It's more minimal in the interface (basically full-screen with a bunch of kbd shortcuts) but has all the features I need (including playback speed), and even some that are not in VLC--for instance, VLC has a key to advance 1 frame ('e', IIRC) and mpv can step both ways (with ',' and '.').
A few downsides: it doesn't seem to have playlist functionality (not that VLC's playlist UI is that great, but it works). to load a subtitle file, you either need to specify it on the command line or it needs to match the filename exactly, in VLC you can just drag'n'drop any subtitle onto the player to load it or use an Open File dialog. mpv immediately exits when the video is finished playing which is actually nice sometimes, but also can be annoying if you wanted to rewind the last 10 seconds or something or if you seek forward too quickly (maybe mpv has a setting for this though).
On the whole, I use mpv for almost anything. Indeed in combination with youtube-dl, I've made an alias for `youtube-dl <URL> --exec "mpv --fs --fs-screen 1 {} &"`, which starts the player immediately after download, full-screen, on the second (big) monitor. I still use VLC whenever I want to watch multiple short videos in a playlist. And of course VLC on Android because it's really for both video as well as playing music--although I feel there should be a better musicplayer, one that allows me to browse my collection through the file system instead of tags (which VLC does) but has a real smooth UI to manage playlists (which has been clunky in most Android players I've tried).
> A not too crappy GPU. mpv is not intended to be used with bad GPUs. There are many caveats with drivers or system compositors causing tearing, stutter, etc. On Windows, you might want to make sure the graphics drivers are current, especially OpenGL. In some cases, ancient fallback video output methods can help (such as --vo=xv on Linux), but this use is not recommended or supported. (o)
Whereas VLC has a similar option but it's sort of an afterthought and you have to activate it, from the wiki:
> The VLC media player framework can use your graphic card (a.k.a. GPU) to accelerate decoding of video streams depending on the video codec, graphic card model and operating system.
