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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

#131
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

You don't need to use the command line.

If you set it as your default video player it will work as you expect.

If you don't want to set it as your default video player you can probably do something like "Right Click -> Open with..." and choose MPV.

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

#132
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

There are graphical frontends like Celluloid.

https://celluloid-player.github.io/

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

#133
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

mpv tries to be pretty minimalist (and does this well), you could try a frontend (Celluloid, Haruna, etc.). And for the commandline, when you install the mpv package, depending on the distro, the package creates a default shortcut/desktop file, so you can open videos on your WM without hitches, on the menu bar. You can associate the shortcut to mime/file types and set as default player too. You can create yourself a desktop file too if necessary on your profile (eg: $HOME/.local/share/applications/mpv.desktop) with this file/content [1]

[1]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/etc/mpv.deskto...

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

#134

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 playba…

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

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

#135
post #76

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

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

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 fra…

that's still a whole lot of yapping that as an end user I don't care about. i can frame scrub forwards and backwards in multiple other apps. right? very weird response from the vlc team in that original thread.

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

#137
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Just a ridiculous idea, could a reversed version of the video be kept around so that if you hit frame backwards it's frame forwards operation on the reversed video so you can show that frame, if you continue playback the head goes to the closest second of the forward video

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

#138
post #84
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Not "magically", but more reasonably and without forcing your entire program into a different state, breaking any ability for libraries to work with a huge range of functionality consistently. C locale handling is basically impossible to work with robustly, even before you get into how it can't be effectively used at all in a thread safe way.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What non-maintenance work needs doing? From the outside, it plays basically all the formats. There is always the potential for improving algorithms, but it strikes me as pretty feature complete.

> has many small seek/sync issues

Playback issues... scrub problems mentioned elsewhere, audio/video get out of sync when seeking a lot; need to hit left arrow to reset, speed changes lag when changed a lot, when there's a short clip it can end audio early, etc, etc.

Not a huge deal, but if you use it every day for video and audio file testing/lyric transcribing these little bugs get old. The playback core needs a rewrite to be "preemptive" I'd guess.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 fra…

> video with only a single key frame at the beginning

I've literally never seen a video like that in my life, but I'd still expect it to work. Just decode everything starting from frame 1. My desktop can decode H265 at 1,666 fps. I can wait.

https://docs.nvidia.com/video-technologies/video-codec-sdk/1...

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