It loads much faster than VLC and it also seems faster in general. The GUI is very minimalistic and you can leave only the video itself (with the 'no-border' setting). It has a bunch of nice little features/settings, but it requires some exploration and changing config files...

I switched from VLC to mpv some years ago and never looked back. It's just better for opening random video/audio files, IMO.

For one thing, VLC on macOS has become so unreliable it's more or less unusable. Randomly won't play valid video streams, slow or completely broken seeking, and even intermittently crashes.

I switched to IINA and haven't looked back, it's incredibly good for most cases. Unfortunate that it's Mac-only software; not a multi-platform capable solution.

https://iina.io/

MPV is the only video player I'm aware of which is available for every common desktop platform and works consistently across them.

Odd, I would have described VLC on mac as “bulletproof”. Are you maybe on an M1 mac?

mpv has better support for playing videos from the web. You can paste a youtube link into vlc's "Open Network Stream..." dialogue, but because VLC doesn't use yt-dlp for this it often doesn't work at all (it presently doesn't work for me) and works with fewer websites than mpv.

Also mpv's json IPC interface is easier to use with better documentation than any of VLC's numerous remote control protocols (which aren't mentioned in the manpage, and have incomplete hand-wavy documentation spread across numerous poorly organized wiki pages.)

One very neat feature, mpv can play videos (with sound) directly in your terminal (no extra windows needed):

    mpv --vo=tct 'https://www.instagram.com/p/CfZK86fozXa/'

It sucks, it uses too much CPU. DRM/KMS it's MUCH better.

I had better luck with it on older hardware than VLC.