& it's also not needing many separate dependencies and it's lightwight.
You also can lift it up as YouTube cinema,
check out on their website, if interested = 
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you should have this now fixed after you reboot your system 
, with a notification about it, try it!
mplayer is included by default, but vlc was always simply a preference because has GUI, common users wont have idea how to use mplayer, and they are also more used of vlc
hum... in fact yeah, it doesn't looks so bad, its just a frontend of mplayer so its in any case powerful and featured
@maxinou @Rebel450 (@Franc?) can you* try these performance things with "mvp" and "mplayer" ? just to know if any of the two works better (which is what smplayer uses in the background)
also, can you try "rage" and compare performance ? this is an EFL (enlightenment) based video player (i know, not many features, but im more interested in the performance / videoplayback thing now)
about vlc (for those who has difficulties with it), is there any setting that should be changed on it ? (like the video rendering options, probably)
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the sufficent difference in playback(!) performance comes from different codings;
VLC is meant for streaming, its playback is an optimzed feature for the mainly used codings in VLC
Frankly, any movie that will not even open with other players will open in VLC.
VLC is a beast, in the sense that it can do almost anything.... especially if you don't mind using the commandline.
The GUI in itself is already fairly daunting but still lacks sufficient full control for all it's options and admittedly is a lot more than just simple play-back.
A few years (almost 10) ago I enrolled at an online course at the (Barcelona based) Free Technology Academy (FTA) concerning, among others "Network Technologies". VLC was used as an example of data streaming protocols and after several mishaps and failures to get streaming working as it should .....and where I was the only that succeeded in getting it working/streaming at all. I discovered I was the only one there that was running Linux and thus had the option of using the commandline options on start up.
With that I'm saying that VLC can run very well but it will take a thorough search/tweaking of all the options.
VLC has a big pro over all other players: It litterally plays everything (that your RAM can handle) perfectly ...... even some that Mplayer cannot, and there's more of those than you think.
Another pro: It can download subtitles on the fly if you have an internet connection and can handle a few more different subtitle file formats than other players.
As for "rage" ....... nah! Doesn't work well i.e crashes or goes zombie on some codecs.
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Smplayer plays more out of the box than VLC does, try....
Yes, we can, I'll try them ASAP, actually I test as much as possible some web browsers to compare Chromium vs Vivaldi vs Midori, I add also the test between mvp vs smplayer vs rage vs VLC
I'll give my feedback in both laptops along this week
Nope! It doesn't but it's not worth the argument either. So please do not come up with a list of file-types and codecs to make a point.
Smplayer is simply a front end to mplayer and I do use both. In effect like I said:
If mplayer gets choppy or doesn't play at all or says it requires a certain codec (i.e some mpg files) or freezes on certain (4k) H265 files that decode on the CPU then ....... VLC will do that nonetheless.
Streaming from a (USB) video device ditto.
Both players definitely need to be installed but IMHO VLC is vastly superior.
Especially if you live in a country that doesn't overdub sound tracks but always uses subtitles.
There is a case for using mplayer (especially on low end machines) as the default player for simple use but it's definitely not good enough for serious movie watching. Like VLC that would require a lot more commandline tweaking .....and unknowing users need to be aware of those shortcomings before they blame the OS for it.
Your experience is much intensive than mine, I see only "simple" videos downloaded from the net (YT) without subtitles and due to my laptops limits not in HD (even my old Xtreamer Sidewinder 3 doesn't support modern codecs and my TV isn't HD one 
)
I can only perform simple test in low RAM and CPU / GPU machines, but your experience will be helpful than mine to chose / improve media player set as default in Elive 
Which is extremely helpful so please continue to do that.
Have you, perchance "opted" (as in not unchecked) for the XBMC option, on install?
You might want to check out it's (kodi) behaviour to play multimedia on your machines. It relies heavily on VLC.
For any older machine:
If the motherboard allows SATA, get a SSD disk in place of the standard disks. It will increase speed by miles and miles....especially if low RAM makes you use more SWAP space.
In the day on older laptops (like my thinkpad T20), I used to add an external SSD card (500Mb was a lot then) via a PCMCIA adapter for extra swap space ..... even that was a speed gain. 
@maxinou
is right here, but this means not that
@triantares
is wrong with what he pointed out above,
seems, he misunderstood the topic we were talking about.
Of course VLC is the "better" player because of its numerous features,
but as said before,
when it comes to play just a movie or video flawless on a weak equipped machine,
you won't care which is the "better" one -
as long you can watch your stuff without lag or hanging - here is for sure smplayer the right choice.
And then
' don't come with a list of codecs ' - why not
Stop to force others to just eat down your sometimes kinda weird opinion.
Different people has different habits -
that's btw what our Linux community makes out.
