I recently downloaded and installed RealPlayer - Free so that I could view downloaded .flv videos (like those you get from YouTube), and found it to be an excellent player with some great options. It will also play videos and music of almost any file type you can think of.

What I like most is the ability to download any (well almost any) online video one is watching. One can just right click on the video and select "Download with Real Player" or select to have a little toolbar appear above the movie and click on that. It seems only those videos which are not cached to a temp directory on ones system, are not downloadable.

There has been a recent "security" warning about RealPlayer, but that is about an add-on which is not uninstalled when RealPlayer is. Sure one needs to know what is on ones system but to my mind that is not an issue as there are no vulnerabilities associated with it or that it invokes. RealPlayer seem to be pretty good about patching things like that when they come up anyway.

I've not used RealPlayer in a while but I have their Rhapsody service, I love it

BTW, Media Player Classic plays .flv files like a champ! RealPlayer used to come with excess baggage, (read AOL etc.) though I don't know about now.

The RealPlayer 10 was notorious because installing it could actually damage your Windows setup (although I guess I was lucky, and this never happened to me personally).

I've been using the RealPlayer 11 since it first came out in Beta, and I'm very happy that I no longer need to mess about with fiddly alternative software in XP x64 and Vista just to listen to online radio, like the BBC for example...

Personally I just use WMP11 for playing all of my files. The K-Lite Codec pack has codecs for bascially anything that I need. However, if I really need a lightweight player in a snap (usually for my laptop) I use VLC to run the necessary videos.