Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

by Bluestein • 2 years ago

1113 559 2 years ago

The best media player available on linux. The worst GUI (none) out of the box. Bearable after tinkering a bit with configs.

Bluestein11• 2 years ago

The best media player available on linux

Strong clam, this ...

PS. For the controversy: Please note I am not disputing the claim - particularly when many claim this is the best player on any platform, not just Linux.-

pengaru2• 2 years ago

Strong clam, this ...

What's better?

vocx2tx2• 2 years ago

The worst GUI (none) out of the box.

That's funny, for me that's exactly the best GUI out of the box. I actually did some tinkering to reduce the GUI parts even more, and added more keyboard shortcuts.

sgc• 2 years ago

I use SMPlayer as a front end for mpv (you can select mplayer or mpv as backend). Not sure if that is common or even a good idea. But I am generally happy with it.

Glyptodon• 2 years ago

That's funny. SMPlayer was my preferred MPlayer front end before I switched to MPV years ago. And I've never really felt like I needed more GUI for MPV.

quohort• 2 years ago

try celluloid https://github.com/celluloid-player/celluloid

globular-toast4• 2 years ago

It does have a GUI in the form of video overlays. For me it's perfect. By default it just shows the video which is both necessary and sufficient.

w4rh4wk52• 2 years ago

Is this worth a look when you are pretty happy with VLC already?

baal80spam• 2 years ago

Yes, it is. I don't understand the cult of VLC to be honest. There are better media players, at least on Windows.

djbusby2• 2 years ago

We love VLC because it plays anything, everytime.

And has done this, for a long time, since times when other players struggled.

Maybe it's not the "Best" - it is still the goodest.

blooalien• 2 years ago

VLC plays pretty much any media file from pretty much anywhere it can be stored, and it's got a pretty standard interface, so folks find it easy to understand how to operate it. That's it. No real "cult" situation there. Just an app that does it's job well. Same is true of mpv, but some people will prefer it (as I do) because it's lightweight and clean and quick (and all the stuff people also like about VLC).

w4rh4wk52• 2 years ago

I do use MPC-HC on Windows, but it's no longer under development :'( IIRC it can't do AV1.

zeppelin101• 2 years ago

I'd say there are a few aspects that make VLC an easy, common choice: 1) it has incredibly extensive functionality (even if MPV has more capabilities, with VLC, it's all available through menus/GUI - no need to memorize any commands) 2) handles any files you throw at it EVERY time - out of the box. Throughout the years, VLC has been the only player which didn't choke on ANY file I threw at it. 3) It's multiplatform and works (in my experience) equally well on Windows, Linux, and MacOS - OUT OF THE BOX! Even on Android, where I normally prefer using MX Player Pro (bc it has a slightly nicer UI/UX), it was able to handle video files where the audio was in the DTS format. MX Player Pro required the installation of codecs to make the audio work. 4) It's been around forever, so if you want to look up any info related to it, you're sure to find it more easily than for any other player.

All that said, VLC is not always my video player of choice. On Windows, I typically prefer PotPlayer and MPC-BE. On MacOS - IINA. On Android - MX Player Pro. But I always keep it installed on all those platforms because I know that I can fall back to it reliably at a moment's notice and it will simply work.

Additionally, with regard to MPV, where I think it makes the most sense is for the highly discerning user who wants to tweak the rendering of video in a specific way. I think anime fans really like it a lot (I'd imagine they upscale or improve the image quality in very subjective, specific ways, though I didn't investigate this in detail). The other good use case is when you have somewhat limited hardware and you want the most efficient video player application. That is perfectly valid, I suppose, but I think for most people, whatever hardware they're playing a video file on is likely more than capable of running with a more 'unoptimized' video player app such as VLC.

wwalexander• 2 years ago

mpv has less UI affordances than VLC, but it’s very full-featured and configurable. It’s kind of like the ffmpeg to VLC’s Handbrake.

Of course, if you really want to be a purist you could use ffplay.

whyoh• 2 years ago

I switched from VLC to mpv. Mpv loads quicker and is more (CPU) efficient. Besides that, I like the minimalist UI.

I think it's worth it, but to get the most out of it, you'll need to customize it to your liking (tweaking the OSC, the keyboard shortcuts... you can do many things, but it requires some reading/searching).

heraldgeezer• 2 years ago

The famous VLC seeking corruption still happens to me. Happened on an i3 NUC HTPC recently. So using MPC-HC or MPV now depending.

daneel_w2• 2 years ago

In my opinion, yes. It's smaller, simpler, snappier, yet has everything and then some under the hood if one really needs this or that function.

miyuru• 2 years ago

I have a 4k SDR display and 4k HDR content on VLC looks washed out.

Mpv does not have that issue and converts 4k HDR to SDR in real-time and shows a colorful image.

jwells893• 2 years ago

This has always worked well for me, handling anything that’s thrown at it with ease.

Things may have changed since then, but when I first encountered the project several years ago it seemed like the thing that made this project stand out compared to other player projects was a big emphasis on correctness and accurate playback. There have files I’ve encountered that for example VLC will play with quirks (color reproduction is not quite right, etc) that mpv plays perfectly.

Bluestein11• 2 years ago

There have files I’ve encountered that for example VLC will play with quirks (color reproduction is not quite right, etc) that mpv plays perfectly.

Given how VLC is basically bulletproof and will play absolutely anything thrown at it - it's great to hear that mpv is up there ...

mixmastamyk6• 2 years ago

While great in general, vlc has many small seek/sync issues, and also seems to be in maintenance mode.

arp2424• 2 years ago

There have files I’ve encountered that for example VLC will play with quirks (color reproduction is not quite right, etc) that mpv plays perfectly.

This has long since been the case, even back in the MPlayer days in the early 2000s.

I'm not really sure why this is the case though, because I believe both largely rely on the same libraries for many codecs.

jwells893• 2 years ago

The explanation I’ve read in the past is that the difference lies in how VLC was initially focused on playback of video streamed over a network (hence the name Video LAN Client), which was generally more rocky a couple decades ago when the quality and bandwidth of the average connection was lower and the only routes between the client and server could be highly indirect or routed through weak nodes.

In that environment, playing at all without constantly dropping out or buffering is the goal, which is more achievable when fudging accuracy/correctness (which wouldn’t have been possible anyway).

Not sure how true that is though, it’s not something I’ve ever verified.

loeg10• 2 years ago

Hm, I've had (significant) issues with color representation playing back "HDR" media in mpv.

jwells893• 2 years ago

Not something I have experience with so can’t speak to that.

SSLy7• 2 years ago

was the material purple-green by chance?

adrian_b6• 2 years ago

Then you must have not used "mpv --vo=gpu-next".

Playing HDR and Dolby Vision encoded movies has been solved a long time ago in mpv, but they usually need the option shown above, which may not be the default on your system.

There are plenty of additional options in mpv that provide a finer control of how HDR colors are handled.

While playing a movie with mpv, press "I", so that mpv will display the information it has about the color space supported by your display and the color space used in the movie, which will allow you to verify if they are correct.

ailurooo• 2 years ago

i used to be able to go frame by frame with quicktime.. is there any modern video player that can actually do this?

thegeomaster2• 2 years ago

mpv does it! Period key (.) for next frame, comma (,) for previous. Super handy.

amlib2• 2 years ago

You can also hold those keys to play normally at the speed set with [ and ], so you can actually play the video in reverse and slow motion or whatever. Be aware that it's usually very intensive on cpu time (and maybe gpu decoding if applicable) since it has to usually go back a whole keyframe and compute all frames between while doing that, which may result in less than smooth playback on some videos.

entropie2• 2 years ago

This is a build in feature that mplayer had and mpv has aswell

. and , on keyboard go frame-to-frame, you can also up and downspeed with [ and ]

righthand• 2 years ago

Offtopic: vlc too

pferdone• 2 years ago

only next frame

entropie2• 2 years ago

I started to use it on linux a few years ago.

Now its on every device, even on my android tablet. Its perfect. Minimalistic, sane defaults, fast and just works.

It can even play natively over ssh. Its awesome

mpv sftp://mit@nyx/home/mit/Work/merged.mp4

Recently I needed a hotkey to rotate a video (which seems not like any player can easily do this; for mpv it was a 'r cycle_values video-rotate "90" "180" "270" "0"' in the in input.conf)

ivanjermakov2• 2 years ago

You can also play videos over http, many websites are supported, even YouTube:

    mpv <yt link>

vocx2tx2• 2 years ago

It uses yt-dlp as the download backend, so it works with anything that yt-dlp handles.

account4223• 2 years ago

I wish seeking word work better in this mode though. There is no reason seecon should freeze the player for minutes or indefinitely if the whole video can be downloaded from start to finish in seconds.

coppsilgold• 2 years ago

MPV has versatile scripts. For example you can cut and crop a video you are watching[1].

