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Comment by unixbane | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat cheeky but you're right. mpv is much better than VLC.

I disagree. I've had many issues with MPV over the years, ranging from lack of hardware decoding support on some hardware to plain crashes for files that VLC and even web browsers played flawlessly.

I see people claim that VLC somehow produces inferior output but I've never experienced this. The only way mpv seems superior is that it can deal with Syncplay better than VLC, in all other cases it's just a more crashy, less intuitive media player in my experience.

How is mpv better than vlc?

Mpv is touted for its better video and audio playback quality, it also opens just about any video without artefacts (a grey picture in vlc anyone). Other than that it’s definately more responsive when seeking through a file, and it supports shaders to improve the perceived low res video playback quality.

The cherry on the cake really is IINA, a MacOS video player that has a super responsive native UI and is basically what QuickTime should have been.

Never ever had a problem with VLC but for Linux there's a nice GTK front end for mpv called Celluloid : https://celluloid-player.github.io/

Celluloid's seekbar drives me insane, and it doesn't seem to offer an option to fix it. In every other media player since the dawn of time, clicking a point on the seek bar seeks to that point. In Celluloid, it only seeks back/forward 15 seconds depending on which side of the progress indicator you are on.

Wow that's weird, I just tested that on latest Linux Mint and the seekbar had the expected behaviour.

Interesting, maybe there is something different about the builds being provided by Mint and Arch?

>video and audio playback quality

How is this done? Without additional information the claim sounds like hdmi cable advertising to me.

>without artefacts (a grey picture in vlc anyone).

What videos are you playing that gets this issue?

>How is this done? Without additional information the claim sounds like hdmi cable advertising to me.

Differences in the video/audio decoding process. VLC optimizes for playing media over a network connection (hence its name Video LAN Client), where temporary dropouts and data loss are common and might cause other players to choke. The cost of this is sometimes less accurate playback.

mpv is optimized primarily for accurate playback of media from local storage, and so while it might not fare as well for network/streaming media it's generally measurably better for local media.

Just laughing to myself at this. A friend and I started copying long movies from the NAS to the media PC's local storage, since if I use my preferred smplayer (mpv) sometimes some hiccup will cause it to crash, but his preferred vlc will limp along and happily put out corrupted playback. Neither is a good experience. (Anyway the problem is likely the media PC itself since the issue doesn't happen on either of our personal PCs streaming from the NAS, using whichever player.)

I've had a good experience with playing files in mpv via sshfs, both local and remote. Helps a bit to enable a generous cache in mpv also. (I let it take a few GB so that the average episode of something can be entirely cached if I let it sit)

Can you give specifics? When it comes to decoding media formats, I'd expect of the "happy path" decoding behavior of media players to follow the specification exactly, which should result in the same result. Is VLC simply throwing out certain packets rather than properly decoding them?

I’ve downloaded VODs from Twitch that gave the grey screen. I thought it was a dumb glitch in the actual video file (maybe still is) but it works with MPV.

In my (and apparently other people's) experience, multiple popular options, of which mpv is one, are more responsive and produces fewer visual artifacts. Also, subjectively, I think VLC's UI can be surprising and confusing.

> and produces fewer visual artifacts

what are you watching that produces video artifacts on something like VLC or mpv?

I had an old laptop, on which VLC struggled with a video, but MPV worked fine.

I like keep multiple of these critical applications around. Sometimes, for a use case, one works better than the other.

With old hardware, better use ffplay, to play a video direct from the command line with no overhead.

The old Mplayer it's as fast as ffplay if not faster.

That's a good idea, thanks! I already use ffmpeg and ffprobe, so this will fit into my toolset nicely.

it starts up in less than a year and seeks decently fast

I can add upscalers like Anime4k and Nvidia Image Scaling and FSR in mpv

Or MPC-HC if you are on Windows.

Clearly, we all need to retvrn to the Gom player era

Please refrain from making cynical comments like this. It goes against HN guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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