I can't say that I understand the rave reviews here. MPlayer does some things better than VLC, but overall, it's nowhere near as capable. I threw a couple of AVIs that befuddled VLC and Quicktime Player (with Perian) at MPlayer. It managed to play them, although the first time I dropped one of those videos onto MPlayer's dock icon, the app immediately locked up and I needed to force quit. That's great. But compared to VLC, MPlayer lacks a lot of features and is also un-Maclike in many ways. For one thing, there's no "Open recent..." submenu like most Mac apps have. Finish playing a video and it disappears from the playlist, so if you want to play it again, you have to go find it again. There's no control over audio sync, so if your audio doesn't match perfectly, you're out of luck. Go through the menus for a little too long (about 15 seconds) and the playback freezes. And there is no quick jumping through the video. With VLC, I can make short, medium, long and extra long jumps through video at the press of a key combination (actually at the press of a key on my wonderfully programmable Belkin Nostromo N52 Speedpad). That's very useful if I'm searching for a specific point in a video or I miss a line of dialog and want to jump back. Press a key and I've jumped back 10 seconds. Press another and I can jump 5 minutes forward instantly. No such luck with MPlayer. It has barely more controls than Quicktime Player. I use VLC's extremely configurable prefs to set the audio volume to very fine grain control, another option not available in MPlayer.

MPlayer is a useful addition to my video arsenal for files that won't play back any other way. But use it as my primary player? No, thanks. MPlayer is more of a basic tool, while VLC is a power tool.