mpv is the king. Nice minimal interface, comprehensive format support and great performance.

I tried to use VLC to watch videos from my network share and it it just kept stuttering and freezing, meanwhile mpv has way better capability there and actually buffers and preloads the video. It even shows you in the seek bar how much of the file is preloaded.

VLC's core components do get integrated into other programs, so you could be indirectly using it.

Do you know of an MPC equivalent on nix? Basically I'd like it to remember my unsaved play list and remember where I left off in a video either by stopping the video, logout, or system crash and has a minimal interface like Haruna (sp? default player in Kubuntu). Been using MPC since the k-lite kodec pack back in early 2k.

Thanks for any advice

*prolly not the best place to ask but you guys seem to know and have the patience to test a lot of software