Windows 7 - what is the best out and out media player

VLC for those huge mkv files (High Definition Anyone?)
Windows media player for your average avi file
winamp for music
real player for those pesky rmvb and rmb files

anything else worth mentioning?

I rate VLC as the best hands down as it can play just about anything!

for movies i use kmplayer, similar to vlc, it's free and plays near-enough everything without needing (but can use if required) external codecs.

i prefer it to vlc as it has better subtitle support (i watch a lot of foreign films), it lets me use my extra mouse buttons as rewind/forward buttons, powerful capture options, and is oh-so configurable.

i use winamp for playing music - mainly because i use my own custom skin, auto-tag and i like the milkdrop visualisation at times.

i don't think i've used windows media player for years...is it any good yet?

JetAudio

QuiMP

Foobar for music
Media Player Classic for movies
Windows Media Player for BBCiPlayer shows.

kmplayer

i beg to differ, now i know a lot of us (sevenforummers) aren't the biggest fans of codec packs but when i played a matroska file in windows media player with shark 007's codec pack installed it played flawlessly, on the other hand vlc's handling was rather choppy.

Winamp for my audio, and Windows Media Player for video, because with a codec pack installed, it plays pretty much everything.

+1 for Sharks Codec Pack!!!

I'll second that. I used K-Lite for quite a while, and had some problems with earlier versions of Shark007's codecs, but the latest are rock solid.

I strongly recommend them - no additional players to mess with.

Personally for video I use Media Player Classic. I use that because it always works and it is extremely simple by design.

But for audio I use Creative Media Source because I have a Creative X-Fi sound card. However if I did not have that I would use Winamp Pro mainly because it has plugins for anything you want to do.

You can use whatever you want. Most of it is personal preference so use what you are familiar with or like using. All media players are general equal because much of what your seeing or hearing is dictated by the codecs you have installed and the quality of the file your playing.

The exception to all of this is the standard windows media player. The one that is built in and comes with windows. I have had issues with it especially related to licensing of files I wanted to play. When it cannot find a license and it tries to obtain one it has issues. Because of that I avoid using it. Also even with correct codec the player sometimes refuses to properly handle the file not sure what is up with that. But bottom line it is buggy so I avoid it.