When I was more of a windows user vlc was my favorite for audio. The only area where vlc is better than smplayer is for playing music because vlc's playlist works better for me. Don't these people understand that you put the most commonly used settings first? Most other player's settings (esp vlc and mpc-hc) are just ridiculously poor. They're so well designed that the fact that documentation is very sparse has never bothered me at all. Just set the local file stream cache to 8192Kb. The difference is extremely noticeable even on a smaller screen. Smplayer gives me better quality video rendering performance than any other one I've ever tried.

Usually smplayer plays it better than vlc. I've only rarely used vlc for videos for several years, in case smplayer doesn't work with it properly. Contrary to popular opinion, smplayer is better at that than vlc. VLC and smplayer are the best players for throwing anything at them. What you did was download a video that was incompetently encoded and probably by someone who had stupid incompatible codec packs. Mp4 files can contain a lot of different formats and if you don't even know that you aren't qualified to review ANY video software. Saying it 'won't play mp4' is stupid and misleading.

Videomega smplayer