VLC doesn't have perfect compatibility. I think it worked correctly on random video files less frequently than mpv the last time I tried it. And mpv can actually step forward and back frame by frame.
I found MPV because VLC was unreliable. Seeking was especially crazy sometimes, and not that I couldn’t seek to the exact moment, but I couldn’t seek at all. Even displaying was broken sometimes regardless of file types. I had none of these issues with MPV for the same files.
VLC is sometimes so unreliable for me, especially when seeking or frame-stepping, that it stops responding to playback commands entirely (although it pretends to still work) and I have to kill the zombie process before I can even re-open the file and try again.
There were lots of drama in the media player scene. Even "wm4" the original maintainer, who forked mplayer2 into mpv, is no longer with the project: he deleted his Github account and disappeared.
