I have been using the video lan player from http://www.videolan.org for over three years now for watching movies and listening to music. Unfortunately the later versions have started to include a bit of bloat to improve the user interface. This feature creep has also caused performance problems. Large MKV and AVI files were image freezing with the audio continuing. This is really annoying.

The solution to this problem was to go back to version 8.0.

This post is informative, concise and not much else.