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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

#261

Post by somnic »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #232
ziml77 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because it's an open-source project, not commercial software. In your job, you have to special-case some things because the alternative is not delivering what the boss wants. Regardless of the problems this may cause, or how much tech debt it generates - those are (in the end) business decisions, and while you can make a case to the boss that implementing the special case feature is going to cause huge problems, it's…

If you say "no, we're not pursuing this feature because it's impossible" and users have used other software that implements the feature to a reasonable degree of functionality, you're not doing yourself any favours in terms of shutting down demands. You'd be better off either not giving a reason at all, or giving reasons that are clearer to people who aren't as knowledgable.

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

#262

Post by ruszki »

mtrower wrote: post #198
scottlamb wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have a long video with only a single key frame at the beginning then ...you can't support the scrub bar efficiently either, so no one encodes video that way. Typically to go to a frame you find the last IDR frame before it (and in reasonable encodings those are frequent enough) and decode forward until you get to the frame of interest. Doing that every time the user presses the single frame back button reall…

> It's of course work to do, and I'm not super motivated to send them that patch, and there's the question of it it would be merged That's my issue; he calls for people to send patches, but anyone capable of writing such a patch is also probably going to see that he's not positive on the matter, and that his "patches welcome" is really pretty passive aggressive in this instance. At least, that's how it comes off to m…

I learned this the hard way.

One other team at my workplace insisted that they can’t make their product compatible with our product, because it would take a team and half year. I knew that it’s a lie, but we convinced them to “allow” us to make for them. I finished - alone - in four days.

It was never merged. It was purely political. It was never about whether it’s possible or not.

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

#264

Post by nagisa »

vocx2tx wrote: post #36
ivanjermakov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I have found this not to be as straightforward as this. In particular:

1. Although `yt-dlp` consistently is able to download videos at link speed (even when the said link is in multi-gig range!), streaming the video through `mpv` will not work as well and some videos would buffer every couple chunks. But that was in the past…

2. With recent changes to how videos are served and "protected", I'm still able to download them with recent versions of `yt-dlp`, but streaming a `yt-dlp` generated playlist will reliably fail to work (this is true for the newpipe android app too.)

3. Even back when streaming youtube worked, closed captions and other such features would not work by default.

I download videos first, nowadays. And then play them with mpv anyway.

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

#265

Post by neckro23 »

ruszki wrote: post #256
tumult wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC doesn't have perfect compatibility. I think it worked correctly on random video files less frequently than mpv the last time I tried it. And mpv can actually step forward and back frame by frame.

I found MPV because VLC was unreliable. Seeking was especially crazy sometimes, and not that I couldn’t seek to the exact moment, but I couldn’t seek at all. Even displaying was broken sometimes regardless of file types. I had none of these issues with MPV for the same files.

VLC is sometimes so unreliable for me, especially when seeking or frame-stepping, that it stops responding to playback commands entirely (although it pretends to still work) and I have to kill the zombie process before I can even re-open the file and try again.

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

#266

Post by dikei »

77pt77 wrote: post #240
tumult wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC doesn't have perfect compatibility. I think it worked correctly on random video files less frequently than mpv the last time I tried it. And mpv can actually step forward and back frame by frame.

So can mplayer and did that way before mpv could.

mplayer was forked into mplayer2, which in turn was forked into mpv

Though AFAIK, most of the rendering code behind mpv has been entirely rewritten.

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

#267

Post by Aardwolf »

ctenb wrote: post #251
Aardwolf wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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

These two do seem connected, at least in my case, maybe the video is waiting for the audio codec. Of course your issue could be something entirely different than what I'm typically encountering!

I have like 3 things trying to be audio device on my linux (of which the graphics card is the most unwanted one and sometimes it randomly manages to take over despite me not changing any settings) and the list of audio modules that show up is simply enormous (pulseaudio, pipewire, alsa, ...), some of those make VLC stutter, others don't. It's a mess but at least pipewire works better than puseaudio in my case...

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

#268

Post by namdnay »

kstenerud wrote: post #243
sebastos wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A playback architecture that can wrangle all of that cruelty into a consistent experience was hard won. No, it hasn't. The only reason I use mpv instead of VLC is because of the frame step feature. Everyone else has proven that it is possible and practical to do. Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If people don't use your product, it doesn't matter how right and pure of vision you are.

> No, it hasn't. The only reason I use mpv instead of VLC is because of the frame step feature

You realise your requirement is important for less than 0.01% of users? For every requirement you have to balance future maintainability and the impact it has on the code base against potential revenue

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

#269

Post by tuxone »

somnic wrote: post #261
marcus_holmes wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's an open-source project, not commercial software. In your job, you have to special-case some things because the alternative is not delivering what the boss wants. