another option i came across recently is a GUI shell for the popular mplayer, called MPUI. I have a link to it in my sig. MPUI is stand-alone and makes no changes to the registry. I compared it with MPC/FFDshow and found the quality identical but MPC used on average about half the cpu thanks to ffdshow. Also MPUI could not handle Quicktime and Real videos, while MPC with the respective alternative packs could. However for people looking for an alternative to VLC, check out MPUI.