mpv is my choice by a wide margin, but I still recommend VLC to most people because it has the sort of GUI more people are comfortable with.

GUI still looks and feels like WinAmp (slap llama, etc.) in both all of the good and bad ways

VLC also streams media to other clients, which most players don't do.

Not on Android yet though.

> Outdated ffmpeg, good for dated formats, not good for new stuff

Just how new does the new stuff have to be? I use VLC daily (because even though we have 4x streaming services, when I want to watch 3rd Rock from the Sun, it's not on any of them.

Some of the very new movies are also not on any of the streaming services, so I am left wondering, if I downloaded a movie that was only torrented a few days ago, just how new does the movie have to be to be unsupported by VLC?

Uninstalled vlc ~two years ago, but from what I remember it was missing tons of optimizations with h265 and newer codecs, almost lacking proper av1 and prores support, HDR is terrible. I think it's dated by like 3-4 years.

Haven’t tried mpv but VLC is my go to for weird formats and streaming from random rtsp cameras. Maybe it’s outdated but a couple of years ago when I switched over from libffmpeg to libvlc it was because some cameras on site had weird auth problems with libffmpeg but worked when streamed through VLC. I swapped over and now those cameras work.

What exactly is the new stuff?