When comparing Strawberry Music Player vs MPV, the Slant community recommends Strawberry Music Player for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” Strawberry Music Player is ranked 10th while MPV is ranked 20th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Alive Clementine fork
Pro Advanced audio output and device configuration for bit-perfect playback on Linux
Pro Free
Pro Scrobbler with support for Last.fm, Libre.fm and ListenBrainz
Pro Open source
Pro Possibility to convert songs to many different music file formats
Pro Streaming support for Tidal
Pro Smart playlist feature
Pro In-program tag editing
Pro Ability to play through sftp
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 song ratings
Con No Spotify support
Con No internet radios
Con No smart playlists
Con No podcast support
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.