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

I use it to inspect video frames by frames, particularly being able to go back one frame. VLC doesn't support it, this thread about the feature is hilarious https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=120627

VLC is pretty bad and it shows the more you use it.

It doesn't let the audio clip/exceed safe volumes and always applies some sort of a limiter, even if it's disabled everywhere in the settings. Try using an EQ on a bass-heavy track and see that it's limited.

Try jumping back multiple times in a song at its beginning, and it will play in lower pitch.

That strikes me as such a strange statement, I’ve always considered it to be among the most impressive OSS projects out there. It tackles enormous complexity, works everywhere, and has a trove of a million hidden features. For example, I use it to headless play streams from CLI.

If you enter video-related enthusiast scenes, such as fansubbed anime releases, mpv is recommended over anything else across the board. There are releases that break in VLC, and mpv is usually first to support new features. It also has particularly good defaults in terms of good and accurate playback, so where you might see some people say "install mpc-hc and these scripts and change these settings", with mpv it's just "use mpv". mpv is extremely configurable on top of great defaults also. Setting default audio and sub languages in order of your preference (such as enm before eng and en if you prefer honorifics tracks) is a common tweak.

I thought VLC was awesome while growing up, and at the time it probably was compared to Windows Media Player and such. I remember a common bit of praise was that it supported more types of video files. I haven't really run into anything mpv won't play (I even use it when an image I saved ends up as .html for some reason and then use the info screen to determine the real extension it should be so I can rename it), but also I'm guessing we've standardized more on codecs and containers these days which doesn't hurt.