MPV Player 0.33 Brings Nearly A Year's Worth Of Improvements

[schmidtbag]

VLC does some stuff that mpv doesn't (at least to my knowledge), ...

That there is why I prefer VLC. Knowing what MPV can or can't do isn't so clear. Even if it can do something, it isn't always obvious how to make it do that. VLC does a good-enough job at everything I need it to do, it's not difficult to customize, and I know it supports the things I want.

I appreciate that MPV is better optimized, but since VLC doesn't struggle to do anything I want, you'd be hard pressed to convince me to switch.

[Nocifer]

Regarding SMPlayer, beware that its GUI configuration only exposes a limited selection of mpv's many options, and that many of those it does expose are old and/or deprecated, with the result that at best you're missing out on mpv's newest and coolest features (so what's the point of using it then?) and at worst you're bugging out your experience without even knowing it. For example, there is no option for setting Vulkan instead of OpenGL as your renderer, or for using NVDEC for hardware decoding on Nvidia cards (it still only shows the deprecated VDPAU), or for changing image scaling filters to sharper ones if your hardware can support it, or for using custom shaders, etc.

Your best bet would be to disable most of the Video, Audio and Performance options provided by SMPlayer (maybe even those for subtitles but the situation is better there), then go to "Advanced" (or something like that, been a couple of years since I've last used it), find "pass options to mpv" (...or something like that) and configure mpv there. And yes, reading mpv's documentation about its command line options can be very intimidating the first time, but once you decide to take the plunge and do it you'll never go back, be it SMPlayer or VLC or whatever. Trust me

PS - It bears mention though that a lot of mpv's better features are nowadays exported to a standalone library, libplacebo, which happens to be the exact same library that VLC also uses under the surface for its video playback. So it's not as clear-cut between these two as it may seem at first.

PS2 - SMPlayer may have improved its game during these two years I haven't been using it and itself rendered what I said deprecated instead; if that is so, then my apologies to its dev.

[Vistaus]

To put it nicely, VLC is more geared towards less skilled users.

MPV is useable for less-skilled users too with nice GUI's like Celluloid.

[tildearrow]

So you're not using hr-seek and are comparing apples to oranges?

Compare mpv to QuickTime.

QuickTime seeks really fast, plus you can seek with the scroll bar and it shows a preview of the seek in real time.
mpv does the same.

On the other hand, VLC doesn't even seek when you use the scroll bar, and when you let go, it takes a while to seek.

[[TV]]

Firefox 84 is bringing back oss backend, but the former MPV developer/owner recently decided to remove oss audio output before he was eventually kicked out of the project. Had zero problems using oss output on MPV with OSS4 drivers and apparently it also worked well with the BSD distributions. SDL audio output seems to work with OSS4 for now but you have to set the environment variable SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dsp.

[Tvashtar]

Regarding SMPlayer, beware that its GUI configuration only exposes a limited selection of mpv's many options, and that many of those it does expose are old and/or deprecated, with the result that at best you're missing out on mpv's newest and coolest features (so what's the point of using it then?) and at worst you're bugging out your experience without even knowing it. For example, there is no option for setting Vulkan instead of OpenGL as your renderer, or for using NVDEC for hardware decoding on Nvidia cards (it still only shows the deprecated VDPAU), or for changing image scaling filters to sharper ones if your hardware can support it, or for using custom shaders, etc.

Your best bet would be to disable most of the Video, Audio and Performance options provided by SMPlayer (maybe even those for subtitles but the situation is better there), then go to "Advanced" (or something like that, been a couple of years since I've last used it), find "pass options to mpv" (...or something like that) and configure mpv there. And yes, reading mpv's documentation about its command line options can be very intimidating the first time, but once you decide to take the plunge and do it you'll never go back, be it SMPlayer or VLC or whatever. Trust me

PS - It bears mention though that a lot of mpv's better features are nowadays exported to a standalone library, libplacebo, which happens to be the exact same library that VLC also uses under the surface for its video playback. So it's not as clear-cut between these two as it may seem at first.

PS2 - SMPlayer may have improved its game during these two years I haven't been using it and itself rendered what I said deprecated instead; if that is so, then my apologies to its dev.

Smplayer can use mpv's config, it's also possible to see what it passes to mpv. I'd say that it's still better than bare mpv which exposes nothing.
Personally I've switched to uosc which is mpv native and with which you can expose whatever you want in addition to its defaults

[gbcox]

SMPLAYER has issues when running under Wayland. It opens another window to play the video with the controls in a separate window, which kinda defeats the purpose of using SMPLAYER. There is an enhancement request, but there doesn't seem much urgency in getting it fixed, even though Fedora is moving toward making Wayland the Plasma default for F34. If you're running Wayland, Celluloid works fine under Wayland and at this point is a superior choice.