
mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player - przemoc
http://mpv.io/index.html
======
przemoc
Apparently I was living under a rock, because I was unaware of mpv... Maybe
you too?

mpv is a free and open-source general-purpose video player. It is based on the
MPlayer and mplayer2 projects which it greatly improves.

Changes from mplayers: [https://github.com/mpv-
player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/en/ch...](https://github.com/mpv-
player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/en/changes.rst)

Quoting JEEB's explanation from IRC:

> sounds like mplayer2, which used to be uau's patchset for mplayer. And then
> mpv was forked out of mplayer2 because uau wouldn't merge things from other
> developers

Lachs0r's Windows binaries: [http://mpv.srsfckn.biz/](http://mpv.srsfckn.biz/)

~~~
daGrevis
I discovered it few days ago. Currently trying to set up Xmonad to work with
it's fullscreen.

What are the main pros comparing to, lets say, VLC?

~~~
pgz
The main selling point of mpv, IMHO, is video quality and color correctness.
You can get pretty nice results (on par with MadVR on Windows) with
--vo=opengl-hq and it's many suboptions.

Minimalism is also something people are interested in. mpv has 1/5 the code of
mplayer and 1/6 of VLC but still has relevant features.

They appeal to different kind of users. For example, even if I am in the mpv
team, I will recommend VLC to my 'average Joe' friend as I know he would be
put off by the CLI usage and config file editing.

~~~
coolj
It's nice to see a renewed interest in developing mplayer. Do you know if
there are plans to get it packaged by the major distros?

~~~
pgz
I know it was added to deb-multimedia some days ago and it is also in the
gentoo-multimedia overlay and on AUR.

I think many distributions would consider mpv a duplicate of mplayer, so for
one to be packaged officially the other would have to be removed.
Realistically that's not going to happen anytime soon.

------
belorn
> (from the changelog) Support for playing URLs of popular streaming sites
> directly (e.g. mpv
> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...))

While a nice effort, this will really put a fast freshness date to their
builds. Popular streaming sites continuously changes their api's to prevent
third-party software from using their service.

~~~
kovnsk
The support is done through libquvi, so the distro only needs to update
libquvi-scripts to make it behave.

~~~
cbhl
It's really rare to see SRUs (or the equivalent back-porting) for things like
this, though. On distros I've used, amsn would break in stable for months at a
time when Microsoft decided to change the protocol; the generally-accepted
advice was "use the package from {development/unstable/whatever the newest
branch is}" which would itself require bringing in all the random new
dependencies and possibly breaking X/the desktop environment/something else.

------
stephengillie
I have been a VLC user on Windows for years. I've actually stuck with VLC
1.1.5 for 2 reasons:

1\. It plays any local video I throw at it. Other people tell me "It doesn't
play some of my videos" but I haven't seen this actually occur. Or when I do,
it's because they're using a _newer_ version of VLC which has removed support
or changed processing. VLC has terrible license problems and awful feature
creep. I had some .mkv files which didn't play correctly, so I _down_ graded
from 1.1.10 to 1.1.5, and they play just fine. That's right, the 3-year old
player plays the newest .mkv files much better than the 2-year old player or
the newest player.

And unlike mplayer, mplayer2, wmp, and most other players out there, you don't
have to goto some random website and download some random codec pack, and
install it with who knows what malware.</FUD> All the codecs are included with
the program.

Reading this github doesn't tell me why I should use mpv instead of vlc 1.1.5.
Actually, it tells me I'll have to go find these random codec packs again,
opening myself to possible CSRF attacks and other malware from poorly-secured
or malicious codec providers. I'm already trusting the media player install
package to not be evil, and I'd rather only have to trust 1 install package
instead of it and several codec install packages.

2\. I actually _down_ graded from VLC 2.0 to 1.1.10 because of VLC's terrible
responsiveness. I don't know what changed, but it has made VLC 2.0 too
annoying to use. The delay is a second or 2, which is a second or 2 longer
than it used to be, and a second or 2 longer than it needs to be. When I go
from a quiet video to a loud video, and I roll the mousewheel to lower the
volume, that volume change needs to happen immediately, not after a 1-2 second
delay.

