MPlayer vs VLC media player

MPlayer is a movie player for Linux, macOS and Windows, with additional listed support for BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and QNX. It plays formats including MPEG, AVI, Ogg/OGM, ASF/WMV, MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska and DVD, and accepts streams over protocols such as HTTP/FTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS/MMST, MPST and SDP. Subtitle support covers 12 formats, as well as DVD subtitles and closed captions. The player includes playback-speed control, an on-screen status display and multiple video output drivers; hardware acceleration is listed. Its MEncoder component can create MPEG program stream files. MPlayer is free under GNU General Public License version 2. The download page lists version 1.5, created on 2022-02-27, as the latest release and recommends current Subversion source for newer features and fixes. The graphical interface is not under further development and receives limited bug fixing. A complete installation requires source code and binary codecs; the GUI also needs a skin.

VLC media player is a free media player for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. It plays multimedia files, DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs and streams, with sources including files, discs, webcams and connected devices. Supported formats include MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, XviD, WMV, MKV, MP4, MOV, AVI, WebM, MP3, AAC and FLAC. It supports subtitles, network playback, hardware acceleration and 4K playback, and most codecs work without a separate codec pack. VLC also supports skins, extensions and skin creation through VLC Skin Editor. Additional downloads are listed for Apple TV, Windows variants, several GNU/Linux distributions and systems including Chrome OS, FreeBSD and Solaris. VideoLAN is a non-profit project, and its source code can be obtained directly. The free plan states that VLC has no spyware, ads or user tracking; no other free-tier limits are listed.