Yeah vlc has been so good for so long!

Mpv cause you can use keyboard shortcuts from the terminal.

Thanks to this I can ssh from the phone, connect to my tmux mpv session, and use that as remote control.

SMP (SM Player) seems better than MPV, and even VLC in various ways.

mpv on linux, vlc whenever i’m on windows.

no particular reason, just habit.

Count me in on the minimalist interface preference gang. I’ve been using it for probably more than a decade. Less nowadays that I watch content on my TV through my media center server, but on the off occurrence that I need to watch a file on my computer, mpv is my boo.

MPV, better colors , faster , lighter and has everything I need and nothing I dont

I use MPV, mostly because I like the simplicity of the on-screen interface.

But both are great players. No issues with VLC and it is a go-to if I ever have a file I can’t play otherwise (which is a vanishingly rare occurrence).

VLC has been disintegrating on Wayland, mpv became the default

MPV>VLC

While they’re technically the same type of software, it’s still sort of like comparing apples to oranges.

VLC is your kitchen skink media players that comes bundled with basically everything possible.

mpv is more of a minimalist media player that let’s the user add the features themselves using add-ons.

Me personally prefer mpv since it’s minimal in every regard. I have turned of the OSC, and I use the keyboard for everything. I don’t use a lot of extras, but the ones I have, is add-ons I couldn’t probably live without, like yt-dlp and SponsorBlock (for YouTube).

I even use mpv as my music player with playlist that I manage using Neovim and the tool echo (to add new tracks to my playlists).

VLC seems to be the gold standard. If you want to play something, it will. That should be more than enough for common users.

In the 15 years I have used vlc there has only been one file it couldn’t play and so I have had no need to try another player.

Ever since VLC came on the scene it has been my go-to. Just a really functional player that plays almost anything I throw at it, and I like the UI well enough. For now I have no reason to use anything else. I’m not hating on other players, but VLC works for me.

mpv. I like the minimalist UI. I have it configured to show no titlebar, just the video, and open by default in the corner of my screen at up to half the width of my display. It’s easy to customize with keyboard shortcuts, and by default it has sensible shortcuts for nearly everything. It’s easy to make videos with hardcoded letterboxing fit my full screen. It handles HDR and even Dolby videos (use gpu-next if you aren’t already). I can set default brightness/contrast/gamma settings, and then adjust them during playback if necessary with a single keystroke. I can adjust playback speed with a single keystroke. I can fix the aspect ratio of warped videos, again with a single keystroke.

As for VLC, well, it’s fine, really, and I’m not in the best position to say since it’s been a very long time since I used it regularly. So my experience is likely outdated. But back then, I found the UI a bit much, putting playlists front-and-center when I really just wanted to play individual files 99.99% of the time. It had too much going on besides the video. The GUI is great for discoverability but the more time I spend using something, the more I appreciate command-line usage and simple text-based config files.

VLC is my go-to recommendation for beginners, because everything is in the GUI, but mpv suits me better.

Functionally, both are similar. A few times over the years, one has adopted a critical feature a little bit before the other, like hardware acceleration for some specific codec, but for most videos they both do the job just fine.

I use VLC. I have no real reason for choosing it other than knowing it since I was a kid, and it doing the job I need perfectly fine so far