I like that responsiveness is one of the bullet points.

I would have downloaded it and tried it out, but I don't know how to make this
on Windows.

~~~
SimHacker
VLC may play lot of videos, but it has the most systematically terrible user
interface of any program I have ever seen. Just absolutely horrible, on a
level that could not possibly just the results of ignorance and carelessness,
but it actually seems to optimized to actively fuck the user on purpose.

~~~
stephengillie
Uh...what?

The UI is plain, but all of the controls I regularly need are there. And I
ABSOLUTELY LOVE that _every_ hotkey is rebindable. If you don't like "change
subtitles" to be V, you can change it to be P or even Alt-V. (Why can't we
rebind Windows Copy to be Alt-W instead of Ctrl-C?)

And last I checked, the UI can be skinned too, but I grew up with plain
interfaces.

~~~
SimHacker
So why does it have one set of controls in window mode, and a totally
different set of controls in full screen mode? Who decided that?

~~~
stephengillie
I don't know -- I'm using a 3 year old version where the windowed and
fullscreen controls are almost the same. (the only difference is fullscreen
doesn't have "shuffle" or "playlist")

------
lmm
As a user this is all just a big mess. Mplayer2 had some nice improvements
(does straight mplayer support mkv segment linking yet?) but also removed some
important features (e.g. mencoder). (Side note: ffmpeg has been refusing
patches to add new filters because they're working on a new filter
infrastructure. For something like 4 years now). It's even worse if you're on
windows and want to use a frontend as well.

Here's hoping the various groups resolve their differences somehow or a clear
winner emerges.

~~~
cookiecaper
mencoder is an abomination. Unless you have an actual real-life use case where
mencoder works and ffmpeg doesn't, use ffmpeg; practically everything else
does, regardless of licensing (ffmpeg has a wall of shame, which I'm sure
comprises only a small sample of infringers, on their site).

~~~
lmm
Last time I tried encoding with raw ffmpeg it couldn't even render subtitles.

~~~
derobert
It does now, even supporting libass to render ASS/SSA subtitles.

------
kennae
Been using mpv for many months as my only video player on my laptop Archlinux
setup and everything has been great. Been telling people to check it out and
no single complaint has been given, and most have changed solely to mpv.

The -opengl-hq option is a great option to easily get acceptable quality
playback without the hassle.

But even still, Windows is so much ahead in video playback by just a hobby of
one guy (Madshi, software being Madvr) that it is a shame to Os X and desktop
linux. FRC (smooth motion without any of the soap opera effect people hate)
completely removes the need to use 23.976 Hz on your monitor, so you can use
what your monitor is build to use. With Jinc + anti-ringing filter as the
scaler, your image looks gorgeus even how much you need to upscale it.

These are the reasons my HTPC still runs Windows even though I love mpv and
would like to change but my eyes can't make the jump just yet.

~~~
cookiecaper
Been using mpv the last few days, replacing mplayer2. It doesn't seem to be
activating VDPAU correctly despite using the sample config file as a template.
The console output clearly indicates VDPAU vo, but I still get 40% CPU usage
with HD footage and occasional slowdowns (including the slightly-modified
classic MPlayer "your computer is too slow to play this!" message) while
playing videos.

While mpv sounds like a good thing in theory, I might just remain content with
mplayer2. Now at least a single point has been given.

~~~
pgz
Did you actually activate vdpau with `--hwdec=vdpau`? If you did can you
please open a issue so that your specific problem can be investigated?

The switch changed from mplayer/mplayer2 and mpv uses the new hwaccel api
where available (instead of the custom decoder).

------
zokier
The whole media playing world is just a weird place with lots of twists and
turns, and lots of sharp edges. There is always a new fork, some new clever
filter, or a new API spawning somewhere, nothing never stabilizing. And of
course lots of things being subjective and/or hardware-dependent making
finding the "best" solution difficult.

