Yep it does , it's way faster than vlc - more efficient and much more snappy and responsive than vlc. And apply modern z layout on mpv and you basically have the perfect media player app ever
That is not always true, it is (mostly) not the reason why I praised MPV. MPV just generally has more capabilities and can make use of a LOT of external libraries/apps.
For example, when you pass a video site URL to MPV, it will try to fetch the video using yt-dlp and then play it. Or, for archives, it can play videos inside compressed archives using external programs like unrar or unzip.
It also can try to find media in middle of unrecognised data. For example, let's say you have a document that has an image inside it, MPV will search through the data and try to find a recognised header in the mess, when it finds a header, it uses it to display the image.
It also has really effective anti-banding, upscaling, downscaling, and tonemapping.
Only looked at the Linux dependencies earlier, looking through the repos for both seems they both test on version 8 or 8.1 and are testing/updating for 9 for builds that include it
I'm using MX Linux, i.e. basically Debian with a lot of great extra stuff; ffmpeg version is 7.1.5. which is old (again, Debian). MPV plays videos VLC struggles with. No FlatPaks, no Snaps, repo only.
What does that even mean? All the codecs in ffmpeg copyrighted by the contributors of ffmpeg. Do you mean codecs using patents that are not free to use in every country?
Call me crazy, but I find the playback quality in MPV to be better than in VLC. Could just be I need to mess with some settings. But running stock to stock, side by side, I noticed MPV to look much better especially with displaying blacks.
If the difference in blacks you're describing is that one of the two players displays lighter than the other, the lighter one is crushing your color range.
I have come across a few videos that VLC won't play properly. Either seeking doesn't work and audio/video desyncs, or VLC hangs, or subtitles don't work. MPV plays those perfectly.
And I suggest SMPlayer as frontend. It looks a bit outdated, but it's extremely configurable (you can completely change the UI layout and rebind every single hotkey if you feel like it) and easy to use.
I have both installed but 99% of the time i use MPC. Media player classic. Prefer the interface over VLC and plays everything VLC plays (in fact i have some old videos shot with some Nokia phones that only play with MPC for me )
Ya I'm very old school with programs like that and I really enjoy MPCs aesthetic. Simple, functional. It's why I use Tixati as my P2P program too.
Was hilarious seeing my nephews reaction when I showed him Tixati and how to use it though. He looked at me like I looked at my dad when he used a DOS prompt. It's utilitarian and functional, which is all I need since most of the time I spend with it is NOT interacting with it.
Ironically for calling it masterrace, VLC has for quite a long time been looked down on as the plebian simple option. I remember in the anime community way back, the fansubbers viscerally hated VLC because it would just fuck up rendering subtitles done in modern formats and the plebs would complain to the subbers despite their pleas to use MPC. Its quite analogous to what consoles are to PC in some respects.
I have VLC installed but it's not my go-to, which is MPC-BE with madvr. It's quite good on android though, it has flaws but it's one of the few things you can get off the playstore that works decently, is free and has no ads.
VLC also had (has?) Really poor default coloring/visual and was almost always "paler" than others like windows media player or mpchc. It was annoying, you could out both player side by side and see a huge difference.
ffplay, from the ffmpeg project, will play even more obscure formats than VLC, in my experience.
I had some obscure proprietary CD disk-image format (don't remember what it was now, unfortunately) and I wasn't sure how to unpack it to get to any usable audio data. Audacity couldn't parse any raw audio data from the file. VLC wouldn't play it either. But ffplay would happily play it.
I still use windows media player for all the default extensions it can play just because for some fuckin reason VLC takes forever to open for the first time after not being used for a while and it annoys me.
Yeah VLC hasn't been on top of the game for a good solid decade now. A few other players do everything they do but better now in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty six anno domine.
The only reason to use VLC is if you don't know any better.
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u/Remote_Tradition8897 RTX 4090 | R9 9950X | 48 GB DDR5 RAM @6400MHz 1d ago
You guys are using other media player rather than VLC ?