You can also introduce hotkeys for functionalities I have never seen in another player.

I use this (input.conf) sometimes to normalize the brightness and colors of a scene I'm watching (may not work when using hardware decoding):

    n vf toggle normalize=smoothing=100

Or rotate a video:

    Ctrl+r no-osd cycle-values video-rotate "90" "180" "270" "0"

[1] <https://github.com/occivink/mpv-scripts>

sweeter• 2 years ago

it also has a robust Lua scripting interface. I made a tool in Golang and Lua that allows Mpv to treat torrent files and magnet links as if they were http links. You can then stream a torrent directly.

People also don't realize that mpv not only has the ability to stream youtube videos but you can also search youtube on the CLI using mpv `mpv ytdl://ytsearch:query`

it can also play videos directly in the terminal using ascii, sixel or kitty image protocol (which is by far the highest quality)

abhishekjha• 2 years ago

Do you have an example?

Bluestein11• 2 years ago

I made a tool in Golang and Lua that allows Mpv to treat torrent files and magnet links as if they were http links. You can then stream a torrent directly.

Increíble. Consider putting this up somewhere folks can find it.-

it can also play videos directly in the terminal using ascii

Beats Star Wars over telnet :)

369548684892826• 2 years ago

There are lua hooks for play/pause/stop which is great for dimming room lights when the video starts.

tvshtr3• 2 years ago

it's crazy what you can do with its plugin scripts. MPV Android also supports them. I wrote one which turns off keyboard backlight and maxes brightness for HDR.

Also I'm using it to stream from Gerbera and to sync progress seamlessly between phone and PC.

Madeindjs• 2 years ago

I personally use MPV to play my music libraries containing mainly FLAC file and I wrote a plugin [1] using JS to send my listens to listenbrainz.org . It's damn simple, but it worked for the past few months!

[1] https://gist.github.com/madeindjs/f33225cf4d8fdc9f61e0fe3ebe...

blfr2• 2 years ago

The best media player in existence: superb minimalist UI, makes use of hardware accelaration, and just plays videos.

Its continued excellence is one of the reasons why I will probably remain a pirate for life. Streaming services spend millions on their players and don't come close.

FabHK7• 2 years ago

It seems to me that YouTube cripples their web player on purpose to "entice" you to download their app and upgrade to premium.

kjkjadksj• 2 years ago

All it does is entice me to avoid that and go to mpv

blfr2• 2 years ago

I have YouTube ReVanced, which is better than premium, which is still not as good as mpv.

Other services are strictly premium, paid affairs. Still not as good as mpv.

factorialboy• 2 years ago

Goat

etra0• 2 years ago

A fantastic mediaplayer, quite minimalistic and performant; it does what it's supposed to do!

Also has a fantastic commit where the author rants about locales: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02... worth a read for some chuckles.

beagle3• 2 years ago

A long, informative read, with some profanities. Highly recommended!

25 years ago, Spolsky wrote an article called “everything you wanted to know about Unicode and character sets”. Those of you who only lived in the post Unicode/UTF world might find that one informative as wel.

josephg3• 2 years ago

As strange as it is to say, I think avoiding problems like this might be one of the biggest productivity boosts from new languages like Go, Rust, Swift, etc. New ecosystems get a chance to “do over” the standard library and flush all the horrible legacy choices made before we knew better (locales, UTF16, etc).

The standard library in Zig, Go, Rust, and many others is miles ahead of the C standard library or posix api. That is reason enough to use them.

b112• 2 years ago

I'm skeptical that rust magically deals with, for example, character sets in 30 year old subtitle files, in a way that makes C seem inadequate.

Legacy compatibility has value.

account4223• 2 years ago

You can create/use a different string processing library without jumping to a completely different language.

efilife4• 2 years ago

All in all, I believe this proves that software developers as a whole and as a culture produce worse results than drug addicted butt fucked monkeys randomly hacking on typewriters while inhaling the fumes of a radioactive dumpster fire fueled by chinese platsic toys for children and Elton John/Justin Bieber crossover CDs for all eternity.

This was a great read

telegtron• 2 years ago

Loved the last paragraph of the long, justified rant. Hilarious:

“All in all, I believe this proves that software developers as a whole and as a culture produce worse results than drug addicted butt fucked monkeys randomly hacking on typewriters while inhaling the fumes of a radioactive dumpster fire fueled by chinese platsic toys for children and Elton John/Justin Bieber crossover CDs for all eternity.”

racked2• 2 years ago

I actually thought that last paragraph really undermined his case, because rather than substantiating like he did before, here he goes all out and just insults whoever he can think of; people who take it in the ass, greybeards, the Chinese, listeners of bland music...

I get him though. It's one of those writings from a foul mood. There was probably more going on in his life than some trouble dealing with locales.

thayne• 2 years ago

Imagine they had done this for certain other things. Like errno, with all the brokenness of the locale API.

They did. See for example time functions like localtime (and localtime_r) and tzset. It is admittedly locale adjacent, since it depends on the locale. But the time zone is also global state, so it is impossible to get the time in a different timezone with standard apis in multi-threaded portable (for posix) c code.

ptdorf• 2 years ago

Oh man! This was GOLD. Thanks.

yard2010• 2 years ago

Both C locales and wchar_t are shitfucked retarded legacy braindeath. If the C/POSIX standard committee had actually competent members, these would have been deprecated or removed long ago. (I mean, they managed to remove gets().) To justify this emotional outbreak potentially insulting to unknown persons, I will write a lot of text. Those not comfortable with toxic language should pretend this is a religious text.

What a legend.

codedokode• 2 years ago

Wow that comment is so educating. I guess I'll pay more attention now to standard functions I use in C code.

As for weirdness of C standard, I guess it is because they wanted to make it compatible with obscure proprietary platforms which might not even exist anymore.

Narushia3• 2 years ago

Worth noting that the author of that commit has not been associated with mpv development in years.

account4223• 2 years ago

Which is a shame because he's highly techinally competent.

kasabali• 2 years ago

in other words: they've kicked him out of his own project

thegeomaster2• 2 years ago

Joining the praise in this thread. Extremely reliable, fast, versatile, plays anything.

What I haven't seen mentioned is that it has 1- or 2-key keyboard shortcuts for almost everything, down to adjusting audio/video delay, subtitle size and offset, etc etc.

Once you've had the experience of adjusting the video just how you like it in 5 seconds with a series of keypresses without having to pause or disrupt the playback, you'll never want to go back.

Bluestein11• 2 years ago

It feels like the "Vim" of video players.-

palata• 2 years ago

I have been using mpv on Linux for like 10 years, it's simply amazing. No complaint, it just works.

Highly recommended.

iLemming• 2 years ago

What's cool that you can control it from your editor. It feels so nice managing YouTube video playback from Emacs, makes the note-taking so easy. elfeed-tube/elfeed-tube-fetch command lets you follow the transcript, while ignoring commercial bits. You can basically search through the text and play it from that point.

Agingcoder• 2 years ago

I didn’t know mplayer had been forked - this looks good to me. The primary reason why I used mplayer in the early 2000s was performance, both in terms of cpu and for lack of a better word ‘ smoothness ‘.

Basically all other players seemed to produce choppy videos ( including regular dvd players ) but mplayer didn’t ( and there was no motion interpolation). A friend of mine told me that mplayer was very accurate ( ie each frame lasted exactly the same duration), unlike most players on the market at the time and this explained the ‘smooth’ feeling.

Is this smoothness advantage still the case ? Would anyone know why it felt like that years ago ?

jcelerier5• 2 years ago

It's impossible for video players to be exactly accurate on normal monitors as most computer monitors don't handle movie frame rates. Either a frame gets skipped or elongated here and there, audio get resampled while video speed changes, etc. but there's definitely no silver bullet due to imperfect hardware not matching movie data formats

globular-toast4• 2 years ago

A lot of monitors these days support a kind of variable refresh rate like Freesync, so this should be possible. I've never actually got it to work with AMD, Linux and mpv, though.

loeg10• 2 years ago

It's relatively easy to get 100us level precision in CPU wait and mpv has 42ms (42,000us) to emit each frame (at 24fps). Nevermind that the monitor refresh is likely 60fps or better so each frame lasts for two+ monitor frames anyway. As long as it is consistent with each frame timing it should be very rare that a video frame is skipped or doubled up.

ac29• 2 years ago

48hz support seems pretty common.

