Well there's an old kid in town, MPC-HC is still being maintained[1] to the great joy for us who dislike the VLC UX.

[1]: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/

Ugh... for the life of me I still can't understand why you can't click to play pause in VLC. Probably once upon a time it was about dvd, but the number of played dvds compared to pirated mk4 is probably one to a billion.

Agreed, Media player classic is the Winamp of video.

It's nice to see that someone revived MPC-HC (again). For a while MPC-BE[1] was the alternative. I don't know how they compare today, but the latter is still great.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/

If mpv on Linux and MPC-HC on Windows, what is recommended on macOS?

I have been using mpv on MacOS too. I just had to create an app bundle for it a very simple swift wrapper which just runs mpv command...

mpv is really good but a little light on the GUI; I recommend VLC for most people

SMPplayer is a frontend for mpv which I use and like.

Yep, highly recommend https://www.smplayer.info with dark skin :)

It also has MPC GUI mode for nostalgia :)

On macOS, IINA is my go-to mpv wrapper nowadays, and last time I tried, Haruna is pretty good on KDE.

There's https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net for Windows lusers.

mpv is super for lower spec hardware!

mpv is great for scripting, though.

PotPlayer is the new kid, I guess? Personally I don't like VLC because of the UI, so I've always used MPC.

Still vastly prefer mpv[0].

0. https://mpv.io

MPC is better if you're on Windows.

IINA is much better on Mac

https://iina.io