The key difference is that with mpv, content discovery is external. With mps-youtube, you're using the console tool itself to discover, curate, archive, generate playlists, and play back media.

With mpv, you have to have the URL to hand it first.

To mpv's advantage:

- It works on a wide range of sources, unlike mps-youtube which is specific to YouTube

- You can often throw the URL of a page containing the media in question and have mpv automatically detect and extract the correct media entry. (This works less often than I'd like, and I have some curl | sed one-liners which I throw at numerous cases, often starting from:

    curl -s <URL> | grep '\.mp3' | tr [,<>] '\n' | grep '\.mp3'

(There may well be better queries, this works in a sufficient number of cases and is reasonably easily adapted in the shell.)