Dylan168076• 2 years ago

120Hz screens are good enough here that I'd call them a silver bullet.

Dylan168076• 2 years ago

That can't be it. The circuit outputting video onto the wire triggers every 1/60th of a second, always the same duration.

There are situations where a player could time things so badly an entire frame has to be skipped, but that shouldn't happen often. And it should basically never happen on a regular DVD player. Any variations smaller than that disappear; whether a frame is ready 15ms before the deadline or 1ms before the deadline has no impact on the output.

lysace• 2 years ago

The primary reason that many of us still used MPlayer 20 years ago was that it did keyboard-based seeking really well. Nothing fancy, just look for the closest I-frame from the target time and move exactly there.

This art of quick seeking sort of got lost in time as the distance between UX people and people who understand H.264/265/etc in detail grew.

On Apple TV: At best it takes like 500 ms. At worst (the Max app), like 6000 ms.

MPlayer 20 years ago: 17 ms.

t-3• 2 years ago

My favorite thing about mpv is that it works under the console using framebuffer or drm. This can be used with configuration or scripting for image viewing, reading pdfs, and more without needing needing a lot of specialized tools, especially on non-linux platforms where graphical framebuffer tools aren't available. Tmux +(e)links + mpv can nearly completely obviate the need for a graphical environment and removes a lot of distracting things from view.

HPsquared• 2 years ago

Can it do smooth scrubbing (i.e. scrolling the progress bar)?

So many media players only show the key frames when scrubbing, making it a much less pleasant experience. Some mobile phones (Apple, Samsung) built-in media players seem to do it nicely, but I've never found a desktop media player that does it (VLC can't).

Probably would require a lot of extra decoding behind the scenes to extract all the frames, but worth it on a modern machine.

arp2424• 2 years ago

I don't really know what "scrubbing" is, but If you add "exact" to seek then it will use exact (non-keyframe) seeks. I think that's what you want? For example from my input.conf:

  Right            seek  5                    # In seconds; these are limited by keyframes
  Left             seek -5
  Shift+Right      seek  2 exact              # Smaller non-keyframe-limited, seeks with shift
  Shift+Left       seek -2 exact

Obviously, this is slower. Sometimes much slower (depending on the file).

latexr10• 2 years ago

Obviously, this is slower. Sometimes much slower (depending on the file).

Anecdotally, I’d change that “sometimes” to “often”. After years of using `exact` I finally stopped. It always felt that the wait was longer than going to the previous keyframe and rewatching the bit. Now if I could only find the perfect timing to go back, though.

Tmpod• 2 years ago

I don't believe the scrollwheel works to seek video, not sure, but MPV can go frame by frame. It's bound to the keyboard by default, but you can tweak your config and bind it to the scrollwheel.

LukeShu• 2 years ago

By default, mpv has vertical-scroll bound to volume and horizontal-scroll bound to scrubbing.

loeg10• 2 years ago

Outside of low bitrate streaming (youtube), most media has sufficient keyframes (I frames) that this distinction really doesn't matter. I don't know what mpv does, though.

Numerlor• 2 years ago

Yes, you have to turn it on through hr-seek=yes but then you can seek arbitrarily; great when I have to quickly step through something but not actually miss anything.

For the scrolling you can bind smoething like a .1s seek to the wheel

https://mpv.io/manual/master/#options-hr-seek

zamubafoo2• 2 years ago

Yes, though you do have to enable that. For me I tend to have it buffer the video. That way I can even seek backwards of web streams.

gioo2• 2 years ago

mpv is awesome. Shout-out, in no particular order, to:

- Seeds of Might/JySzE's base `mpv.conf`[1]

- uosc, a feature-rich but still minimalist UI[2]

- thumbfast, a fast thumbnailer to be used with uosc or another custom UI[3]

- Eisa01's SmartSkip, which allows to skip intros & more (audio-based)[4]

[1] Windows: https://gist.github.com/JySzE/db4149cad726b3b6955dca8d47a197..., macOS: https://gist.github.com/JySzE/34ee131da3974811a9469e1e3b7d4d... [2] https://github.com/tomasklaen/uosc [3] https://github.com/po5/thumbfast [4] https://github.com/Eisa01/mpv-scripts#smartskip

Cyph0n• 2 years ago

Not to take away from the work done on the plugin, but that’s a “basic” skip intro implementation.

To reliably be able to find intros/credits, you need to some non-local analysis - basically, you need to look for common chunks of audio across episodes in a season or entire show.

I wrote a CLI tool that can do this, albeit it’s not really “finished” and probably will never be. My initial goal was to use it to develop a Jellyfin plugin, but then I discovered that there was already such a plugin :)

https://github.com/aksiksi/needle

tbeseda• 2 years ago

If anyone is looking for the mpv core with a GUI on macOS, take a look at IINA https://github.com/iina/iina

radicality2• 2 years ago

It’s also the only way I can play HDR on macOS that looks decent (besides the native players like QuickLook/Quicktime/Photos).

I went into a rabbit hole recently playing iPhone-recorded Dolby hdr videos and tweaking all the various mpv settings but nothing really looked the same as in Photos. Iina is closer but also not exactly the same as the native players.

SSLy7• 2 years ago

infuse will also do good job, but it's using apple engine instead of ffmpeg, and it's paid for the good stuff https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infuse-video-player/id11362209...

galad87• 2 years ago

iPhone-recorded Dolby Vision videos uses an additional metadata called "Ambient Viewing Environment", and I don't think any third-party player supports it at the moment.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3145-h...

arch1t3cht3• 2 years ago

IINA has issues with color space conversions. I've heard that the specific issue is that it always (incorrectly) assumes a BT601 matrix for all videos, though I haven't verified it myself and cannot really right now. (I did verify its colors differing from stock mpv before writing this comment, though.) Various mpv wrappers exists, but for reasons like these stock mpv is the only fully reliable version.

yborg• 2 years ago

Huh, that explains it, I was wondering why I was having problems with some video that VLC would even playback correctly, I didn't think to try the stock mpv.

ksec2• 2 years ago

Have you filled a bug report about this?

morphle• 2 years ago

mpv is always faster than IINA, especially with 4K playback on older MacOS. mpv is near perfect

matricaria• 2 years ago

On macOS there is IINA which uses mpv under the hood but with a more native GUI.

Venn1• 2 years ago

If you're on Linux, don't forget to enable hardware acceleration by adding hwdec=auto to mpv.conf. Works with AMD/Intel/NVIDIA.

https://interfacinglinux.com/2024/01/10/hardware-acceleratio...

synergy20• 2 years ago

great to know this. thanks!

NavinF4• 2 years ago

Why would that be disabled by default?

diggan4• 2 years ago

Doesn't work on all systems, I presume. Better to default to something that definitely works everywhere.

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/a3baf94ab9f3b43a8027d...

Would be appropriate to have true/false/auto instead of auto==true though, so auto wouldn't use it unless it confirmed to be working.

crossroadsguy• 2 years ago

Because if you don't have to enable a flag or two in a text config file what's the fun of using Linux after all :)

varenc3• 2 years ago

In addition to what others have said, hardware decoding comes with other drawbacks. There’s occasionally decoding inaccuracies and there’s no support for most video filters (unless you’re using `auto-copy`)

krzys• 2 years ago

If you autodetect hw accel, even the slowest underpowered gpu might get returned, which could result in worstened user experience compared to just using cpu.

mzajc2• 2 years ago

It breaks on suspend-to-memory for my system with a nVIDIA GPU. I assume that's a driver problem, though.

shmerl4• 2 years ago

I do it like this:

    vo=gpu-next
    gpu-api=vulkan
    hwdec=vulkan
    gpu-context=waylandvk

You can replace hwdec=vulkan with hwdec=vaapi if Vulkan video doesn't work.

vladvasiliu• 2 years ago

Is there a reason why one would prefer vulkan over vaapi, or the other way round?

troad• 2 years ago

Huh. Apparently I've been watching videos on mpv for years without HW acceleration. Good thing I read this; thanks!

nijave• 2 years ago

Not sure why but I've had lots of issues with worse performance (lagging/stuttering) on Fedora (I think kernel 6.10) with a Vega 64. Every year or so I'll give it a try and it just won't work well and I give up again.

steelframe• 2 years ago

Yeah, I just pacman-installed mpv and tried running it on a 4k video. My CPU fan immediately kicked on, and top showed multiple cores getting involved. Kept scrolling this HN post to learn about hwdec=auto. Coming from mplayer and vlc my immediate question is, "What tradeoffs are the maintainers trying to make by not making this the default?"

adamomada• 2 years ago

Mac users can get a very nice front end to mpv with https://iina.io

Bonus trivia: Plex Media Player uses mpv as the video player

causality02• 2 years ago

That is... not a glowing endorsement. I've had more bugs and player failures from Plex than any other media software I've ever used.

