- MPlayer starts much faster.
- MPlayer loads videos much faster.
- MPlayer has very convenient shortcuts for skipping forward or backward by 10 seconds (just press the right or left arrow), which are a godsend when you're watching something in a foreign language and you need to hear a sentence again. VLC's shortcuts (command-option-arrow) are far less convenient, harder to remember, and VLC reacts to them much more slowly, which makes it incredibly inconvenient.
There has been some improvement over the last few years: seeking hardly used to work at all in VLC, while now it works, albeit slowly. However, it's not enough to beat MPlayer.
There may be other reasons to prefer MPlayer, but they become more subjective. The ones I mentioned above are areas where VLC is objectively inferior. It would be great if it could be further improved.
Part of the lag in VLC when starting a stream might come from a more heavy handed init process.
This can be a curse or a blessing, I'm happy both approaches are available.
a to change aspect ratio on poorly encoding. c to change crop. e to advance one frame. s to change subtitle stream, l for audio stream.
I use FooBar2K for audio and VLC for video.
>The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior.
VLC is built largely around the cross-platform ffmpeg libraries and does not seem to have the ability to use native Windows DirectShow filters, in the interest of being portable and removing a source of configuration errors. Like it or not, a number of high quality open-source "audio/videophile" (for lack of a better term) media player plugins exist solely as Windows DirectShow filters. The most important that springs to mind is MadVR, a video renderer with support for high-quality GPU-accelerated upscaling filters, and the ability to set separate upscaling filters for the chroma and luma channels. That's more than enough for me, but there's also ReClock (similar to the RetroArch emulator, perfectly syncs the video to the display and slightly shifts the pitch of the audio to compensate), various vendor-specific hardware-accelerated video decoders, xy-VSFilter, the LAV filter suite (which support, amongst other things, bitstreaming, the ability to pass compressed audio streams through to a digital receiver), and others I'm probably forgetting.
These plugins can be used in any media playing software for Windows that supports DirectShow filters, such as the official Windows Media Player. MPC just happens to be a really lightweight, stable, and customizable DirectShow-based media player.
VLC is good software and probably the best solution for people who just want to watch some videos without configuring anything. I haven't looked at a stock MPC install in a while, but it's possible that stock VLC works better than that. However, for those that actually want to put some effort into tweaking their AV-setup, and want to make use of Windows-specific software, MPC is a great media player, one of the few programs (including Foobar) that I sorely miss on Linux. The people that look down on VLC users are silly, but it's not like the only reason to use MPC is elitism.
MPC's easily extensible plugin system was a great thing then, because fansub groups could create their own package and easily distribute it with the codecs they were using.
VLC wasn't nearly as optimized as today, so it tended to run like crap on a lot of systems. I remember MPC loading up almost instantly on my college machine, while VLC would take a while to load and run.
Today, this is less of an issue. Pretty much everyone's settled a few standard codecs, and VLC's performance is quite good.
However, consider that an H264 successor will arrive at some point, the anime scene will probably adopt it well in advance of everyone else (like it did with Hi10p), and flexible codec support doesn't seem so pointless after all.
These are just two examples that I came up with off the top of my head, but there are countless more. The advantage of VLC is that it's simple and just works out of the box for 95% of stuff, but MPC/Directshow gives you far more flexibility as you can construct a very custom filter chain (eg. using different decoders and renderers).
[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228 [2] https://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/
* Extremely fast startup and snappy interface
* Supports a wide variety of formats
* Uses existing ID3 tags & Vorbis comments and doesn't try creating its own
* Mature plugin interface
* Reasonably simple
Downsides are that you have to be willing to spend a little extra time organizing your music and it's weak with playlists and device synchronization.
There are others too, though I'm not sure what the differences are.
VLC has gotten heavy and some defaults have me thinking the user is not in mind. Holding CTRL / ALT with arrow keys to skip? This is awkward with one hand. The arrows default to "Navigate" for DVD menus. DVD's! Rebuilding font cache? Yes, yes these are all customizable...
Curious as to what you think about MPlayer, MPC-HC, or mpv, which have mostly taken the crown in nerd circles as being the de facto video players.