[Zircom]

It is[1] popular to recommend MPC over VLC in the anime fansub community, especially on /a/. When H. 264/10bit was newish and had just started to come into regular use in the scene[2], I distinctly remember a lot of people shitting on VLC because at the time it didn't handle it very well right out of the box, and there were tons of guides floating around on how to download/setup MPC-HC with CCCP or k-lite and haali media splitter for a supposedly better viewing experience.

[1] Or at least was, my recollections regarding this are nearly 10-15 years old at this point.

[2] There was one specific person, Daiz from the Underwater/UTW fansub group, that was one of the first people to start encoding his releases in H.264/10bit, and he would get a lot of hate because they tended not to play very well on improper setups, vanilla VLC being among those. "Dammit Daiz", they would say. He eventually bruteforced a tripcode to have H.264 in it just to mess back at them for all the hate. Fun memories.

edit: here we go, a contemporary HN rant from the man himself regarding MPC vs VLC. Looks like summoning Daiz works here too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6449420

[astrange]

VLC had no styled subtitle support at the time, and often didn't seek to keyframes so clicking around would corrupt the video. It was also pretty inefficient on macOS.