16 ms·

mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

195 points by przemoc 13y ago

belorn 13y ago
> (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 13y ago
  The support is done through libquvi, so the distro only needs to update libquvi-scripts to make it behave.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    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.
przemoc 13y ago
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/changes.rst https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/en/ch... 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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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.
  - przemoc 13y ago
    While I have VLC installed, I think I haven't used it for ages, constantly relying on mplayer2 almost since its inception, until today that is. :) In the past VLC used to display wrong colors or downgrade video quality for better performance, not sure how it is now (possibly a bit better). Relevant: http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=Media_Players http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=Media_Playe...
  - 13y ago
lmm 13y ago
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.
- bloopletech 13y ago
  Looking through the changes that mpv introduces, it looks like they've brought back encoding. The primary motivation for yet-another-mplayer-fork, is that they are explicitly removing complex, obsolete code in an effort to encourage fresh blood to join the developers; given that what they are removing includes 'teletext' support, this is probably not a bad thing.
  - claudius 13y ago
    I am sure that there will be an outcry among teletext users how the devs dared to remove their favourite feature! Let’s see when/what Debian releases…
    - frik 13y ago
      In central Europe teletext is still supported by all TVs and broadcasting companies. A lot of older people read the latest news via teletext. The browsing effect is similar to HN, it shows just the news headlines and the interface is text only - no fancy graphics or ads. With a single button press you see a short summary. That way you can read the news of the day in less than 5min - something that is hard to achieve for Joe Doe with the internet.
    - voltagex_ 13y ago
      I am probably the only mplayer+teletext user in Australia. I'm trying to strip out the subtitles from a DVB-T stream and do an analysis of the words used on a commercial vs a public channel.
fafner 13y ago
Sadly it doesn't work with SMPlayer. They seemed to have changed some options.
ksec 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  Personally I've always preferred mplayer's no-nonsense interface. That's been the biggest thing that has kept me an mplayer user for several years now. VLC also seems to mandate a larger performance hit while playing a video, no matter what. For the most part, VLC and mplayer provide a similar experience, and both tools have major dependencies on ffmpeg. It's just a matter of preference on the interface, and if you utilize any of VLC's niceties that justify its performance decrease (I've heard this happens because VLC forces software processing of the image at some stage to facilitate easy application of filters, and mplayer (and its descendants) doesn't. I don't know if this is true or not).
kennae 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Reminds me of http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=12 http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=12 .
stephengillie 13y ago
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 downgraded 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 downgraded 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 13y ago
  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.
  - ciupicri 13y ago
    What's so horrible about it? It looks like most media players. The playlist could use some love, but if you're only playing a single (long) video at a time it doesn't matter to much.
Jeremysr 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    That or xmms2.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  While MPD is probably ideal for your use case, there are lots of toolkits that facilitate this delegation. Many Linux apps utilize GStreamer to do this, including several very prominent ones. Heck, even VLC and mplayer are just "interfaces" on top of decoders. It's pretty uncommon to rewrite this type of code, considering its complexity. There a lot of tools that allow you to reuse media decoders and output frameworks.
pwenzel 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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.
Semaphor 13y ago
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.splayer.org/index.en.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.spl...) [4] https://code.google.com/p/shooter-player/ https://code.google.com/p/shooter-player/
antihero 13y ago
Is there a GUI frontend like SMPlayer?
- kchu 13y ago
  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
jbaiter 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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?
bridgpal 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
rossy 13y ago
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.
phryk 13y ago
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.

195 points by przemoc 13y ago

> (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 13y ago
The support is done through libquvi, so the distro only needs to update libquvi-scripts to make it behave.
- cbhl 13y ago
  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.

przemoc 13y ago

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/changes.rst https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/en/ch... 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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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.
- przemoc 13y ago
  While I have VLC installed, I think I haven't used it for ages, constantly relying on mplayer2 almost since its inception, until today that is. :) In the past VLC used to display wrong colors or downgrade video quality for better performance, not sure how it is now (possibly a bit better). Relevant: http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=Media_Players http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=Media_Playe...
- 13y ago

lmm 13y ago

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.

bloopletech 13y ago
Looking through the changes that mpv introduces, it looks like they've brought back encoding. The primary motivation for yet-another-mplayer-fork, is that they are explicitly removing complex, obsolete code in an effort to encourage fresh blood to join the developers; given that what they are removing includes 'teletext' support, this is probably not a bad thing.
- claudius 13y ago
  I am sure that there will be an outcry among teletext users how the devs dared to remove their favourite feature! Let’s see when/what Debian releases…
  - frik 13y ago
    In central Europe teletext is still supported by all TVs and broadcasting companies. A lot of older people read the latest news via teletext. The browsing effect is similar to HN, it shows just the news headlines and the interface is text only - no fancy graphics or ads. With a single button press you see a short summary. That way you can read the news of the day in less than 5min - something that is hard to achieve for Joe Doe with the internet.
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    I am probably the only mplayer+teletext user in Australia. I'm trying to strip out the subtitles from a DVB-T stream and do an analysis of the words used on a commercial vs a public channel.

fafner 13y ago

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

ksec 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
cookiecaper 13y ago
Personally I've always preferred mplayer's no-nonsense interface. That's been the biggest thing that has kept me an mplayer user for several years now. VLC also seems to mandate a larger performance hit while playing a video, no matter what. For the most part, VLC and mplayer provide a similar experience, and both tools have major dependencies on ffmpeg. It's just a matter of preference on the interface, and if you utilize any of VLC's niceties that justify its performance decrease (I've heard this happens because VLC forces software processing of the image at some stage to facilitate easy application of filters, and mplayer (and its descendants) doesn't. I don't know if this is true or not).

kennae 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago

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 13y ago
Reminds me of http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=12 http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=12 .

stephengillie 13y ago

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 downgraded 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 downgraded 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 13y ago
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.
- ciupicri 13y ago
  What's so horrible about it? It looks like most media players. The playlist could use some love, but if you're only playing a single (long) video at a time it doesn't matter to much.

Jeremysr 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  That or xmms2.
cookiecaper 13y ago
While MPD is probably ideal for your use case, there are lots of toolkits that facilitate this delegation. Many Linux apps utilize GStreamer to do this, including several very prominent ones. Heck, even VLC and mplayer are just "interfaces" on top of decoders. It's pretty uncommon to rewrite this type of code, considering its complexity. There a lot of tools that allow you to reuse media decoders and output frameworks.

pwenzel 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.

Semaphor 13y ago

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.splayer.org/index.en.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.spl...) [4] https://code.google.com/p/shooter-player/ https://code.google.com/p/shooter-player/

antihero 13y ago

Is there a GUI frontend like SMPlayer?

kchu 13y ago
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

jbaiter 13y ago

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 13y ago
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?

bridgpal 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

rossy 13y ago

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.

phryk 13y ago

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.