I use both VLC and MPC-HC on my machines. On the lower end computers I've noticed a large performance difference between the two: MPC-HC can crank out 720P on my 5year old laptops without hiccup, but VLC stutters all over the place.

I've heard some recommendations on how to configure VLC to be more responsive, but the fact remains MPC-HC performs better "out-of-the-box" than VLC.

I still keep VLC around for anything MPC-HC has trouble playing, however, as VLC truly does play just about anything if it is playable at all.

Of course, MPC-HC uses GPU while VLC didn't until this version.

Yeah, I use VLC strictly as a fallback. It's always MPC/mplayer first.

But VLC is invaluable for always showing something.

Do you have any of the sharpening shaders turned on in MPC? I'm not sure VLC has anything like that yet.

The issue here is not sharpening, but the colour output space, and yes MPC-HC uses shaders to do it, while VLC trusts the GPU so far.

And some nVidia GPUs have a wrong colourspace output, which makes the colour to be faded...

I've noticed a difference in quality also. I compared mplayer and vlc, mplayer looked definitely better.

Very unlikely.

Here MPC-HC, uses shaders and special renderers, technologies that VLC doesn't use on Windows.

But Mplayer and VLC use the same technologies, same decoders, and same output modules technology (xv, x11 and plain d3d)

nVidia driver?