I am having endless problems with VLC player but also with alternatives.

VLC player has the advantage of being able to play ANYTHING! But it seems broken under KDE Plasma, both Neon and Kubuntu (20.04!) I figured the 20.04 rebasing would fix things so I was waiting for that until I hit the same trouble under Kubuntu 20.04, which is:

1. VLC player will play but does not seem to use any hardware decoding and so struggles to play any high quality video on my minimal n2840 laptop while other players such as MPV and SMplayer hand such well.

2. Worse, VLC player goes zombie. It frequently does not close properly and lies around in memory and has to be KILLED! Not closed, but killed! This has caused me frequent trouble with media playback to students. (I run a private tuition business.) I run Neon on five laptops and have VLC problems with ALL of them and I am having to send staff out to site now to tecah using Neon and they do not know how KILL processes.

MPV handles any video which is good but is missing a load of functionality. SMplayer does not have the problems of VLC player but does not play half my video material! I only get audio.

I kind of need the functionality of VLC player especially with endless Zoom classes but I am finding the same zombie VLC problems on this 2011 Macbook pro running Kubuntu 20.04! I even do screen captures of anime for pictures for younger students to write stories from, to give an example.

Laptop: Asus X200M N2840, 2GB RAm running KDE Neon User edition among others using Neon LTS and user edition!
Macbook Pro 2011 edition, 4GB RAM, 1st Gen i7, Kubuntu 20.04.

Help appreciated because this is weird and I thought would be fixed in a rebase.
Many thanks.

Yes VLC playeer goes Zombie in Neon, but you can also visit for best solar panel services - https://solarpanelcostprice.com.au/