Because both can be tweaked to play all of them.
It's about how they use the available hardware in the default setting.
Mplayer falls short on some older file types/containers including some avi and mpg types as well as some newer HD types, which is something to be reckoned with.
This is not about forcing a choice but of putting pros and cons for a default (both will be installed anyway) movie-player in a row.
Just saying: "I like this one and everybody else should too." is not enough.
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Agreed and confirmed in full.
(Additional note: swap is speeding up the PC then!)
Setting up a virtualmachine (32bits 2G) offers the following comparison running the same file:
SMPLAYER
- 302 mb ram
- 3.6% men
- 6.0 - 6.7 CPU
- Pulse audio 1.2 -1.7 CPU
VLC
- 310 mb ram
- 7.2% mem
- 26.9% CPU
- Pulseaudio 1.7% CPU
RAGE
- Same as smplayer except that it's CPU usage spikes at 20-25% on start up and then settles down to around 9%.
There are quite a few error messages on "vlc" (or cvlc) as well as "rage" so might be wortwhile to look into for kodi/xbmc. Not for me this week, though .... I have work todo.
Conclusion: Without changing/tweaking any default settings, [s]mplayer is definitely a lot lighter.
Now let's see those bare-metal figures (using 32bit).
I used "top" for the above figures BTW.
Be aware that although only using 1 core, I still have an i7-4600U at 2.10GHz there, so percentage values will vary. 
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No swap usage itself is speeding up not the PC. Physical RAM is still the best option but if you cannot upgrade it, this is an option.
Either way the experience will be slower using swap. So avoid it if you can.
Omy
Sure.
We were still talking about NoteBooks
with physically ram limitations of max 1 or 2 GB
like e.g. Eee PC Seashell and similar -
in these cases - swap on SSD! will indeed speed it up .
This is tested here and confirmed -
on bare metal in real life - not only on vm
Yes, I'll test them, of course, XBMC I didn't remember if was checked/unchecked on install, I should verify it.... the same for kodi..... to see this week...
If not, yes, one day two SSD for my both machines it will be the best solution, because in the HP HDD is broken and Elive says to me that it have more bad sectors as before any time its starts.... but as unemployed actually is not my priority....
Yes, this is the target here so i'll perform my own test in my cheap machines...
One day..... 
XBMC=kodi and will show up in the choice menu on the top right hand side (under e16 and enlightenment) if you log out. It's a media center....I use it on my RaspberryPi to watch TV and movies. 
really? 
that's interesting, so mplayer always played for me any kind of file... maybe the new development of vlc makes it more featured / supported than mplayer now
but yeah, as said later in the thread we are more worried about the performance than the features, i know that slow computers cannot play smoothly a lot of videos, so its a pain to try to use multimedia or watch a movie, this becomes a headache if the rendering is not enough powerful, but if smplayer (mplayer / mvp) renders better than vlc then that's an important thing to consider, at least for simply set it as "default player"
can somebody (that has these slow playback experiences) try the different "video output" settings in vlc ? (@Rebel450? @maxinou? ), i wonder if is just a video-output setting which makes vlc slow...
have you tried to right-click in a movie file from thunar ? thats a unique elive feature
ah! that's a delicated thing, so:
- rage is an EFL (enlightenment libs) application
- EFL uses its "emotion" lib for multimedia
- "emotion" uses an external multimedia lib to handle multimedia files (libvlc-dev, libgstreammer-dev, etc)
so, looking at the actual dependencies of libemotion1 (which comes from debian builted), it rely's on gstreammer, which the E developers says its the preffered one (elive 3.0 uses vlc on its own build, which worked pretty good i think), have you tried to install the extra gstreammer-* plugins which includes extra codec support?
anybody compared mplayer VS mvp VS mplayer2 ? im an old user of mplayer but never tried deeply their forks and i dont know which one is better now
I'm not altogether sure what you mean by that in combination with subtitles. Can you explain?
EDIT:
Found it in the 32bit 3.7.5 not in the 64 bit though. Alas nothing happens when clicking. 
No, I haven't as mplayer in combo with VLC covers all my needs. Will give it a go if I run into some spare time. 
I suspect you meant "mpv" with that.
Actually "mplayer" is my default choice ...... I'm quite happy with it and used to all the key-combo's it requires. Fullscreen (f) is really fullscreen and no bullshit menu underneath.
And if a video wont run I open it with VLC.... even damaged or partially downloaded or files being rendered, it's a streamer after all.
On the 32bit 2G RAM machine I created, i find that mplayer is the only one that doesn't have choppy playback. The choppyness in VLC and rage is ever so light but it's there.
On a side note: XBMC relies on VLC. So uninstalling it might have some unpleasant side effects.
just try it 
ah, right
definitively we need a better default player (probably smplayer)
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