Plus macOS, Android and iOS.

I think the reason VLC it's the moster it's right now it's their approach to multi platform and "out of the box" experience, with the user not having to worry about codecs and things like that.

Well this isn't true for codecs anymore. mpv and many other players support many codecs out of the box. The reason VLC has become slow it they keep on adding features.

The whole application can pass off as professional video playing software. So many ways to play and so many places to play from that it surprises me everytime I open it (which is very rarely).

I would argue that mpv has pretty much a similar feature set like vlc. I use mpv to watch youtube videos. And expanded it with a lua script to be able to zoom in. Its pretty crazy what is possible with mpv nowadays.

VLC was designed (and, well, still is) as streaming media server. This actually causes some problems with regard to normal playback but also makes it really good as... well, streaming media server, something mpv can't really do well (and doesn't intend to).

Approach to vlc is that word of mouth gave it significant market share while mpc had a boring interface when everyone wanted to migrate with a player with colors and better UI at the time (WinXP design). VLC was to video players what chrome is to internet browsers.

Yes! I do like this project and thought about contributing, but then it struck me that I have next to no know how on windows systems... Is it possible to get it running on linux at all, via say wine?

Use MPV, it's pretty much the successor of MPC and it's fantastic.

MPV is the MPlayer codeline however.

MPC-HC was basically the Windows Media Player from WinXP era, except maintained to a modern audience. That's partly why its so slim and efficient: its directly written in the Win32 GUI.

I do video editing with Vegas, which is DirectShow based as well. So an entire workflow working with DirectShow is important for codec reasons: Vegas, MPC-HC, and VirtualDub / AviSynth all are tools built on top of Microsoft's DirectShow platform.

Oh, I see, yes, I remember the program now (I haven't used Windows in years). It's the continuation of the original, light Windows Media Player from Windows 98, before it got all iTunesy. Yes, MPC is a fantastic piece of software.

For me it is mplayer for life, I like the command line switches

mpv is a fork of mplayer2, which itself is a fork of mplayer.