Larrikin• 2 years ago

Streaming or player errors? Plex has basically never failed to play any video I've ever given it, but a bad connection can totally ruin streaming. I wish they would implement pause and allow to buffer.

SSLy7• 2 years ago

plex uses terribly old build of mpv with questionable config

arch1t3cht3• 2 years ago

IINA has various issues that mpv does not have, in particular with color space conversions (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41278331 for a few more details)

darthShadow• 2 years ago

Adding onto this is Outplayer, which similarly uses MPV for its backend, for iOS & iPadOS.

tvshtr3• 2 years ago

MPV is slowly becoming the major embedable media player on the PC side. It's in a bunch of stuff and that's great.

pentagrama2• 2 years ago

Happy VLC user here, but might give this a try, I want to find a better UX with the player controls, like a way to pin the controls bar when full screen (it disappears after some seconds), a 10s forward/backwards control, bigger buttons, less bloated settings, less features that I don't use like radio and other stuff.

But one thing that confused me seeing that homepage is that it shows a player UI screenshot, but it says " mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line", isn't just for the command line right? I assume you can install it as an app and it has an UI like VLC. (I'm on the phone rn will check it on my PC later).

arp2424• 2 years ago

mpv has a UI for things like seeking forward and backward, displaying info, etc. But you typically start it like:

  % mpv file.mp4

That's what they mean.

It doesn't really have things such as "File → Open" like VLC has. At least not out of the box, but it's scriptable with Lua and there are scripts and even entire "alternative frontends" that can do this.

It can also be remote controlled via a socket; I built an audio player like this; works pretty well.

In general, if you want a "Windows-like" or "macOS-like" experience then VLC is pretty good. If you want a more "unix-beardy" experience then mpv is pretty good.

pentagrama2• 2 years ago

Thanks for your response. Understand. So MPV may not be for me, I don't know how to use a command line app, I remember have to use to fix an Ubuntu issue and the UX was painful to me.

btdmaster• 2 years ago

It does have a drag-and-drop window if you start it with `mpv --profile=pseudo-gui` (I think the same as its .desktop file)

anta40• 2 years ago

Ahhh.... sounds like tweaking vim/nvim (which is one of my daily tools).

Sure the possibility to tweak the UI is limitless, but at least there are minimum usable UI, like gvim (Windows, Linux) or macvim (macOS) which are easy to install.

lxgr2• 2 years ago

It doesn't really have things such as "File → Open" like VLC has.

Huh, it does for me (in the menu bar) on macOS! I guess that's platform-specific then?

SSLy7• 2 years ago

you can just drag-n-drop a file on top of the window and it'll promptly get played

foresto• 2 years ago

It's excellent with companion tools as well. For example...

Streamlink, for watching live streams without a web browser:

https://streamlink.github.io/

Syncplay, for remote movie parties:

https://syncplay.pl/about/syncplay/

amlib2• 2 years ago

My favorite feature of mpv so far is being able to apply CRT shaders in real time to content. This solution also handles properly downscaling HD videos into actual 240p buffers that then gets upscaled to your screen resolution by the shader.

https://i.imgur.com/akmgzxX.png

https://github.com/hhirtz/mpv-retro-shaders

shpx• 2 years ago

On my Macbook Air, mpv adds an orange tint to videos so I hate when I have to use it because it's the only player that can play a file I downloaded.

literallycancer5• 2 years ago

Do you have the Apple silicon version? The brew package is messed up somehow IIRC a the up to date version for Apple silicon doesn't have the graphical shortcuts (I don't remember what brew calls these), but the one that does is for the Intel CPUs.

lairv• 2 years ago

I use it to inspect video frames by frames, particularly being able to go back one frame. VLC doesn't support it, this thread about the feature is hilarious https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=120627

sergiotapia2• 2 years ago

i wonder why he's such an ass about it, and totally adamant that it's impossible when multiple players already do this fast. ego?

aaplok2• 2 years ago

He mentions in the thread that he had to delete posts offensive to the developers. Maybe that's why?

In fairness to him, he offers the posters an opportunity to propose a technical solution and responds to all the posts that do it. It is interesting that nobody in the thread went to check in the code of mpv, smplayer, etc. to see how it's done there. Surely this would be the best response to his request for technical suggestions?

mannyv2• 2 years ago

To do this well you need to keep the old frames around...or go back to the previous keyframe and re-render. That might be hard if your design is playback-optimized.

variadix• 2 years ago

I think technically he’s correct (I haven’t worked on media decoding code, but I understand how common video encoding formats work). If you have a long video with only a single key frame at the beginning then to step back you would need to, starting from the beginning of the video, decode every frame up to the previous frame you wanted to jump to in order to apply frame deltas, also assuming you have some sort of frame counter to determine when you’ve reached the target frame. In the worst case this does require a lot of compute, but this is an edge case if you primarily care about common video formats with normal encoding settings. I assume seeking backwards is also painfully slow on videos encoded in this manner, so why stepping back 1 frame is out of the question when compared to seeking backwards, I don’t fully understand, it must have something to do with precise frame counts being unavailable on some hardware decoders for some formats (and there being no good workaround) so you _may_ not actually go back 1 frame.

I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be supported for a set of formats with reasonable encoding/decoding settings, and provide some error message for other formats if a user attempts to step back, e.g. reverse frame stepping unavailable for current video due to format/encoding/decoding settings.

F3nd0• 2 years ago

From what I can see, he's neither an ass nor adamant that it's impossible. He claims it's impossible to universally support the jump within certain technical constraints (which VLC supposedly limits itself to).

The only time I saw him being unpleasant in the thread is when people ignored his explanations and acted very entitled. Correct me if I'm wrong on anything here, but VLC is an independent free software project developed in no small part by volunteers; they have every right to choose their technical direction and compromises, and it seemed the people insulting them were in no position to demand anything from them.

efilife4• 2 years ago

VLC is pretty bad and it shows the more you use it.

It doesn't let the audio clip/exceed safe volumes and always applies some sort of a limiter, even if it's disabled everywhere in the settings. Try using an EQ on a bass-heavy track and see that it's limited.

Try jumping back multiple times in a song at its beginning, and it will play in lower pitch.

darby_nine3• 2 years ago

VLC is pretty bad and it shows the more you use it.

Compared to what? Such a statement is meaningless without comparison.

user3939382• 2 years ago

That strikes me as such a strange statement, I’ve always considered it to be among the most impressive OSS projects out there. It tackles enormous complexity, works everywhere, and has a trove of a million hidden features. For example, I use it to headless play streams from CLI.

FabHK7• 2 years ago

I guess I don't want my video player to let audio exceed safe volumes...

Always42• 2 years ago

I have ran into this issue as well. I believe my solution was to use pot player but i am not sure if its open source

j1elo• 2 years ago

Wow those answers are indeed funny. I agree that as an OSS dev/maintainer, it's easy to fall on the vice of over-generalization and crusade for the perfect solution, and it feels that's exactly what happened there.

this feature is algorithmically impossible
You're just looking at one specific video, not the general problem.
is not generally possible.

As a fellow multimedia dev, man, who cares? Sometimes we forget that software ought to be useful, not hypothetical ideals of truth. Just implement the feature for those codecs that support it and which probably are in the 98% percentile of what users actually use, regardless of the damned "general case".

Or accept and announce shamelessly that you don't have either the knowledge or the development resources to tackle such a complex feature. But excuses about not being possible for absolutely every possible codec in a completely generic way is just denying that the world is just a chaotic and dirty place where things are not ideal nor perfect. Just give your users a real-world solution (or rejection).

ziml772• 2 years ago

I notice a lot of devs try to deny the chaos of the world. It's almost like the code is where they go to hide from things that can't be cleanly and unambiguously expressed.

I don't know how they get away with that though. In the coding work that I do, I'm constantly dealing with rules that have exceptions on top of exceptions. I just need to special-case some things, because the alternative is not delivering what the business needs.

upon_drumhead• 2 years ago

But excuses about not being possible for absolutely every possible codec in a completely generic way is just denying that the world is just a chaotic and dirty place where things are not ideal nor perfect.

It's also not consistently applied. VLC will happily let you jump around in the videos, so his claim that the only way to do it is to play the video as fast as possible from the start of the video just doesn't jive with what is already there.

sebastos2• 2 years ago

Disagree!

