Last updated on 2014-03-16, by David Brooks

Which Video Player is Better: VLC vs. MPlayer

Watching movies has occupied a quite large part of computer life.  Most people may have got their desired media players to play and watch their favorite movies, either videos, DVD or Blu-ray movies. If you’re looking for the best video player to enjoy movies on computer, this VLC vs. MPlayer post would give you some hints to choose your best video player.

What is VLC (short of VLC Media Player)

VLC Media Player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project. VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but since VLC is no longer simply a client, that initialize no longer applies.

VLC is popular for its ability to play the video content of incomplete, unfinished, or damaged video downloads before the files have been fully downloaded (e.g. files still downloading via BitTorrent, eMule, or Gnutella). It also plays m2t MPEG transport streams (.TS) files while they are still being digitized from an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, making it possible to monitor the video as it is being played. This is because it is a packet-based player.

The player also has the ability to use libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user’s operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images.

What is MPlayer?

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies.

Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.

MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.

Leawo Blu-ray Player – Better alternative media player than VLC and MPlayer
Looking for a media player that combines all the goodies and abandons all the shortcomings of VLC and MPlayer? Leawo Blu-ray Player is actually your choice of best video player to let you enjoy movies in various formats on Windows. It is easy to use in interface but powerful enough in actual functions. Leawo Blu-ray Player is all-inclusive media player software to play back Blu-ray discs/folders, DVD disc/folders, common videos and up to 1080P HD videos in various formats like AVI, MPEG, WMV, MP4, FLV, RM, MOV, Xvid, 3GP, HD MP4, HD AVI, HD MOV, HD TS, HD TRP, HD VOB, HD MPG, HD WMV, HD ASF, etc., and audios in AAC, AC3, MP3, M4A, MKA, WAV, WMA, etc. smoothly on Windows, Windows 8 included. It delivers lossless quality video and audio, with subtitles, audio tracks, video effects and audio effects adjustable.

A specs summary of Leawo Blu-ray Player:
Blu-ray player to play back Blu-ray discs and folders without quality loss;
Play back all the latest Blu-ray and DVD discs without quality loss, just like hardware Blu-ray players;
Free media player to play back DVD, video (up to 1080P included) and audio on Windows;
Allow people to adjust subtitles and audio tracks, and load external subtitles for better movie experience at will;
Support to play back audio files with DTS-HD Master audio and DTS-5.1 audio;
Full menu for playback control to enjoy audio, video, DVD and Blu-ray friendlier;
100% compatible with Windows 8 OS supported.

   

To know the detailed guide on using Leawo Blu-ray Player, check how to play Blu-ray/DVD/video/audio with Leawo Blu-ray Player on Windows