The web techradar.com chose SMPlayer as best performing media player for 2014.

The winner of our roundup was SMPlayer. It wasn't the quickest player to
launch and load files, but it never took more than two seconds, which we
think is an acceptable wait. It excelled where it mattered though - in
CPU and memory performance. Thanks to a maximum memory footprint of just
80MB, and average CPU utilisation just that little bit more efficient
than the other two players on the podium, SMPlayer emerges as the best
performing media player for 2014.

You can read the whole article here.

(Of course, the good performing is due to mplayer)

Previous version was 0.8.6, this new release is 14.3… What happened? Now the version is just the year and month of the release.

Version 14.3

• The control for fullscreen mode has been rewritten and improved. Now it is displayed over the video.
• (Windows) New option in Preferences -> Subtitles to enable or disable the use of the Windows font directory. Disabling this option prevents the annoying font scanning.
• Some presets have been added to the audio equalizer.
• (Experimental) Possibility to play (non-protected) blu-ray discs.
• Better support for multimedia keys. This can help control SMPlayer with a remote control.
• New option in the playlist preferences for adding automatically other files in the folder to the playlist.
• The option “Move the window when the video area is dragged” has been fixed.
• (Windows) Now it’s possible to open Windows shortcuts (symlinks).
• Better support for Youtube.
• (Windows) Better screensaver disabling.
• Many bugfixes.
• Possibility to compile with Qt 5.

You can download this new version from the official site: 

http://smplayer.sourceforge.net