VLC is what it is today because the authors understood video standards enough to make the _right_ abstractions that could generalize to ~every video format ever. That is no easy task. Video container standards are utterly perverse, and seem to delight in stomping over even the most innocent intuitions about what you would expect to find in a stream of bits that purports to contain "video". They often refuse to make even basic promises, like "the first frame's timestamp starts at 0" or "every parcel of data has a timestamp". Seemingly reasonable ideas that a neophyte might propose, like "suppose we store the video's framerate-" must be immediately interrupted with "you FOOL, there IS no framerate, nothing can be certain, this video might not even have frames, it might in fact be an interactive gift basket experience merely PRETENDING to be an mp4-". That's just the nature of the beast.

A playback architecture that can wrangle all of that cruelty into a consistent experience was hard won. Of course they're not eager to throw new features into the mix that will pollute that mental model, and suddenly introduce thousands of codec-vs-player-feature checks that were heretofore ruled out in principle. At a certain point, the architecture is sacred, and it's the only thing making VLC maintainable. If a feature doesn't work for everything, it doesn't work.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

Sometimes we forget that software ought to be useful, not hypothetical ideals of truth.

I've long since come to the understanding that if I want software that are useful, I must go and pay for it. Commercial software exist to make money, and to make money they must be useful.

If I want software that are hypothetical ideals of truth, I go and shitpost at the nearest neckbeard communion. Free-beer software exist to satisfy a man's desire to display his voluminous beard, everything else is tertiary.

DonHopkins7• 2 years ago

"I'll be waiting for your patch. Surely you're not as lazy and incompetent as the existing volunteer developers."- Rémi Denis-Courmont

I see Rémi Denis-Courmont's arrogant attitude and disrespect for users and developers hasn't improved in all these years. And neither has VLC's spectacularly awful UI. Coincidence, or cause and effect?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573499

DonHopkins on Feb 5, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech comp...

VLC's UI sucks so terribly, it's like they went WAY out of their way to make it sucks on purpose, and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there are any problems or ever consider fixing them. One example of many [1]:

Type CMD-E (on Mac, or whatever the equivalent is on Windows) to get the video effects window.

Select "Geometry". Now check "Magnification/Zoom".

Notice how you get a picture-in-picture in the upper left corner, with a white rectangle showing the zoomed area, that you can move around by clicking. But if you press and hold, it also drags the entire windows (on a Mac -- I haven't tried on Windows -- VLC's UI and behavior on Mac and Windows diverges widely so I won't try to predict what happens).

Now look underneath the picture-in-picture and notices some ugly upper case pixelated text that says "VLC ZOOM HIDE". See how it's jaggy and rendered at the resolution of the movie you're playing itself, not at screen in a full resolution overlay with readable text?

Now look at the triangle with a jaggy curved hypotenuse below the jaggy words. That is the zoom "slider" (which also drags the window when you drag the mouse, so it's more like a clicker than a slider). See how it gets narrower and narrower in a succession of jaggy stair-step chunks, until it's merely one jaggy pixel wide? Well guess what: the TARGET AREA also gets narrow to match the width of the slider, so it's almost impossible to click on the bottom of the slider, to select the larger zoom sizes! Since the zoom slider is not very tall and its pixels fat and jaggy, you don't have fine grained access to very many zoom sizes at all, either. The zoom pixel steps are much bigger than screen pixels, depending on the video resolution!

What possible purpose could that serve? Why would any user guess that the lower narrow part of the slider represents a wider zoom showing a bigger rectangle over the picture-in-picture, while the top wider part of the slider represents a tighter zoom showing a smaller rectangle over the picture-in-picture? And what slider have you ever used that gets narrower from top to bottom, with a jaggy curve, and an impossibly narrow hard to click target area at the bottom?

This single facet of VLC's terrible UI deserves to be front and center in the User Interface Hall of Shame [2] -- it's even worse than Apple's infamous schizophrenically skeuomorphic QuickTime 4.0 player [3], from 1999! The latest version of VLC in 2017 is still much worse than the shameful QuickTime player was 18 years ago!

Who could have possibly gone so far out of their way to design and implement such a terrible user interface on purpose, then smugly brushed off and ignored 16 years of bug reports and cries for help on the VLC message boards, without harboring a malicious contempt for their users?

That's not even the worst of it. Now check "Transform" and pick one of the transforms like "Rotate by 90 degrees". Guess what? The magnification interface itself is rotated 90 degrees, because it's drawn on the video before it's rotated, so now it appears at the top right of the screen, rotated 90 degrees itself.

And guess what else? The mouse clicks are not even transformed properly, so clicking on the magnification interfaces does NOTHING, rendering it completely useless! Depending on the aspect ratio of the video, you can't even click in the upper left corner where it USED to be and SHOULD still be to operate it, because it is clipped off the right edge of the window.

Are those ugly cosmetic and impossible usability problems not bad enough for you? Then make a playlist with one item. Select "Repeat" mode. Play the movie. Now go to the finder and remove, rename or move the movie you're playing, or just unplug the USB stick containing the video. Not an uncommon occurrence, right? Now VLC will hang up, consuming 100% of the CPU time, often times seizing up the entire Mac, turning on the fan, locking out all user input, and forcing you to reboot! This happens to me all the time.

These bugs have been around for years. The more you fiddle around with it, testing out the edge cases and trying to combine various poorly designed and implemented features, the more bugs you find.

File a bug report, they say. People report these problems again and again. The developers just ignore them and brush them off. I've tried reporting these and other bugs, describing them in meticulous detail, which is frustrating because once I start writing step-by-step instructions to reproduce one problem, I keep finding more and more problems, each worse than the last, and then they just brush me off and ignore my bug reports too.

VLC's user interface is maliciously terrible in so many ways, the developers are careless and arrogant towards their users, and there's no hope of the developers ever changing their ways, acknowledging the problems, and improving it. Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV cartoon porn [4] [5].

[1] http://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV

[2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php

[3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

[4] https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html

FOR ANIME FANS

New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.

[5] https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=208770

Now, if you are an AMV (Anime Music Video) creator and want to edit the video directly, the MKV is your best friend since it's a lossless video-content container due to the fact that you will find yourself adding effects to the video frames/audio. In this case you will want to lose as little as possible in your video, so MKV compression best suits.

TOPIC ANSWER: The reason why MKV is popular for anime is because of it's noted lossless compression. Anime show creators most likely notice this fact and use it to contain their video frames and audio tracks for maximum quality. - it has nothing to do with HD.

derefr on Feb 5, 2017 [–]

Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV cartoon porn Mind you, FOSS is contributed to by people scratching their own itch. It's not so much that VLC has a lot of otaku developers; it's that a lot of people who watch (or subtitle) "AMV cartoon porn" see a problem with, or missing feature in, VLC, and think "I'm a programmer; I can fix that", and dash off one-off patches.

DonHopkins on Feb 6, 2017 | parent | next [–]

It just puzzles me that out of eight bullet points summarizing the new features in VLC 2.1.5, one of them was "FOR ANIME FANS" and none of them were "FOR USABILITY". It's the contempt and dismissal that the developers show to usability bug reports when they brush them off and ignore them, which bewilders and frustrates me. Go read some of the discussion group postings and bug reports over the many years, and you will see what I mean. It's a deeply entrenched pattern of behavior.

majkinetor on Feb 6, 2017 | parent | prev [–]

Its very hard to contribute patch to foss tool in general. There is no substitution for agile development team.

DonHopkins on Feb 6, 2017 | root | parent [–]

Oh I certainly wanted to contribute to the VLC project and integrate it into my own projects, but after having my concerns that I wrote up in great detail flippantly dismissed with such contempt, and seeing how the exact same thing happened to other users reporting legitimate longstanding bugs who were brushed off and ignored over so many years, I had no interest in contributing after that. It's fortunate that not every open source project suffers from such arrogant developers as VLC.

hatsunearu2• 2 years ago

Wonder how mpv deals with backwards step in infinite GOP/long GOP situations.

darby_nine3• 2 years ago

Like said earlier codec frame access is very problematic

Wow. Talk about not understanding the user.

justin662• 2 years ago

The developer responds to a comment:

But many players are able to do it for years.

with:

If it's so easy, why are you not doing it?

He's not just a butthole, he's a stereotypical open source developer butthole. On the other hand, if he worked for Microsoft, he'd be claiming that it takes a PhD to do it...

Levitating2• 2 years ago

In his defense, some commenters had a pretty rude attitude. You cannot demand developers to implement a feature or call them out on being lazy.

