I use mpv (and mplayer before that) from CLI and I find it the best user experience. Sure, it takes some time to read the man and play with it, but now I start it with a bash alias on the display I want and the sound output for either: TV + big sound system or monitor + desktop speakers, depending on whether I am at my desk or on the couch. With a cheap wireless mini keyboard I get all the shortcuts one single key press away.<p>With a GUI player I have to navigate menus with a pointer to switch displays and sound, or to select sound and subtitle language, subtitle delay, contrast and brightness, etc.<p>Mpv also integrates with youtube-dl. You can tune the buffer size to never require pausing because of internet problems, select whatever quality with no auto switching like the native youtube client. Supports playlists and everything.
IINA [1] is an open-source [2], native [3] modern video player for macOS based on MPV [4].<p>[1] <a href="https://iina.io" rel="nofollow">https://iina.io</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/iina/iina" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iina/iina</a><p>[3] Written in Swift and designed with modern macOS (10.11+) in mind<p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv</a>
Just recently I finally got sick of the various defects VLC developed on macOS:<p>- Running videos off of my NAS routinely introduced audio lag even on very small videos (less than 1h long). My LAN and WAN are at 1GbE and my NAS uses ZFS with very adequate caching setup.<p>- Crashes 2-3 times a week. Pretty rare but annoying nonetheless because I usually leave one huge video to play for the entire day.<p>- On iOS and macOS it forgets the position of a video played very recently. That one is rather new, <6 months. Still not cool.<p>Eventfully enough was enough and I moved to MPV just two weeks ago. Rock-solid so far, never lags the audio, snappier animations, quick keys to jump between chapters -- it's all good stuff so far.<p>I heard a while ago that the VLC team is struggling with a huge rewrite. As a programmer I sympathize but as a user I can't excuse them. Few months of a rocky ride is fine but VLC definitely is not how I remember it from the past, during the last 2 or so years.<p>---<p>Off-topic: can somebody recommend a tool that scans your videos and downloads metadata and posters for them? We're talking movies, shows, game playthroughs, music videos, and others.
It's also worth noting that you can use this with libcaca [1] to get a <i>truly</i> command-line video player, i.e. one that plays videos in an 80x20 terminal, with --vo=caca. (Note that not all distributions compile this in, I guess to save space as most people probably don't actually want to watch videos via an ssh pipe...)<p>[1] <a href="http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca" rel="nofollow">http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca</a>
This project has unfortunately been crippled by toxic devs who value their opinions more than actual technical arguments.<p>Report bugs and you may end up getting mocked instead of thanked.<p>When I reported that on my hardware I need -vo vaapi to get full hd playback without frame drops and stuttering, I was told to get better hardware. They wouldn't even entertain the thought that maybe -vo gpu (their default) needs more work. All I asked them to is to document in the man page that if you get stuttering video with -vo gpu you might want to try -vo vaapi.<p>This was a few years ago and apparently they did work on -vo gpu in the mean time, but they will never get rid of the stench that episode left.<p>Since then -vo vaapi has been deliberately crippled. It can not display subtitles and gives a deprecation warning when you try to use it.<p>It's too bad that mplayer has fallen into disrepair. Didn't they also suffer from toxic dev infighting? I seem to remember even a fork of ffmpeg because the other devs needed to get away from one particularly toxic dev.