~~~
raylu
Reminds me of
[http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=12](http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=12) .

------
rossy
It's great to see mpv talked about on HN. I started using uau's patches for
MPlayer a while ago (mainly for mkv segment linking, which has already been
mentioned in the comments here and is a feature that MPlayer-svn still lacks.)
That set of patches got renamed to mplayer2 and since mplayer2 development
ground to a halt, mpv was the logical next step.

Development is fast and the developers are friendly and helpful. It's exciting
to see improvements in the accuracy and quality of the GL video output and,
since I like to use the same video player on Windows and Linux, it's also nice
to see much needed attention to detail in the Windows port, including support
for Unicode filenames. Overall, mpv is probably my favourite media player and
I recommend it to any MPlayer/mplayer2 user.

The lack of a GUI may be a problem for some users, but hopefully that's fixed
soon. A new slave mode is planned that doesn't suffer from the problems of the
old MPlayer one, which was always very incomplete and required GUI frontends
to parse MPlayer output that was intended for users. There's also the
possibility of using lua and libass to draw a minimal QuickTime-like on screen
display with a seekbar.

------
fafner
Sadly it doesn't work with SMPlayer. They seemed to have changed some options.

------
ksec
Why not VLC?

I suppose mplayer and its forks are good for cross platform.

On Windows, and if you ask me, the best experience i have now is MPC-BE. Which
is based on MPC-HC, which is based on MPC.

~~~
pdkl95
Lets see if VLC has finally added sane output support... /me checks
[http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=av](http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=av)

Nope. _sigh_

[X11, SDL, FrameBuffer] These are all basically dumb framebuffers.

[XVideo] Ahh, the X Video Extension... from 22 years ago. It only accelerates
some specific parts of the process such as the final colorspace conversion.

[ASCII Art] I assume they mean libaa. How last decade. Besides, everybody
knows the Cool Kids all moved on to libcaca's seductive ECMA-48 color escape
sequences anyway. :p

In all seriousness, I've used mplayer{,2} because it brings my CPU usage down
into to the <1%-2% range on most videos thanks to pretty much all of the work
being done on the video card by way of VDPAU. How much do I care about this?
Well let's see:

    
    
      (100% == one fully ussed core of my old 3GHz Core2, gpu is a 9800gtx)
      video is: 1280x720 23.976fps h.264 High profile L4.0   (no audio)
    
      CPU usage w/ vdpau: mpv  2.8%, /usr/bin/X 5.2%
      CPU usage w/ x11:   mpv 10.4%, /usr/bin/X  36% 
    

[aside]Wow; it seems mpv has improved the software rendering engine.
mplayer{,2} used to be about 10% to 15% higher![/aside]

Even on non-Nvidia hardware, the software has always had a very strong focus
on efficiency. Their GL output drivers are great, and even the bad, old Matrox
G200 I was stuck for far too long was fully supported. I wouldn't have been
able to watch some videos without the hardware-assist.

There are other reasons I've always liked mplayer too, but the fact that it
_actually plays_ the videos that were a slideshow in vlc (and most other
players) made the choice obvious.

------
phryk
I've been using mpv for a few months now and have to say that I grew to like
it. Coming from mplayer I'm used to not asking myself "Can my player play this
piece of data" but just throw it in and see what happens. mpv does this just
as well (if not better) than mplayer.

Besides that theres a zillion little usability improvements that make using it
much better than mplayer, which is one of the main reasons why I stuck with
it.

The integration of libquvi is also pretty nice; Just throw a youtube URL into
mpv and it'll play - even the ones you can only view with flash in the
browser. :)

But beware, this was a bitch to get running on Gentoo. YMMV.

------
bridgpal
I've been using [http://mplayerx.org/](http://mplayerx.org/) exclusively. It
seems to handle files better than vlc for me, and has a nicer mac like player.