Nobody even offered to research how other players accomplish this. They just expect that because they believe it can be done someome should do the work for them.

At least Remi was actually andering questions on the forums.

This attitude towards open source maintainers is what's getting them all burned out.

The_Colonel• 2 years ago

The dev said they are happy to accept patch for this feature. Remember that you're not entitled to demand new features, as a (non-paying) user, you can't allocate dev's time to work on what you want.

thrdbndndn3• 2 years ago

You need to send an email to the admin and ask for approval in order to register an account on VLC website to report bugs.

This says it all.

anigbrowl3• 2 years ago

I'll be happy to switch over to MPV for this alone. VLC is great in general, but lacking some basic features. This sort of 'not possible' nonsense from developers is always a sign of a project's long-term decline.

mnsc4• 2 years ago

"not possible" is as much nonsense as "everything is possible". Is it possible for vlc to implement support for rendering and editing common 3d object models? Yes! But is it possible given what vlc was set out to do? No!

I think another sign of a projects long term decline is developers that are all too happy to expand the scope of the project. If that happens I just know that down the line the feature I started using the software because of is down prioritized due to the "need of supporting markdown in the email editor" when the software started as a MSN chat archiver.

varenc3• 2 years ago

Slightly related: mpv also has excellent backward playing capability! Of course video encodings aren’t optimized for this so it does some work to make the performance reasonable.

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

You can press e to frame advance. Can't go back though.

romanows• 2 years ago

I was hoping that mpv would work a bit better than vlc for sending video to chromecast, but unfortunately, another similarly amusing thread: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/177

latexr10• 2 years ago

Far from me to defend the whole mpv team[1], but the dev in that thread is a ghost (deleted user). I remember them, they were always rude and eventually got kicked out of the project and loudly complained about “being removed from the project [they] created”. I never found the exact reason why, though I can’t help but think the attitude had something to do with it.

[1] Some are quite nice and competent. Others are exceedingly rude and will e.g. jump on an issue that had thus far been entirely cordial just to, without provocation, insult users for using whatever OS they don’t like.

sureIy4• 2 years ago

Ghost is my soulmate. As a OSS maintainer, I feel that.

Not a week goes by without some random dude coming to my repos expecting I implement whatever they ask, or else be called a dick.

Particularly: you don’t have to use mpv if it doesn’t do what you want it to do, and don’t bust my ** because of it.

throwaway117472• 2 years ago

It's a former developer that's no longer affiliated with the project since 2021 or thereabouts. They did not part on good terms because he behaved in the same way towards other mpv developers, "my way or the highway".

So you probably shouldn't let anything that old sour your opinion on the current mpv.

(I don't belong to either side, just have been using the player since its inception.)

account4223• 2 years ago

This isn't remotely similar. Nowhere is the MPV developer ( wm4) being unreasonable in that thread. And while wm4 was not exactly known for interpersonal skills, he was rarely wrong unlike Remi in this case in claiming things to be impossbile when they are not.

a-dub• 2 years ago

i can imagine how it would be annoying in a system that is designed to process live streams as opposed to one that is designed to have random access to the stream via persistent storage.

if the target frame were not an i frame, you'd have to dig up the preceding i frame and replay everything up to the target frame. pretty easy for random access, not so much for a monotonic stream of frames.

plq• 2 years ago

Quote from that thread:

It can be added in theory, but there would be certain problems. Like said earlier codec frame access is very problematic (I, P and B frames), because in worst case scenario you have to decode about 248 sequential Full HD H.264 frames before you can get previous image (so there will be major LAG).

Having used the 'previous frame' feature in mpv, I suspect this is exactly how it's implemented.

breck• 2 years ago

This thread is amazing. Thanks for pointing it out.

What's lovely is that it is indeed possible, but not trivial, and you can see Remi is sort of baiting to catch smart talented programmers to the project.

You can see the patience and long term horizon needed to lead a volunteer open source project. Time to study VLC more.

Thanks!

thiht4• 2 years ago

Yeah he’s probably playing 5d chess, not just being an ass

account4223• 2 years ago

I don't see Remi's behavior in that thread attracting more developers than it pushes away.

PUSH_AX• 2 years ago

That guy sounds like a nightmare to work with.

IndySun• 2 years ago

That is one funny, informative read! Although, the first response, I feel, aught to have been 'non'. I can hear it now.

hatsunearu2• 2 years ago

What really sucks ass is mpv doesn't have features to show what the frame count of the frame you're looking at is.

throwaway20375• 2 years ago

Wow, reading this now very old discussion makes me cringe a little bit when I see dingers like these:

    > If you think it is easy, VLC is open-source: you are welcome to provide the easy patch. Somehow, I won't be holding my breath.

    > If it's so easy, why are you not doing it? Talk is cheap.

    > I'll be waiting for your patch. Surely you're not as lazy and incompetent as the existing volunteer developers.

    > And I don't take moral lesson from an hypocrit who feels like they can demand work from "toxic" volunteers and even state that they are not there to do any actual work.

There are so many (passive-)aggressive comments in that discussion. This is the primary reason why I never get involved with open source projects any more. The discussions are so toxic. I always wind up feeling terrible about myself after "trying to help" an open source project by reporting bugs or submitting patches to fix bugs.

account4223• 2 years ago

That was an interesting read.

- Great example of letting perfect be the enemy of good.

- Hilarious example of a developer making claims of what users want while ignoring the users in front of him.

- Shows how CoCs can be and often end up being used in toxic ways.

Is Remi the sole active developer or why did no other dev chime in to defuse the discussion?

I'm all for open source projects sticking to their vision and standing up to unreasonable user demands but it really is in your own best interest as a developer to learn to communicate effectively - and keep an open mind for feature requests that sound unreasonable to you and first make sure if you understand what is being asked for.

lights0123• 2 years ago

libmpv is also amazing. It's a simple C API that allows you to render each frame into an OpenGL framebuffer or pixel array, using a fully hardware-accelerated path for the former.

preisschild• 2 years ago

Love the use of one of the best Kubrick scenes IMO on the main site

YuccaGloriosa• 2 years ago

I added a hotkeys for change subtitles scale...well worth it

xwall• 2 years ago

Does anyone here know more features that MPV offers that VLC and MPC don't, considering they are all free and open-source?

rafaelgoncalves2• 2 years ago

Like anothers comments said, mpv has some awesome native hw decoding and you can play frame by frame, previous and next, vlc you can only do next [1] (awesome thread btw). :) And mpc/mpc-hc is discontinued [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41278203 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277818

SirMaster2• 2 years ago

mpc-hc is not discontinued.

https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc

Plus there is also mpc-be which is actively developed and pretty much the same.

https://github.com/Aleksoid1978/MPC-BE

dither8• 2 years ago

In my input.conf file I've created filter keyboard shortcuts:

  F1 af toggle "acompressor=ratio=4,loudnorm"
  F2 vf toggle "bwdif"

First one is an alright dynamic range compressor (makes the loud parts quieter and quieter parts loud). Second is a deinterlace at default settings. These are standard ffmpeg filters and mpv let's you turn these on in real time.

azizLIGHT-• 2 years ago

I amalgamated some audio filters to cycle through on a F1 press

- Loudness Normalization: "lavfi=[loudnorm=i=-14.0:lra=13.0:tp=-1.0]"

- Loudness Normalization + Mild Tinnitus Filter: "lavfi=[loudnorm=i=-14.0:lra=13.0:tp=-1.0,equalizer=f=6000:width_type=o:w=2:g=-20]"

- Mild Tinnitus Filter: "equalizer=f=6000:width_type=o:w=2:g=-20"

- Aggressive Tinnitus Filter: "equalizer=f=4000:width_type=q:w=1:g=-30,equalizer=f=6000:width_type=q:w=1:g=-30,equalizer=f=8000:width_type=q:w=1:g=-30"

- Bass Reduction: "bass=f=210:g=-17.7"

- Alternative Loudness Normalization: "loudnorm=linear=no"

- Dynamic Audio Normalization: "dynaudnorm=s=0"

- None: ""

F1 cycle-values af "lavfi=[loudnorm=i=-14.0:lra=13.0:tp=-1.0]" "lavfi=[loudnorm=i=-14.0:lra=13.0:tp=-1.0,equalizer=f=6000:width_type=o:w=2:g=-20]" "equalizer=f=6000:width_type=o:w=2:g=-20" "equalizer=f=4000:width_type=q:w=1:g=-30,equalizer=f=6000:width_type=q:w=1:g=-30,equalizer=f=8000:width_type=q:w=1:g=-30" "bass=f=210:g=-17.7" "loudnorm=linear=no" "dynaudnorm=s=0" ""

https://reddit.com/r/mpv/comments/xf8p9t/movie_volume_compre...

https://pastebin.pl/view/2f48e64c

Klover• 2 years ago

Instead of using 2 compressors in tandem, it might be better to set the very good one to your preference:

  F1 af toggle "loudnorm=I=-14:LRA=1:tp=-1:linear=false:dual_mono=true"

The I=-14 is the target 'volume', which makes it as loud as YouTube and Spotify, setting it to -23 will be much quieter, but gives you more dynamic range. LRA=1 goes from 1-50, with 1 being the most compressing which is probably what you want in this case. TP=-1 sets the limiter to -1dB, which is plenty of clipping threshold because loudnorm calls the resampler for 192kHz before working in dynamic mode. Linear=false because we use dynamic mode here and cannot even use linear mode. Dual_mono=true makes -14 as loud for mono as stereo sources.

