What is your favourite video player?

What is your favourite video player? And why? Doesn’t matter which OS.

I use mpv with SMPlayer as my frontend.

SMPlayer has great keyboard shortcuts, and MPV, when compiled native, has the best subtitle performance and better seeking than VLC.

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MPC+MadVR

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VLC, been that way for a long time.

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I was satisfied with and settled on VLC. Then it became clunky and I moved on to lightweight players. Currently, I am using MPC-HC with madVR, xy-VSFilter and LAVFilters.

Mpv , no front end, but admittedly don’t watch much video using it. Have kodi on RPI 3s for TV like stuff. Have stopped opening YouTube in MPV (via scripts) and just use the web player.

VLC. I was glad to find out last week that it also converts video formats.

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mpv, but if anything goes wrong or I need a special feature: VLC!

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I also prefer mpv or on macOS IINA, which is basically the same thing.

Mr host @afre :sunflower:
Long time mpv lover, with no doubt the open-source piece of software I use more. Why?
Well, to be thorough that will require a boring super long post; I’ll try to touch some of the goodies.

The general feeling is one of a fast, ultra-configurable, reliable, powerful (loads of scripts, shaders, filters, vapours, etc.), multiplatform and helpful support and community; this last bit is specially important, as in pixls the devs of mpv and of its lua scripts are quite open to suggestions and mods… For instance, there’s a script called gallery that loads a thumbnail for each video in a folder (once you open one of them something like autoload.lua {next-file also} will automatically load all those videos for you); having a big screen and using mpv both windowed and fullscreen, if I configure the thumbs’ size for windowed, they are quite small for FS; so I probed for a feature and the dev occivink implemented a dynamic mode that solved the “issue”; it’s not only that I felt pleased but a (proud) part of the process and that’s grand; had plenty experiences like that =)

Some of the things I use all the time

  1. with auto-profiles you can configure the settings to use for each video, considering size, fps, type, color depth, etc. In practical terms it means that I can use ultra HQ for 720p25 video and not so demanding settings for a 4kp60.

  2. with navigator you can browser your system and enqueue videos while video is playing; with playlistmanager you can access and modify the enqued videos on screen while playing the same, there is a script that will even let you enque at the end an URL in your clipboard

  3. With excerpt (also with slice) you can cut as many pieces of your video as you want, you can config what quality to use, if you do a stream copy it’s instantaneous; will retain the name and extension.

  4. with trashfileonend you can make mpv delete the file once you’ve finished watching or jumped to next in list. With locatefile mpv can open the parent folder of the current video being played.

  5. Stats has all the info you need about audio and video, size, encoding, decoding, buffers, etc. Don’t remember the last time I used mediaInfo anymore.

  6. With gallery, mpv will create a thumbnail for each video in the folder. With mpv_thumbnail you can have thumbnails in the scrolling-timeline to have a visual cue, this can be set always on, triggered by shortcut or by length of video.

  7. me toasted retinas have a thing for the entropy in organic (as no doubt you know it comes from a tree) grain so after a deband and a finesharp shader I use one from the man himself: haasn, that creates that grain, all real-time, makes the world of difference and helps with banding and other artefacts.

  8. autosub will search, find, download and load to mpv without pause the subs for the movie one is currently watching. Fix-sub-timming will let you mark in and and out points in order to sync subs that do not match the file’s fps; and so normal delay will eventually get again out of sync, a jolly royal PITA

  9. a very cool trick of cycle-adevice is that other than letting you cycle through your audio output devices (within mpv), it allows fro two (or more for other instances) audio streams at the same time; in such a fashion I can have a radio playing in the PA (seagulls like that, tap dancing painting pollocks everywhere) while using headphones I watch makeup grown barbies ejejm… I do youtube research.

  10. Other useful scripts let’s you EQ, use many flavours of audio compression, denoise, sharpness - actually you can use almost any ffmpeg filter aswell as many vapoursynths (haven’t tried the later though, right now quite happy where I’m at) - load radio stations referenced in a m3u playlist file, have your screenshots in a folder with its origin file name, have a clock, a timecode with milliseconds unfortunately no frame accuract as of yet (I have requested it but it seems that it could make the sun go cold, so…), crop real-time with no latency and drag and pan through that same crop window (quite a fun experience), have a REPL, have scaled disabled, thus the real size of the video at any time, increase and decrease video playback speed with HQ audio filtering, do simple stuff like floating on top while playing, in the BG when paused, keep record of what you’ve watched, names, dates and time “spent”, autoloop files based in a given parameter, give you feedback on the total playtime of current playlist, speed a film till there’s a subtitle shown, till someone talks, till a frog blinks or someone farts, let you apply LUTs real-time (tetrahedral interp), you can bookmark your videos for later convenience, you can encode while watching, auto-croped can kick in to get rid of black-bars, and there’s so so much more… but I’m tired.

 

example of HQ shaders I use with smalish videos, most of my mpv’s conf I copied and reused from people that actually know what they’re doing :scarf: :meat_on_bone:

opengl-fbo-format=rgba32f
glsl-shaders=/.config/mpv/shaders/haasn_FSRCNN_24_4_4_ssim.glsl:
/.config/mpv/shaders/deband-pre.glsl:/.config/mpv/shaders/FineSharp.glsl:
/.config/mpv/shaders/noise.glsl

that together with

[small vid extra HQ]
profile-desc=cond:is_desktop() and get('width', math.huge) <= 1920
hwdec=videotoolbox-copy
profile=gpu-hq
# tscale=linear
scaler-resizes-only
sigmoid-upscaling
scale=ewa_lanczossharp
cscale=ewa_lanczossoft
dscale=mitchell
scale-antiring=0.7
cscale-antiring=0.7
dither-depth=auto
temporal-dither
correct-downscaling=yes
sigmoid-upscaling=yes
deband=yes
video-sync=audio

Uy uy, it cuts through retinas ala Buñuel like hot butter.
Cheers

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@chroma_ghost Sounds like your favourite video player. :medal_sports: I used MPlayer, MEncoder and FFmpeg before transitioning to VLC. Powerful but too many fine-grained settings :crazy_face:. Heck, I don’t even use 1% of my current MPC-HC configuration. To me, the plus of mpv, which I have yet to try, would be that it is cross-platform. Unsure about the mixed licensing; I like simplicity.

It is, it changed (improoved) me workflow a ton

you’ve got the main drive then ,-)
given enough time or the absence of very demanding partner I guess it’s hard not to become your own mechanic, je jeje. I did used VLC for some time (before movist) and then again when I connected all the terminals in the house and had the torturous idea of streaming image and audio through out them, that seemed way easier back then with VLC… but me things just die too fast to get implemented proper, I want a stone computer!!!
Since day one got iina installed as a backup, rarelly used it, the other players you and fellow compadritos mentioned, heard about but never dipt. :slight_smile:

Same here. Also have VLC just in case, but very seldom use it.

VLC here. For years… and on multiple platforms. Just because always works and always out of the box

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I am a longtime mpv user, like chroma_ghost, and for several of the reasons he’s mentioning.
As it has no GUI, it starts much faster than VLC which I hardly use anymore except in command line for some very specific tasks.

I will definitely give mpv a serious look sometime. Should be simple to get into due to my prior experience with MPlayer, MEncoder and FFmpeg. I wonder how much has changed in 15 years. :stuck_out_tongue: