When comparing xterm 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 xterm is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose MPV is:
When used with youtube-dl.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Xterm is a very lightweight terminal. It requires few resources, allowing it to run well even on lower-end machines.
Pro Used in almost every Linux distribution
If you master xterm, you won't have to learn another tty, since it is in almost every Linux distribution.
Pro Stable, well-tested
Pro Standard with X Window system
Xterm is installed as standard software with the X Window system, and is there even when installing other terminal emulators.
Pro Supports sixel images
Pro Shows full characters for wide fallback fonts
Many terminal emulators that deal with wider fallback fonts (i.e. double-wide characters in CJK fonts) truncate display of wide characters, show Unicode "missing glyph" characters, or simply fail to display the characters at all. XTerm is "smart" enough to simply take up the extra space needed to show such wide characters.
Pro In about 30 years, it had only one issue, and that was fixed quickly
Pro It is fast and responsive
See this.
Pro Many modern terminals emulate xterm
Many terminal applications, such as OS X's Terminal.app and iTerm2 (among others), all claim xterm or xterm- variants as their $TERM and aim for support of xterm's escape sequences. Many command-line applications will assume or even hard-code escape-sequences and behavior for xterm and those terminals emulating it.
Pro Configurable via Xresources
X Toolkit resources and xrdb predates what is currently called "theme". Although one needs to read man, mitigates most listed cons
Pro Integrates with streaming services
When used with youtube-dl.
Pro Needs no additional codecs
Everything MPV needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed.
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 No native transparency
Xterm does not natively support transparency (though it can be emulated if needs be).
Con Bad defaults
Very small default size. No way to know to how to configure size.
Con No tabs
Con It blinks
If it blinks for you too, you can try this: man xterm
and then press Shift+G.
Con Has few dependencies
Has dependencies like xbitmaps.
Con Historical source code
The stories behind terminal emulation beyond their classical representatives (of which xterm is simply the most long-lived) are somewhere inbetween subtly irritating to downright surreal.
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.
