MPV

I recently had some issues with VLC lagging/creating some artifacts while watching some high bitrate 60fps videos and was recommended MPV which completely solved the issue (all videos played fluidly/smoothly at any framerate/bitrate).

Just fine out of the box. EXCELLENT when combined with the UOSC (enhanced UI) and THUMBFAST (thumbnail preview in seekbar) scripts.

It's got a barebones UI, no single-instance behavior, hardware decoding disabled by default... and to top it all off, the installation process is not straightforward. So it's very much not average-user-friendly. If you want a media player that just works and is easy to use out of the box, steer clear of mpv. You'll need to be somewhat tech-savvy and dive into documentation pieces and even scripting to squeeze out its capabilities. However, if you're willing to do that, it can become an extremely powerful and deeply customizable tool. I personally love it. To give you an example: it's the only player I've found so far capable of seamlessly playing several audio tracks simultaneously (there's a way to force this on VLC Media Player, but it's very unreliable and will crash the player often). Plus, you get to assign any keybind to perform whatever function you might want. Highly recommended.

If you just know how to tinker with the conf files (which is very easy now coz of ai) it could turn out to be the best player ever. So much simple and far better experience than every other player out there including but not limited to vlc. An additional tip for silicon macs install with macports as it builds the app, much better and native otherwise you would have to do much more tinkering like installing rosetta etc as it is not native to silicon macs and will have a worse experience.

The best video player on Windows.

If you need GUI, try SMPlayer, which utilizes MPV.