~~~
pgz
That player has a nice GUI but renders colors incorrectly with common h264 HD
videos that use planar YUV colorspace (pretty much all of them use it).

It always uses the BT.601 colormatrix to perform the YUV -> RGB colorspace
conversion. While for HD material one should use the BT.709 colormatrix.

In practice you will notice darker reds that are closer to purple for this
implementation error.

------
Semaphor
I remember when I had to use MPlayer as it was the only video player with dual
core support (some special build) and as my graphic cards are always rather
old that was the only way for me to watch 720p videos :)

Some general comments about comments here:

Never checked back on VLC, back when I tried it 4-5 years ago it was terribly
buggy and crashed all the time.

Codec Packs are a thing of the past for me ever since I discovered CCCP [1]
many years ago

MPC-HC [2] or SPlayer [3] (back when it was released there were some GPL
violations,open sourced afterwards [4]) are my go-to players. MPC with CCCP
plays everything, SPlayer is extremely simple while maintaining top quality.

[1] [http://www.cccp-project.net/](http://www.cccp-project.net/)

[2] [http://mpc-hc.org/](http://mpc-hc.org/)

[3]
[http://www.splayer.org/index.en.html](http://www.splayer.org/index.en.html)
(down, cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.spl...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.splayer.org/index.en.html))

[4] [https://code.google.com/p/shooter-
player/](https://code.google.com/p/shooter-player/)

------
Jeremysr
Aw, I was hoping to see that slave mode was fixed. I want to use slave mode to
make a music player with my own user interface and library/playlist manager in
Ruby without having to worry about how to actually play the music.
Unfortunately slave mode in mplayer seems kind of unstable and sometimes even
gives the wrong answer (I think it's a known bug). I wasn't aware of mplayer2,
I'll have to try that and see if it works any better.

But does anyone know of a program or library with a proper interface for
controlling a music player?

~~~
davignon
Have you heard of MPD? I think it's pretty much what you're looking for,
there's even a ruby library. Check it out, it's a great piece of software.
[http://www.musicpd.org/](http://www.musicpd.org/)

~~~
AndyKelley
That or xmms2.

------
pwenzel
With all the talk of VLC for media playback...

I use mplayer almost daily for no-frills internet radio listening. I have my
terminal window open all day anyway, so no need to waste resources (screen
real-estate or otherwise) on iTunes or VLC.

For example, Groove Salad's AAC stream:

mplayer -playlist
[http://somafm.com/groovesalad130.pls](http://somafm.com/groovesalad130.pls)

Seeing a focus on OSX improvements in mpv, I am hoping we'll see it
installable via homebrew some day soon.

~~~
pgz
It is installable via homebrew very easily: [https://github.com/mpv-
player/homebrew-mpv](https://github.com/mpv-player/homebrew-mpv)

The formula also builds `mpv.app`, I use that to open files directly from the
Finder.

~~~
pwenzel
Great, thank you for the tip. It worked!

I ran in to a few speedbumps along the way, but it turns out I just needed the
HEAD version of FFMPEG installed first.

~~~
pgz
Interesting, it should actually build with ffmpeg 1.2 correctly (as a matter
of fact I have been using it until 2 days ago).

If you can reproduce it, I'd love a bug report.

------
jbaiter
I've been trying to use it after reading about it on reddit, but so far I've
been unsucessful at getting mpv to do "real" fullscreen. I'm using XMonad with
a xmobar at the top of the screen, and with all --fstype modes I've tried, it
has always been laid over the actual video. Has anybody been able to get it to
do fullscreen with xmonad?

~~~
pgz
I know people have been using it with XMonad. There is a fresh issue from
today ([https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/179](https://github.com/mpv-
player/mpv/issues/179)), is this helpful in any way?

------
antihero
Is there a GUI frontend like SMPlayer?

~~~
kchu
I found one, but I haven't tried it since I got used to the keyboard
shortcuts, and it's also Windows only.

Baka MPlayer -
[http://bakamplayer.netii.net/index.php](http://bakamplayer.netii.net/index.php)

