Also, I find VLC is a safe recommendation for someone who just wants to casually play some video files. It's fairly user friendly, it runs on literally everything, and it supports most multimedia formats anyone could ever care about. I like and use MPV, but I use VLC on some Android TV devices because it's readily available and runs buttery smooth on crappy hardware.
It's true that VLC requires arcane knowledge of its architecture to configure all of its options, but basic operation still assumes you've read the fine manual.
VLC does the behavior described (jerky playback) on both a Mac with 60hz display that is several years old, and on a cutting edge PC that has a refresh rate more than five times the framerate of anime and supports variable refresh rate.
mpv plays anime butter-smooth on both systems.
I love it when I get a supremely condescending explanation that is also wrong.
The ones that are 60hz are 60hz, and that's not the reason monitors aren't TVs. They aren't TVs because they don't have one of 1. black frame insertion 2. 60->120fps motion interpolation, so you have persistence of vision issues. (aka motion blur, jerkiness, or both at once)
Movies are also 24fps, though of course they're different from animation because they have built in motion blur (same as if you recorded with 1/24 exposure time vs 1/1000).
mpv's video retiming works some of the time, but means it changes the pitch of audio which is sometimes unacceptable, same as old NTSC->PAL transfers.
…if your monitor has variable refresh rate why are you using retiming?
Most older LCD TVs do not have either black frame insertion or motion interpolation. BFI causes motion artifacts (trailing ghost images) if the frame rate of the video is less than the refresh rate. Motion interpolation also adds its own artifacts.
>mpv's video retiming works some of the time, but means it changes the pitch of audio
The best way to use it is to set custom monitor timings (e.g. with xrandr) so that the adjustment needed is too small to detect. There are various scripts to automate this, although I haven't personally tried any (I just change mode manually).
>if your monitor has variable refresh rate why are you using retiming?
I have a VRR monitor, but I still use retiming because it only has a 6 bit panel, and VRR makes temporal dithering artifacts ("frame rate control") visible.
When I first experienced it, it made me realize how terrible VLC is; VLC can't play back video at a consistent framerate, and this is particularly noticeable in panning scenes in videos, especially anime.
People talk about VLC like it's a poster-child of open source, but really, I just see a bloated, crash-prone program that doesn't even do its primary function particularly well or efficiently.