Try mpv before dismissing it like that! They don't provide traditionnal ui controls, but there are still a few buttons, play, pause, next/previous, a seek bar,

Try mpv before dismissing it like that! They don't provide traditionnal ui controls, but there are still a few buttons, play, pause, next/previous, a seek bar, subtitles/audio track, etc. Everything is pretty barebones as it's running on the subtitle engine AFAIK. You generally drag and drop media to play it, or open files directly (or with the command line). These days I mostly use mpv, it ha great HW accel, wayland support, etc. I still use vlc for more involved cases like playing media off the network (its original use- case!), disk or webcams, etc. Though mpv can handle most of these too!