MPV

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.

I honestly find VLC Media Player to be a bit overrated, and that the other alternatives (particularly MPV) don't get enough of the love.

MPV is an amazing Windows media player; lightweight and runs videos very smoothly. As part of the minimalist lifestyle it holds, it doesn't contain much of a GUI, but that's not really much to worry about in my opinion. I'd say the installation is the tricky part actually, but once you have that settled, you can freely enjoy watching your videos :)

I like MPV, it handles high resolution videos better than MPC-HC on Windows, and on Linux it just plain shines performance wise. Configuration is also not that difficult to figure out. But the bare-bones approach hurts when it comes to the UI look & feel. Many things are available through keyboard shortcuts and it has a basic control pane, but it just doesn't feel as comfortable and solid as having a proper GUI. Feels like the developers decided to give up on it and made it more stripped down akin to mobile apps. That's probably the only bad thing about it, still a great player.