Favorite video players

What are your favorite video players?

Here are my top 7.

1. Parole. An unlikely winner admittedly, but it has several advantages over its counterparts.

* Based on GStreamer which I prefer to FFmpeg based players.
* Uses GTK so looks great on MATE.
* Minimalistic interface which enables easily removing menubar without removing bottom bar with pause/stop/next/previous buttons (good luck doing that in SMPlayer and VLC).
* Excellent m3u/IPTV playback without needing streamlink.

The downside is that like most other players listed you can't play subtitles in the black bars, so if I have a file with subtitles I use MPlayer (or gxine) instead.

2. MPlayer. Not quite as good as Parole due to buggy m3u/IPTV playback even when using streamlink but has other features:

* Great shortcuts so useful for doing quick stuff like syncing audio when playing back video.

* Supports playing subtitles/OSD on black bars on my old T60 which mpv no longer does (as it uses opengl-old). I simply put this line in my .mplayer/config file (change 5/4 to suit the aspect ratio of your monitor):
vf=expand=:::::5/4

3. gxine - surprisingly plays back subtitles in black box out of the box. Unfortunately, I had no luck with m3u/IPTV. Don't bother with xine-ui - the interface is terrible (from the early 90s).

4. mpv - similar to MPlayer (also based on same code) not as good due to dropping support for opengl-old so no subtitles on black bars and also has issues with live stream playback (dropping audio after a few minutes). At least you can play videos in the browser using Mozplugger. Can be set up to use the same keyboard shortcuts as MPlayer if you copy the configuration file to the correct location. Also, you can still use the older GUI which looks much better than the newer one (see here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/404127/how-to-get-the-old-pseudo-gui-of-mpv-video-player ).

5. VLC - m3u/IPTV support is not working on some streams. At least it has a functional NPAPI browser plugin. Also I cannot place subtitles properly in black bars. Also uses Qt which I like less than GTK. I can't remove only the menubar (see above).

6. SMPlayer - Just an MPlayer/mpv front-end. Useful if you want to do something for which you forgot the command such as applying a deinterlace filter. I couldn't remove menubar (see above).

7. Totem - similar to Parole (uses GStreamer) but full screen video didn't work for me as Xv isn't supported apparently so I uninstalled it.