When comparing feh vs MPV, the Slant community recommends MPV for most people. In the question“What are the best applications to use on a X11 window manager?” MPV is ranked 1st while feh is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose MPV is:
Everything MPV needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Loads up images extremely fast
Pro Minimalistic
Goes well with tiling window managers.
Pro Needs no additional codecs
Everything MPV needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed.
Pro Integrates with streaming services
When used with youtube-dl.
Pro Minimal interface
Click to open files and get Video with sound (and passthrough of codecs like DTS etc) for a perfect cinema experience. Works okay for many files.
Default window is not much more than a title bar - and if you drag/resize the window it resizes the video and leaves no empty areas. There is no visible control or display unless you use mouse/keyboard over the window.
This is the best player to use unless you're going for a media center (then use MPV based Plex Media Player to display and play the Plex Server library).
Pro Up to date
Always up to date, rapid development.
Pro Extremely responsive
Pro Caches livestreams
Intelligently caches livestreams and enables jumping within the cached stream.
Pro Fast
Cons
Con Junky rescaling by default in WMs
Fixable by running these commands:
echo "alias feh='feh --scale-down --image-bg black & disown" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bash_profile
But after entering those two commands for all users, feh works flawlessly, and is extremely responsive. Would definitely recommend.
Con Minimal theme support
Con Lack of a typical GUI can be jarring to some
The minimal interface comes at the cost of beginner-friendliness. You need to know keyboard shortcuts by heart, settings are set in text files, right-clicking won't bring up a menu, etc.