Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

I didn’t know mplayer had been forked - this looks good to me. The primary reason why I used mplayer in the early 2000s was performance, both in terms of cpu and for lack of a better word ‘ smoothness ‘.

Basically all other players seemed to produce choppy videos ( including regular dvd players ) but mplayer didn’t ( and there was no motion interpolation). A friend of mine told me that mplayer was very accurate ( ie each frame lasted exactly the same duration), unlike most players on the market at the time and this explained the ‘smooth’ feeling.

Is this smoothness advantage still the case ? Would anyone know why it felt like that years ago ?

It's impossible for video players to be exactly accurate on normal monitors as most computer monitors don't handle movie frame rates. Either a frame gets skipped or elongated here and there, audio get resampled while video speed changes, etc. but there's definitely no silver bullet due to imperfect hardware not matching movie data formats

It's relatively easy to get 100us level precision in CPU wait and mpv has 42ms (42,000us) to emit each frame (at 24fps). Nevermind that the monitor refresh is likely 60fps or better so each frame lasts for two+ monitor frames anyway. As long as it is consistent with each frame timing it should be very rare that a video frame is skipped or doubled up.