Since loudnorm adjusts volumes and sets limits for you, you can forego mpv's audio downmixing if your target is stereo and simply put all your channels together before bringing them to loudnorm:

  F1 af toggle "pan=stereo|c0=FC+LFE+FL+BL+SL|c1=FC+LFE+FR+BR+SR,loudnorm=I=-14:LRA=1:tp=-1:linear=false:dual_mono=true"

dbcooper• 2 years ago

What are the best upscalers for MPV these days?

chungy3• 2 years ago

I default on ewa_lanczossharp; it does pretty well at upscaling normal SD video to modern resolutions.

I also often use oversample, for video game footage and whatnot where I want all the pixels to be not blurry.

KenHV• 2 years ago

profile=high-quality

loeg10• 2 years ago

mpv is the most active fork/evolution of the historical "mplayer" player of yesteryear. I've been using this program in one form or another for probably 20 years now. It's great; highly recommend.

newsclues• 2 years ago

I started using it after the latest Ubuntu version broke VLC, and am quite pleased

devwastaken• 2 years ago

The only player that has proper HDR playback support and proper HDR to SDR conversion plus GPU accel.

FrostKiwi4• 2 years ago

Cannot recommend --video-sync=display-resample enough. The one reason I use mpv on every OS over every other media player

navigate8310• 2 years ago

Can you explain what it does?

shmerl4• 2 years ago

Resample audio to match the video. This mode will also try to adjust audio speed to compensate for other drift. (This means it will play the audio at a different speed every once in a while to reduce the A/V difference.)

I'm not sure what's the benefit of that is though.

FrostKiwi4• 2 years ago

It's makes so the frame pacing fits the display refresh rate, making viewing a lot more pleasant and smoother. Eg.: Your Screen is 60hz, but the video is 59.97hz, then there will be a dropped frame. `--video-sync=display-resample` speeds the video up by a tiny percentage to make every display refresh match a new video frame. The correction factor is recalculated every frame and can be viewed by pressing I. This makes way more difference that one would imagine and makes 60hz gameplay look hyper smooth, even though not much changed. Frame pacing really matters. Applies to very closely matching framerates or multiples of (eg. 60hz screen with 29.97hz video), not to bigger differences like 50hz vs 60hz.

Drawback: MPV will be forced to run at screen V-Sync, draining battery faster. If your screen is 60hz, but the video is 29.97hz, MPV will re-draw the screen at 60hz, instead of just 29.97hz, doubling GPU load.

literallycancer5• 2 years ago

Doesn't it already keep the audio in sync by default? What's the difference with this option?

FrostKiwi4• 2 years ago

lossolo• 2 years ago

Does anyone else have a problem with it on Mac when trying to open videos using the 'Open With' dialog in Finder? I see it start for a second, and then it just quits. It works properly from the command line

npteljes• 2 years ago

My default player is VLC, because it's a great generalist for video, audio and video inputs, but I appreciate mpv very much too. Especially useful on CPU limited devices, I get more performance out of it than any other player.

solegrammarian• 2 years ago

Licensed on a GNU General Public License (GPLv2+) except for the /video/out files which appear to be either unidentifiable or proprietary code rewritten from nVidia, and another unnamed company's repository.

opan5• 2 years ago

mpv is one of my favorite pieces of software, incredibly useful and high quality, enjoyable to use. Right up there with (neo)vim, openssh, tmux.

omeid2• 2 years ago

The MPV of images for linux is IMV: https://sr.ht/~exec64/imv/

kelvie• 2 years ago

with a couple of lines in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf, mpv is the mpv of image viewers:

image-display-duration=inf autofit-larger=100%x100%

slmjkdbtl• 2 years ago

Love the scripting system. I spend 100% my time to write scripts for mpv and vim and 0% for actual work.

Perroboc• 2 years ago

If using KDE, I recommend Haruna as a frontend. Really easy to use!

varenc3• 2 years ago

I absolutely love mpv. And if you have a Mac check out IINA. It’s just a relatively thin GUI over the mpv core.

dsp_person• 2 years ago

I love their section on how to embed mpv in other apps [1]. Too bad there's not an XEmbed equivalent for Wayland [2].

[1] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv-examples/blob/master/libmp...

[2] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/9654

feverzsj• 2 years ago

Libmpv also has a much better api than libvlc.

tobyhinloopen• 2 years ago

MPV can play stuff VLC can’t, and it’s HDR support is superior

gorgoiler• 2 years ago

This is an extremely venerable project, formerly known as mplayer. There are half a million commits going back to 2001, and that’s just from when the CVS repo was converted to Subversion.

streamlink and mpv on a fanless Minix z100 running Ubuntu was a nigh-on perfect Olympics experience.

https://streamlink.github.io/

https://www.minix.com.hk/products/z100-0db-fanless-n100-mini...

thrdbndndn3• 2 years ago

I don't think mplayer and mpv are the same thing. It forked mplayer (among others), but mplayer is still its own thing.

smeg_it• 2 years ago

I switch from mplayer to mpv some years ago but I don't remember when. I use it daily as my media center player.

ctenb2• 2 years ago

I love mpv. But when I pause and resume the video, the first few seconds are jittery. I've not encountered that on other players. Does anyone know why this is?

Aardwolf2• 2 years ago

For me I have that with VLC and MPV is the stable one (in Archlinux). In my experience, trying different sound output device or module settings sometimes fixes such issues (and usually pulseaudio is the laggy one)

ctenb2• 2 years ago

Both sound and video are stuttering for me, would that still be caused by audio issues?

Simon_ORourke• 2 years ago

Awesome, any open-source cross-platform media player is always welcome in my setup!

ho_schi• 2 years ago

You can use mpv on the framebuffer-terminal.

Pass the option —vo=drm and it works flawlessly with free drivers for AMD, Intel or Nvidia.

kinibha• 2 years ago

Using for last couple of years, its best.

ksdnjweusdnkl214• 2 years ago

It sounds stupid but the killer feature for me is possibility to have multiple subtitles visible, all easily configurable with a few keybinds (track, offset, position, size etc). No streaming service provides this, and they actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that.

cenamus• 2 years ago

Especially for things like language learning they are amazing, but services like Amazon show like two (English and the local language) out of the 30 something they have available. And I won't even go into the difference of subtitles and dubbing...

ksdnjweusdnkl214• 2 years ago

For language learning there are some scripts that allow you to hover words and show translations for them. I haven't used them myself with mpv, but I found that kind of tools to be invaluable on a browser when learning a language with a foreign script.

scbrg• 2 years ago

+1. This is a fantastic feature. I haven't even bothered learning the keybindings (perhaps I should), I just start with --sid1= and --sid2= and it works well enough.

Neither me nor my significant other are native English speakers, but we have different native languages. I'm comfortable enough with English, but like having English subtitles since I have a hard time with some dialects and occasionally just miss a word or two due to noisy audio. My SO likes having subtitles in their native language.

Being able to have multiple subtitles makes it possible for both of us to get the experience we like, at the cost of a little screen real estate. Well worth it.

ksdnjweusdnkl214• 2 years ago

They are not default keybinds, but like any configuration can be cycled or set at runtime. Actually I don't use the keybindings much directly since my default config usually is fine, but have a remote GUI to configure it when needed.

exikyut• 2 years ago

Depending on the aspect ratio of the video and playback viewport, you could move the subtitles into the potential black bar underneath.

If there is no black bar, you could get one of those long narrow LCDs off AliExpress, set up the driver, add it as an X display with the right positioning... and then drag the mpv window across that and the TV. Should work. Those little LCDs are just silly expensive though...

OscarDC• 2 years ago

actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that.

