I need a good touchscreen video player for Linux, and so far haven’t been able to find one. The annoying part is several gnome players look like they are designed for touch, but really aren’t.
Playing streaming video through the browser works well, so problem doesn’t seem to be OS or hardware.
Mpv feels snappier to use. It starts up faster, playback starts faster, seeking is responsive. I use mpv without a dedicated frontend like smplayer. The experience is a bit less sane than a VLC but it has been worth the learning curve.
I'm using mpv without frontend too. But I'm wondering about what you do mean by 'learning curve' and 'less sane'?
It seems, related to these two players I've had the opposite experience. VLC always felt sluggish and slow to me, still does, though I've got it installed, still. Just in case.
The thing with VLC for me was the lack of 'snappiness', which led me to fiddle with the endless options in advanced mode. 'Bricking' it. Maybe too advanced for me.
With mpv I had to do nothing at all, it just worked(for me) and my basic needs. And the OSD is enough frontend for me.
All of this under Linux. Maybe it's a matter of different distro-defaults and compilation options?
Similar to when I still used Windows 7 sometimes. VLC? Arrgh!
Some fork of MPC-HC with some codec-pack to the rescue, so supersmooth, unbeatable by anything else.
Edit - My basic needs are:
1.) Just play that thing.
2.) No matter how, and where. Meaning either windowed, and movable to any screen I have in whichever multi-screen setup. Or go fullscreen somewhere.
3.) Not having artifacts, stuttering, or causing such on other screens. Don't burn my CPU while doing so.
4.) Let me fast-forward, rewind, stop, slowmo frame by frame, skip, smoothly without destroying my ears or speakers with crackling noises.
5.) Do good stereo-downmix of whichever surround-sound to headphones.
6.) Subtitles? See 1.)!
Eddding:
7.) I don't stream, and don't care about grabbing streams from Websites. (From within VLC. There's yt-dlp for that.)
I'm old-fashioned enough to just prefer local files.
I haven't tried smplayer, but I have used both vlc and mpv. VLC doesn't support HDR video on Linux, while mpv does, so that's a pretty big difference. With VLC, watching an HDR video results in very dark or very bad (frequently too much red) colors.
Isn't this a general X.org issue? It has no HDR support so anything you play though it has to go through a HRD to SDR conversion which VLC doesn't do very well.
I need a good touchscreen video player for Linux, and so far haven’t been able to find one. The annoying part is several gnome players look like they are designed for touch, but really aren’t.
Playing streaming video through the browser works well, so problem doesn’t seem to be OS or hardware.
There's also IINA - another MPV frontend for macOS.
how does it compare to vlc?
Mpv feels snappier to use. It starts up faster, playback starts faster, seeking is responsive. I use mpv without a dedicated frontend like smplayer. The experience is a bit less sane than a VLC but it has been worth the learning curve.
I'm using mpv without frontend too. But I'm wondering about what you do mean by 'learning curve' and 'less sane'?
It seems, related to these two players I've had the opposite experience. VLC always felt sluggish and slow to me, still does, though I've got it installed, still. Just in case.
The thing with VLC for me was the lack of 'snappiness', which led me to fiddle with the endless options in advanced mode. 'Bricking' it. Maybe too advanced for me.
With mpv I had to do nothing at all, it just worked(for me) and my basic needs. And the OSD is enough frontend for me.
All of this under Linux. Maybe it's a matter of different distro-defaults and compilation options?
Similar to when I still used Windows 7 sometimes. VLC? Arrgh! Some fork of MPC-HC with some codec-pack to the rescue, so supersmooth, unbeatable by anything else.
Edit - My basic needs are:
1.) Just play that thing.
2.) No matter how, and where. Meaning either windowed, and movable to any screen I have in whichever multi-screen setup. Or go fullscreen somewhere.
3.) Not having artifacts, stuttering, or causing such on other screens. Don't burn my CPU while doing so.
4.) Let me fast-forward, rewind, stop, slowmo frame by frame, skip, smoothly without destroying my ears or speakers with crackling noises.
5.) Do good stereo-downmix of whichever surround-sound to headphones.
6.) Subtitles? See 1.)!
Eddding:
7.) I don't stream, and don't care about grabbing streams from Websites. (From within VLC. There's yt-dlp for that.)
I'm old-fashioned enough to just prefer local files.
I haven't tried smplayer, but I have used both vlc and mpv. VLC doesn't support HDR video on Linux, while mpv does, so that's a pretty big difference. With VLC, watching an HDR video results in very dark or very bad (frequently too much red) colors.
Isn't this a general X.org issue? It has no HDR support so anything you play though it has to go through a HRD to SDR conversion which VLC doesn't do very well.
I suppose for most practical purpose there isn’t much difference between libvlc or libmpv. These programs just slap a new skin to differentiate.