[greyskull]

MPC-HC was always my go-to. Starts up instantly and the performance was always superb, much better than VLC in seeking. I don't know what it is, but more often than not, VLC pauses for a moment when seeking to a random part of the file, while MPC-HC has always been instant.

I suppose I'll try out MPV.

[ApolloFortyNine]

VLC in a nutshell: Rebuilding fonts...

Fortunately, I believe MPC-HC will still likely be updated if necessary, or forked and updated if need be. I know I haven't updated mine in years and haven't had any problems.

[rossy]

> VLC in a nutshell: Rebuilding fonts...

I wonder if this is still a problem (I haven't used VLC in a while.) That message box is shown when fontconfig rebuilds its font cache, but libass has been able to run without fontconfig since 0.13.0 (October 2015.) I guess it depends on whether the current release version of VLC still needs it.

[dEnigma]

It happened to me on the current Windows version just a few days ago. But it doesn't seem to happen as often as in the past.

[belorn]

With some malformed files I have notice that VLC has a tendency to handle it when mplayer did not, so I always assumed that the delay in VLC is to more complex seeking that sacrifice performance for robustness.

I haven't used MPV enough to see if this case is still true.