Comment by ksynwa
Mpv feels snappier to use. It starts up faster, playback starts faster, seeking is responsive. I use mpv without a dedicated frontend like smplayer. The experience is a bit less sane than a VLC but it has been worth the learning curve.
I'm using mpv without frontend too. But I'm wondering about what you do mean by 'learning curve' and 'less sane'?
It seems, related to these two players I've had the opposite experience. VLC always felt sluggish and slow to me, still does, though I've got it installed, still. Just in case.
The thing with VLC for me was the lack of 'snappiness', which led me to fiddle with the endless options in advanced mode. 'Bricking' it. Maybe too advanced for me.
With mpv I had to do nothing at all, it just worked(for me) and my basic needs. And the OSD is enough frontend for me.
All of this under Linux. Maybe it's a matter of different distro-defaults and compilation options?
Similar to when I still used Windows 7 sometimes. VLC? Arrgh! Some fork of MPC-HC with some codec-pack to the rescue, so supersmooth, unbeatable by anything else.
Edit - My basic needs are:
1.) Just play that thing.
2.) No matter how, and where. Meaning either windowed, and movable to any screen I have in whichever multi-screen setup. Or go fullscreen somewhere.
3.) Not having artifacts, stuttering, or causing such on other screens. Don't burn my CPU while doing so.
4.) Let me fast-forward, rewind, stop, slowmo frame by frame, skip, smoothly without destroying my ears or speakers with crackling noises.
5.) Do good stereo-downmix of whichever surround-sound to headphones.
6.) Subtitles? See 1.)!
Eddding:
7.) I don't stream, and don't care about grabbing streams from Websites. (From within VLC. There's yt-dlp for that.)
I'm old-fashioned enough to just prefer local files.