Best media player?

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Best media player?

  • VLC

  • MPV

  • Potplayer

  • MPC-HC

  • Windows Media Player

  • Realplayer

  • Mediamonkey

  • JRiver Media Center

  • Plex

  • Other (specify below)

  • The one that whips the lama's ass

Results are only viewable after voting.
I've been a VLC user for the past decade or so, but I may have to change. Later releases have become increasingly buggy with more crashes when alternating different formats.

Might have to give MPC a go. Good thread.
 
Prophetic Spirit said:
bad poll
where's winamp
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Winamp sucked ass as a video player even way back when it was still in active development. Currently it's outdated, Radionomy did jack shit about releasing a new version, and DrO who worked on Winamp before has made WACUP, Winamp Community Update Pack, which has reworked Winamp significantly. That being said, it's best to have separate players for audio and video. In my case I use foobar2000 for general music listening, but in case of MIDIs, Winamp/WACUP works better as it can use an external MIDI driver like OmniMIDI which lets me switch soundfonts in real time. Also for tracker modules XMPlay is a better choice.
 
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Slav Power said:
Winamp sucked ass as a video player even way back when it was still in active development. Currently it's outdated, Radionomy did jack shit about releasing a new version, and DrO who worked on Winamp before has made WACUP, Winamp Community Update Pack, which has reworked Winamp significantly. That being said, it's best to have separate players for audio and video. In my case I use foobar2000 for general music listening, but in case of MIDIs, Winamp/WACUP works better as it can use an external MIDI driver like OmniMIDI which lets me switch soundfonts in real time. Also for tracker modules XMPlay is a better choice.
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damn, i never thought of that before
i always used winamp as a mp3 player before VLC.
 
Slav Power said:
Well you do need a GPU to run it in the first place. With my current config playing that Squid Game episode puts the usage on my 1060 6GB at around 40%. Of course the settings can be adjusted to do lower quality processing in case your GPU struggles to run madVR and vice versa: if you have a better GPU you can crank it higher.
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I've got a 2080ti so I guess I could run it pretty decently?
 
MPV + VLC. VLC has a leg up on MPV due to having multiple deinterlacing modes and a ton of other features. MPV is WYSIWYG. Works well and is my default audio + video player.
 
mpv for video and ncmpcpp for music like the terminalshitter I am.
 
Dom Cruise said:
I'm too used to VLC by this point to change.

VLC's option to scale video down to it's native resolution was a revelation, sure it's tiny, but look at how non-pixelated it is!
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I did not realise I liked this and then one day I was happily watching a 700MB movie I downloaded in 2009 on a 1/12th of my monitor and was happy.
 
Musicbee. Its similar to mediamonkey but no gold, as it all comes included. Its good for large libraries of music. It can do video as well, never used that as I just use file structure and smplayer for videos.
 
I'd recommend VLC to most people simply because it works pretty well out of the box and supports just about everything. It's also just about the best cross-platform choice, working really well on Windows, Linux, macos and beyond. I keep it installed as a backup player. But it's not my favorite.

I've tried just about everything, and I keep several still around because every so often you get some weird file that plays really well in one player but not another. Generally though, I will use MPC-BE (not HC) for 95% of files. You used to want an external codec pack like LAV Filters with it, but the internal filters have evolved a lot over the years and it's really not necessary. You can also setup madVR but for most people it's overkill. More of a poweruser thing who want to squeeze a little more quality or accuracy out of a file.

For music I like foobar2000 or musicbee... but I rarely use them because I gave up on hoarding and sorting a massive music collection and decided to just get spotify premium. Spotify is just one of those 'convenience trumping other concerns' situations for me. Great selection and I love the playlists.
 
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I use vlc but I hardly use it and. I never had any other media player but so far its been good.
 
Slav Power said:
It's not as amazing as straight up upscaling the entire video in ESRGAN but it is still a noticeable improvement. Here's an example of it upscaling a 360p video of Squid Game S01E01.
madVR:
View attachment 2881701
Standard:
View attachment 2881702
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Imagine going through all that effort for next to no difference in picture quality. Video spergs really are the dirt worst.

Also the correct answer is VLC. It just fucking works. Throw some shitty wmv files in it or mp4 files or hell some of those old fucking quicktime video files and it'll just fucking work. You don't need to touch a single setting to watch something.
 
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Winamp is the undisputed champion of playing 8- and 16-bit video game music. It has so many plugins that allow it to play SPCs, NSFs, and anything else you can think of. Pretty sure there are even plugins for some 32 bit consoles, like the PSX.

Hey, it's a thing. Dozens of us, etc.

Aside from that, VLC. Hands down.
 
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Video: MPV, I like unobtrusive controller ui
Music: cmus, though I recently just got into it due to moc having this issue where adjusting the volume crashes it
 
I'm really putting two out here. When it comes to playing music or listening to internet streams then I would have to say clementine. Nice & simple, easily populate a local library & it just works. Also it has a volume slider "FUCK YOU GNOME MUSIC". For video I would have to say mpv media player. Also very simple & lightweight. Click video & it opens immediately, if you want a loop function sadly you would have to edit a text file & place it somewhere but otherwise it's great. It also has a fucking volume slider FUCK YOU GNOME DEVS"
 
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In terms of music, nothing beats Foobar2000 for the sheer customisability and swiss army knife levels of being able to throw whatever you want at it, plus if you have an absolutely monstrous library it's easy to load + edit metatags. Need last.fm compatibility? just chuck a plugin in.

If you're a linuxfag then the closest you'll get to Foobar is Deadbeef, which was my music player of choice when I had a few years of being a linuxfag during the Windows 8 drama.

Although tbh I use spotify most of the time nowadays, given how great it is for discovering NEW music so most of this shit is moot.
 
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