[tumult]

VLC doesn't have perfect compatibility. I think it worked correctly on random video files less frequently than mpv the last time I tried it. And mpv can actually step forward and back frame by frame.

[ruszki]

I found MPV because VLC was unreliable. Seeking was especially crazy sometimes, and not that I couldn’t seek to the exact moment, but I couldn’t seek at all. Even displaying was broken sometimes regardless of file types. I had none of these issues with MPV for the same files.

[neckro23]

VLC is sometimes so unreliable for me, especially when seeking or frame-stepping, that it stops responding to playback commands entirely (although it pretends to still work) and I have to kill the zombie process before I can even re-open the file and try again.

[77pt77]

So can mplayer and did that way before mpv could.

[dikei]

mplayer was forked into mplayer2, which in turn was forked into mpv

Though AFAIK, most of the rendering code behind mpv has been entirely rewritten.