Auto shutdown computer after playing a movie

I use Windows XP Professional (and won't be upgrading anytime soon to Vista), but I've always thought that maybe the Media Center edition of Windows would be more suitable for me. Anyway, my desk is in front of my bed, about 3 meters from it, and from time to time I like to watch a movie before going to sleep. So, I start the movie, crawl in my bed and watch it. By the time it finishes, or after about 15 minutes if the movie is really "good" such as one starring Paris Hilton, I'm half asleep and I have to gather all my powers to walk to the desk and stop the computer.

I always said that "I'll have to find a solution to auto shutdown the computer after the movie plays" but forgot about this. Since my computer crashed recently, when I got to the part where I had to install my favorite movie player, mplayer, I thought that it's a good timing to search for a replacement, the magic movie player that will shut down the computer after it plays a movie (or a list of movies). I didn't have to search too much, since there are some free movie players with this option.

After testing some of them, I ended using GOM Player, just because you install it and it's ready to play (comes with a bunch of codecs too) without installing anything else. To have it shutdown your computer after it plays a file or a list of files, follow these steps:

• first of all, you have to install it, and you can do so by downloading it here: GOM Player
• once installed, it will guide you through some basic profile settings (language, default playing mode) which you can just leave as default
• after you see the main window, simply right-click on it and go to Options, select Shutdown once finished playing the current file (or the files in the playlist). This option will remain enabled each time, so make sure you remember to uncheck it when you don't want to have your computer shut down.

That's it, not too difficult, and best of all is free. Of course there are other free movie players that include this feature to auto shutdown the computer after the movies finish playing. Here's some of the most known:

• jetAudio, basic is free, closed source
• Media Player Classic, free, open source
• The KMPlayer, free but closed source
• I'm adding VLC here too, because it's a very popular open source movie player, though I don't know for sure if it supports or not shutting down the computer after the movie is played. In their trac list, there's the auto shutdown feature added and they say it's not yet done, but it seems that previous versions do support this feature.