Even on the Linux side I have seen a drop in the number of full blown media players being developed, they are mostly front ends to things like mpv and mplayer.
I agree with you that there isn't much (if any) advantage to doing it all again with a new media player core. I would rather all the expertise is put into mpv to be honest and then let others build front ends that do all the extra bits.
I haven't tried the Roku/Fire etc though, so they may be good too.
It uses libmpv though.
mpv supports display calibration and HDR conversion as well. You can load a 3DLUT for display calibration if you want, but for mpv, you would more likely load an ICC profile and have it generate the correct LUT automatically. You can even just let it pick up the ICC profile configured in the operating system. As for HDR, there are a number of built-in tone mapping algorithms: https://mpv.io/manual/master/#options-hdr-tone-mapping
The default keybinds are absolutely nonsensical, though.
Now, the general consensus is that they should be changed gradually, rather than all at once. Some obviously bad keybindings have been removed this way (eg. Esc->quit.) If you create an issue for your most hated keybind, it can probably be changed.
Fortunately there's a file included that will restore the original behaviors.
Here's a rough version of my script: https://github.com/smnx/mpv-autosub (forked from https://gist.github.com/selsta/ce3fb37e775dbd15c698).
I suppose I'll try out MPV.
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.
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.
I haven't used MPV enough to see if this case is still true.
On Linux/macOS I use mpv - I recommend it!
Edit: Turns out this isn't unique to MPC-HC: https://www.svp-team.com/
It reimplements mpc-hc UX using qt for the UI and libmpv for the heavy lifting. The issue with this one is that it doesn't have public builds yet, but it has been in active development for years.
Maybe you want someone to update the ffmpeg it links to. Occasionally. But that's already well into "super power user" territory.
MPC-HC is just a DirectShow frontend, or at least, that's how I used it. Filters do most of the work. And no one seems to care about DirectShow anymore but that's mostly because everything works fine.
It will die eventually, because Microsoft is trying hard to kill DirectShow (to replace it with something inferior...) and the opensource guys mostly go to mplayer, but for now, updates are not really necessary.
Media Foundation ain’t that bad. I coded some moderately advanced stuff with it, custom stream sources, custom transforms — it was fun, and it run well.
I can see how it was inferior back in 2007. The first version of MF was shipped with Vista, and Vista… Let’s just say many people were disappointed with it. Nowadays however, when you only need to support Windows 7+, MF is fine.
I even use mpv on windows...
$ brew install mpv
$ mpv ~/Media/my-movie.mp4
MPV is indeed a good alternative, though.
I am currently on Windows and use MPV, I don't see why it should be exclusive in any way.
The dotfiles are compatible, and same goes for lua scripts. So there's no trade off at all that I've found. And it's nice to be able to just clone my dotfiles and have it work in OS X, and same for Windows.
It's super feature rich, with (in my opinion) a much nice interface than e.g. VLC.
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