This may also be due to legal issues / restrictions in the contract they had with that content's right holders or subtitles providers.

ksdnjweusdnkl214• 2 years ago

They probably don't want to license them globally, because the expected usage is low. But surely this could be taken into account in the contract / negotiation. Anyway I guess I'm just not in the target audience. But that's what MPV is great for, it allows you to tweak it for that 0.1% use-case.

iwishiknewlisp2• 2 years ago

Mpv is great with subtitles. Not just being able to switch through subtitle tracks and configure positioning, but also being able to automatically find and play external subtitle files when playing a video. I wrote an article about this: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mpv-subtitles-automatic. Only issue I found is the documentation for what subtitle formats are supported is lacking. You have to look through ffmpeg code to actually find what formats are actuallly supported.

Additionally, https://subdl.com/ with https://github.com/alexanderwink/subdl is a great resource for finding and downloading subtitles from the comand line.

pahn• 2 years ago

Mpv is great! And also the only player I found to be externally controlable, e.g. through a hardware jog/shuttle or an Arduino. This might be outdated (from 2018), but for reference (me talking to myself ;): https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/53208/video...

cranberryturkey2• 2 years ago

For a web media platform checkout https://zymo.tv

_V_• 2 years ago

I switched to MPV years ago - for some reason VLC started to stutter when opening a file, which is quite annoying. It does not matter whether it is local ol remote file, format does not matter - every open and every seek will trigger this few-second long stutter.

MPV does not do this, so over the years I began to use it as my daily driver.

natrys2• 2 years ago

This is S tier software. I remember using this on a laptop with 2gb RAM years ago. The combo of mpv and youtube-dl could deal with large number of sites (not just youtube), when even the browser struggled.

Sporktacular• 2 years ago

I think youtube-dl is no longer under development. Any suggestions for an alternative?

mzajc2• 2 years ago

youtube-dl is still under development (last commit at the time of writing was 2 weeks ago), but there are forks with more features, such as yt-dlp.[1]

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

natrys2• 2 years ago

yt-dlp[1] has now taken on that mantle. I think mpv nowadays just recognises yt-dlp as the de facto alternative, but if yours doesn't then you can just put this in your mpv.conf:

    script-opts=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=yt-dlp

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

haunter• 2 years ago

No DVD or BD menu support as I've tried now

Narushia3• 2 years ago

Apparently there is partial support for it: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/14370#issuecomment-...

This should let you play a VIDEO_TS folder, ISO, or an actual disc… with the caveat that you need to figure out the coordinates of the menu yourself by using an external tool.

Thaxll2• 2 years ago

MPV is great for powerusers, for the vast majority of people just use VLC.

I used both over the year and there are still things that are really annoying in mpv:

- you can't render on a Chromecast

- opening a file that does not work does nothing, you don't know what's happening, is the file corrupted, is the codec not supported ??

- the no ui idea is nice for opening a single file, but then you go to the rabbithole of millions of settings / config to do anything more complicated, playlists? ( why can't I drag and drop on the window )

- it's hard to compile, so it's up to you to find up to date version on your distro

literallycancer5• 2 years ago

If your distro has outdated packages, that's a problem with your distro.

You can always just open files with a CLI if you want to see the error messages.

What do you mean can't drag and drop on a window? That's literally how you add subtitles or open a file if you opened mpv from the shortcut, rather than by opening a file.

Thaxll2• 2 years ago

None of the distro keeps package up to date with mpv. Only rolling one are probably updated.

Adding a file does not enqueued them, it just open it and play it right away.

zamubafoo2• 2 years ago

Never had to deal with your third point, I just open it via the CLI and it's pretty verbose regarding issues it encounters.

valenceelectron2• 2 years ago

- opening a file that does not work does nothing, you don't know what's happening, is the file corrupted, is the codec not supported ??

You could open the console to see errors. https://mpv.io/manual/master/#console

- the no ui idea is nice for opening a single file, but then you go to the rabbithole of millions of settings / config to do anything more complicated, playlists? ( why can't I drag and drop on the window )

I cannot relate to that. "ad-hoc" playlists or even adding more files while some are already playing works fine for me on macOS. There's a chance the built-in UI differs between operating systems, not sure.

- it's hard to compile, so it's up to you to find up to date version on your distro

I consider that hardly the fault of the mpv project. Other than that, there are usually third-party providers for mpv binaries.

thrusong• 2 years ago

mpv is a key part of my home theatre automation I wrote in PHP.

It runs on a Pi 4. PHP assembles playlists with a Dolby ad, a vintage dancing hot dog ad, trailers, and the feature. It runs mpv through proc_open.

It monitors the progress and controls mpv through a socket to know when to dim or raise the lights, open or close the curtain, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7YEVGWJjvI

Bluestein11• 2 years ago

Dolby ad, a vintage dancing hot dog ad, trailers, and the feature

This is great.-

Particularly the vintage dancing hot dog ad, mind you :)

flanked-evergl• 2 years ago

I use it as a backend for smplayer: https://www.smplayer.info/en/mpv

Brosper• 2 years ago

This kind of project always lacks better UI/UX. I wonder if there is a way to bring more UI/UX people to Open-Source projects.

cranberryturkey2• 2 years ago

another good one in development is http://zymo.tv

markwong• 2 years ago

I am using it for listening to the online radio in terminal.

syngrog66• 2 years ago

chiming in to say VLC is the best audio clip player I've found. every time in past I surveyed the space all other options I tried had one or more showstoppers like too buggy or not the right API. VLC (and driving it via either Golang or CLi) has been reliable, decently documented and ultra configurable.

mysteria• 2 years ago

One cool thing about mpv is that it can transcode audio encoded in different surround sound formats (AAC, FLAC, Atmos, etc.) into regular Dolby Digital for use with old pre HDMI AVRs using SPDIF. AFAIK it's the only player that can do this natively without any additional work on the OS level.

I'll just add this here but if you want this kind of transcoding for the entire system rather than just mpv you can use dcaenc with its virtual 6 channel input encoding everything to DTS. I send the encoded audio to the AVR using a cheap TI PCM27XX sound card with optical output.

iwishiknewlisp2• 2 years ago

What I like most about mpv is how you can control it through its socket. Often times I will play a movie or tv show on a separate monitor, so being able to pause or rewind or change volume without switching workspaces is important. I have in my i3 config, keybindings so I can easily control mpv with my keyboard: https://github.com/ediw8311xht/dotfiles/blob/6a765910ab5ac17...

Additionally, mpv has a powerful script system. One of my favorite scripts is fast foward through intro, which is crucial for watching a tv show. https://github.com/rui-ddc/skip-intro. Another nice script is https://github.com/familyfriendlymikey/mpv-cut, which enables creating clips in mpv. There are a ton of other useful scripts, and its not difficult to create a custom script yourself using lua.

Mpv automatically resuming is also nice for watching tv shows or movies. Only problem is that if you shutdown mpv through killing the window then automatically resuming from history gets messed up.

janandonly• 2 years ago

Mplayer, or MPV was my go-to program, next to VLC player, when I still used Windows and had loose mp4 files to play. Nowadays I’m just streaming on my Mac.

Those good old days. [/ dream]

bentt• 2 years ago

Technically superior with a bit of a learning curve, but really worth it. If they surfaced more of their functionality better, it would gain a lot of users.

Gormo3• 2 years ago

One of the nice things about MPV is that you can apply FFMpeg filters at playback, allowing you to use a wide range of transformations on a source video without having to re-render it for each variation.

We're using inexpensive industrial mini-PCs, Alpine Linux, and MPV as a custom digital signage solution at my company, and centrally managing them via Ansible.

lillecarl• 2 years ago

What does an industrial minipc offer that an RPI doesn't in this case? :)

Gormo3• 2 years ago

It's x86; it works better for hardware accelerated video playback via VAAPI due to FOSS Intel drivers; because it's fully integrated out of the box, its total cost is a bit cheaper than an RPi, and as a single unit with no assembly, it's quite a bit faster to deploy.

I'm using these: https://www.amazon.com/MeLE-Fanless-Computer-Ethernet-PCG02/.... Works great with Linux, and has a very customizable BIOS.

actinium226• 2 years ago

We have free, open-source, cross-platform media player at home [vlc].

ashconnor• 2 years ago

Love the message when attempting to open a multi-volume rar video.

[libarchive] This appears to be a multi-volume archive.

[libarchive] Support is not very good due to libarchive limitations.

[libarchive] There are known cases of libarchive crashing mpv on these.

[libarchive] This is also an excessively inefficient and stupid way to distribute

[libarchive] media files. People creating them should rethink this.

Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

Related Stories