- VLC Media Player
- VLC is simple to use and supports a vast array of video formats. However, it is focused on playing one video at a time, which you select manually. Of course, you can open multiple VLC windows with different videos, but you have to arrange the windows and select the videos yourself.
- GridPlayer
- GridPlayer is similar to Madamiru. However, GridPlayer is designed for the user to manually select videos and curate playlists, whereas Madamiru is focused on shuffle play and dynamic selection.
- GridPlayer does have some shuffle functionality, but it's limited to other videos/audio within the same folder and does not seem to work with images.
- GridPlayer only has a single grid, whereas Madamiru supports multiple grids with different media sources.
On the author's system (Windows 11, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS w/ 16 cores @ 3.3 GHz, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile, 16 GB RAM), Madamiru performs better than VLC (3.0.18) and GridPlayer (0.5.3) with several 1080p videos playing at once:
- RAM usage:
- Madamiru takes about 100 MB per 1080p video.
- VLC and GridPlayer take about 200 MB per 1080p video.
- Slowdown with nothing else running on the system:
- Madamiru can handle 10x 1080p videos without any noticeable frame skipping. Frame skipping becomes obvious by 16x 1080p videos, but they do continue playing.
- GridPlayer sometimes has slowdown and hitching around 6~8x 1080p videos, but not always. At 9x 1080p videos, all videos visually freeze, although audio continues.
- VLC doesn't have any frame skipping or slowdown for the first 11x 1080p videos. At 12x 1080p videos, all videos visually freeze, although audio continues.