Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. (Especially subbing groups) I use FooBar2K for audio and VLC for video.
Kinda surprised that the grandparent (asked an honest question) is getting downvoted while this post (made a baseless claim) isn't. >The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. VLC is built largely around the cross-platform ffmpeg libraries and does not seem to have the ability to use native Windows DirectShow filters, in the inte…
MPC's easily extensible plugin system was a great thing then, because fansub groups could create their own package and easily distribute it with the codecs they were using.
VLC wasn't nearly as optimized as today, so it tended to run like crap on a lot of systems. I remember MPC loading up almost instantly on my college machine, while VLC would take a while to load and run.
Today, this is less of an issue. Pretty much everyone's settled a few standard codecs, and VLC's performance is quite good.