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

mpv.io

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

#63

Post by josephg »

etra0 wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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

#64

Post by amlib »

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

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

#65

Post by Tmpod »

HPsquared wrote: post #44

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…

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.

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

#66

Post by arp242 »

pentagrama wrote: post #60

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…

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.

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

#68

Post by jwells89 »

arp242 wrote: post #55
jwells89 wrote: post #5

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 reprodu…

> 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.

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.

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

#70

Post by globular-toast »

jcelerier wrote: post #45
Agingcoder wrote: post #41

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…

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

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.
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