitles all you need to do is make sure the subs file name matches the video file name, that's it. You can also adjust subtitles speed and time offset, audio offset, etc. I use it to watch DVDs and it skips all those ads and copyright warnings and loads up the root menu right away. For music, I still use Winamp, with classic skin, but that's just out of personal preference.

Thanks very much for the relies everyone, very helpful. One last thing and bear with me on this one:

When I use WMP with the CCCP on my other machines, icons appear on the taskbar telling me exactly what format the video stream and audio stream are of any given video file. I like that feature. Does VLC Player have anything like that?

Tools->Media Information which has a lot of info about the currently playing item.

The best thing of VLC is that it uses its own compilation of codecs, and you don't need to install codecs from unknown sources

Thank you everyone, you've all been extremely helpful. VLC Player is it then. :)

Exactly. This has always been my main motivation to prefer VLC over... about any other media player.

I got fed up with conflicting 3rd party codec installations with odd behaviour, especially with audio. VLC took care of all that, and I could keep Windows clean of excessive and outdated codec installations.

I felt though that e.g. BSPlayer used to be somewhat easier to use and had some nice features, but overall VLC is probably still the best.

Well, I tried VLC on my netbook and I must say it is, in a word, great. It has a nice clean interface, is lightweight and plays everything I've tried so far flawlessly without any hiccups or framerate issues whatsoever.

A very good media player indeed and it seems to be ideal for netbooks too.

VLC is crap. It doesn't stand a chance compared to WMP and MPCHC. The picture quality is pretty bad compared to these two.

Not to mention, it uses outdated libraries and stuff, on the Windows platform, meaning sooner or later you'll be experiencing performance issues.

Wow, an opinion from the other end of the spectrum. Thanks, I'll definately take that into consideration. I feel somewhat deflated now, I was very happy with VLC until I saw this post lol.

Performance kept degrading with each new version. I wasn't able to watch an episode of House in 720p without it stuttering. Not to mention, 1080p stuff that's 10+GBs. Oh, and last time I checked, VLC doesn't like 64+ GBs files, so I can't watch LotR with it.

Anyways, afaik, VLC still uses DirectShow instead of Media Foundation, and that's why the hardware acceleration is buggy and most work goes to the CPU (with MF, the GPU does the work, which results in a lot better performance).

EDIT: Use whatever suits you best, I know I'll never use it. Between WMP and Video (on WIndows 8) for best performance, and MPCHC for the stuff that WMP or Video doesn't like, don't see the need for VLC (and I've never installed any codecs).