'Best' DCP Player to Check Output

[rtX]

Using the word 'best' is a little silly as any response will be subjective, but I wondered if there is a piece of software others have used and can offer advice upon, which serves as a means to test an encrypted 5.1 sound 2D 2K DCP output by the DCP-o-Matic program. Reason: I want to review and check what I have produced before booking a screening room in which it will be properly tested with an audience. Ideally, the DCP player would be capable of working on a Linux or Windows 4 core machine (for my purposes, anyway). For the avoidance of confusion, I've had success previously using DCP-o-Matic, and have no doubts it will work fine, so this is me just being belt and braces, to check things like the mix is in sync etc. (elements which have been provided to me from different sources).

[Carsten]

Should this be free, or are you content with demo players (limited runtime)?

I tested various players. EasyDCP Player has rather high expectations on hardware, otherwise is considered a 'proofing tool' by some.

The digitAll player is the only free player without runtime limitations. I have found it a bit buggy on my notebook. Don't know wether that depends on my specific hardware. I recently tested the Doremi CinePlayer eval and found a nice 8ch audio VU meter - if you are doing surround mixes, this might be handy.

There are now a lot of choices. I can only recommend to get the demo players and play around with them.

- Carsten

[rtX]

I'm just looking for something I can see the picture on and hopefully hear some sound. It's more to be able to check I got what I thought I'd got without having to go into a cinema to do that. I'm not unwilling to pay something, but I've only found players for which the sums being asked are just silly (if you are encrypting DCPs, that is). I'll try out some of your suggestions and many thanks for those.

[rtX]

Unfortunately, none of the trial versions etc. work with an encrypted source. Also, I think my machine is under spec'd. It looks like I would need something like 8 more cores to do what I want.

I found this open source proof of concept for a player using existing software: http://www.belle-nuit.com/open-source-d ... of-concept But I don't think it would handle decryption as is.

[rdbee]

I too was looking for usable DCP player for longer time, and found this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Ci ... CP_players

I tried all of the software listed there, except for FFmpeg.
DigitAll's dcpPlayer doesn't work on any of my machines, the playback is never smooth, jumps forwards and backwards by one frame even on a hexacore i7. Subtitles are incorrectly displayed too.
easyDCP Player is quite nice, but it costs too much and it is practically unusable for some real work in trial version.
I was unable to install FinalDCP Player, it was just showing some DLL problems at the beginning and when I solved them, it just refused to play.
NeoDCP Player is quite fine, I am using its trial version and it helps me a lot. It has nice configuration options, much better than other pieces of software I've tested.
Stereoscopic Player doesn't support DCPs properly, so it shouldn't be listed as a DCP player there.

Cheers,
Robert