QMPlay2 vs VLC media player

QMPlay2 is a free video and audio player for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It handles formats and codecs supported by FFmpeg, along with Audio CDs, raw files, and chiptunes. Playback features include subtitles, network playback, hardware acceleration, spherical view, automatic interlace detection, and deinterlacing filters. A YouTube browser is included; playback requires yt-dlp, which QMPlay2 can download automatically. The documentation also describes using Streamlink as the player and an optional Last.fm extension for scrobbling with a configured account. Hardware video decoding options vary by system and include Vulkan Video, NVIDIA CUVID, Windows DXVA2 and D3D11VA, Linux/BSD VA-API, and macOS VideoToolBox. On Linux and BSD, multimedia-key controls and MPRIS2 commands are documented. QMPlay2 is licensed under LGPL-3.0. The latest macOS release requires Big Sur or later. Windows XP builds and the offline Windows build have stated service limitations, and the latest release page says the experimental Android package and Linux AppImage are no longer provided.

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.