I have both VLC and MPV and VLC used to take 0.5 second to seek forward while MPV being completely seamless. But I just tested again today and VLC has become seamless too with very minor differences. idk what changed

Edit: to answer your question I can't say much other than preferences. I like MPV because it's minimal, but VLC is good too

I've had VLC struggle with high-res videos from my phone, particularly if I'm seeking and replaying a bit.

edit: It may have also been high frame rate.

It seems hit and miss for VLC. I've used it for many years in Linux and can't pinpoint the moment when it became bad for me, but it now has difficulty to read a significant portion of my video files.

It lags when playing videos, or there is sound but no image, or it flickers. It just became unreliable for me. And if we google a bit, there seems to also be lots of people in that situation.

I tried a few things, changing settings and what not, but it never worked correctly again. Even on a fresh install. So I gave up and just use mpv now.

Edit: I just remembered. At one point it was not closing properly. Like, if you didn't stop the video playing before closing VLC's window, it crashed and stayed in the background. It opened new instances but every time it was closed before stopping a video, it would just crash and stay in the background. Eventually I'd have 4, 5 or 6 icons of VLC in my notification tray and would have to kill all of them. It was annoying.

A big reason I use MPV is because of anime. I forget exactly what the reason was back in the day, but I can remember MPV being better at playing certain formats, and fan subs of anime are early adopters of new codecs. In addition, there is a very healthy ecosystem of plugins related to language learning, which again ties back to anime.

All my life when I have to use vlc or try to there's something slightly wrong or not working as expected. Mpv has always just worked perfect and right. Does one thing well: it plays anything you throw at it.

Both are using basically the same libraries and tech behind the scenes, so one should use vlc if there's need for the features it has, like the library and chromecast, etc.

mpv does everything it should in good and performant, while VLC comes with batteries (and codecs) included. This (batteries) can be a good thing because "it just works tm" or it can be a headache with weird errors and security. Personally, i switched to mpc-hc after VLC always had blocky artifacts, and later on to Linux and mpv. Only bad thing about mpv is that it has race conditions with config vs. cli, imo.

Lots of keyshortcuts, easy to use in scripts/Cli, no wasted space for UI-Elements. Its great, but im sure VLC has also tons of Features

I've had twitch lag in VLC, but work flawlessly in MPV

MPV looks better.