I've gone through a lot of players, and I'd definitely say Media Player Classic Home Cinema or KMPlayer for videos. If you're doing hd, you just need Core AVC codec, and AC3 filter. They're both customizable, and play videos well.

For audio, I'd definitely suggest Media Monkey, because of how much control you get over organizing all your music files. It's easy to use, and works great.

VLC for movies (plays almost every format and a small download)
Winamp for music (small download so it runs perfect even while gamging and also has a good EQ)

cccp project codec pack (mpc is included) is way better than vlc

Vlc:vid
Foobar:music

vlc

Second this. Can't understand why VLC is sopopular when it fails to play half of the files and the others either just show a green screen, have major audio issues or flickers every goddamn two seconds.

I use wmp with a codec pack that lets it pretty much read any type of video files.

say what you want against wmp, but it follows its playlists, it doesn't crash, and i can run it fullscreen on my 2nd monitor without noticing any lag in the images :S, so i don't have any reason to hunt any other media player :S

km > vlc. ease of use, keyboard shorties, and easier on eyes. other than that its the same.

this