I have become increasingly dissatisfied with VLC recently with its jerky playback and failure to play some format.
As for Scratch Play, have a look at the feature comparison - you need a license key, an account, and it doesn't play DVDs or Blu Ray discs. So much for being a universal, play everything, media player!
You folks are a little harsh, the ad-free version is $5, the ad version has very tiny ads. It does allow viewing of a lot of camera formats not available with the usual suspects (VLC). I suppose it's a little more useful to those in the movie business.
But should I assume that the player loads in a bunch of new codecs in order to play the wide variety of file types? If so, could some of these codecs interfere with codecs already installed on my PC?
Being able to select multiple clips at once and then being able to scrub through them on a timeline is a cool feature.
The ads in the freeware version would drive me crazy in short order.
I use the "Zoom" player that I loaded maybe 10 years ago. It seems to have a lot of flexibility even if I just use it to show video in a simple window.
I've just switched to Gom Player. Really good quality. Totally free, and no ads...but make sure you untick all the garbage it wants you to try on the install. ;-)
I've got Vegas running on a Surface Pro and it's really quite usable. Basically, whatever I can do on my laptop, I can do on the Surface Pro but I can take the Surface Pro virtually anywhere.