Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

I was going to make this a comparison with a fore drawn conclusion, but instead I'm just going to mention the deal breakers with VLC and the deal makers with MPlayer OSX Extended.

VLC

• Crashes when I load certain subtitles using Thai fonts (like all SSA files from ThaiSubtitles.com)
• Hangs sometimes when I'm playing a movie, pause it the try to exit or load a new movie, requiring me to kill the process.
• Bookmarks don't work.
• Has an option for always on top, but not always on top while playing.
• Always on top option causes Dock mouseover names to appear underneath the player.
• Postprocessing only has a quantitative quality ranking (1-6) and is not granular. 
• I hate VLC's icon.  Seriously, a pylon?  How is that related to multimedia?
  

MPlayer OSX Extended

• Handles all subtitles I've thrown at it so far.
• Has never hung or crashed on me.
• Option for always on top while playing.
• Always on top option allows Dock mouseover names to appear above the player
• Video postprocessing equalizer allows granular control over video settings.

Sure, MPlayer doesn't seem to have bookmarks or a functional playlist, but since I'm only using it for video the playlist function is moot.  Bookmarks would be really nice (as in, the ability to mark a timestamp in a particular file to resume from there later), but I can live without it.  The continued crashing/hanging of VLC is really what did me in, and I'm glad it did as MPlayer, so far at least, seems much nicer.  VLC also appears to have a ton more options, but none of them concern me right now.  Though I'm sure if I needed to change my output module to Color ASCII Art or add a Telnet interface to my video player, I'd switch back to VLC.  Until then, MPlayer is it.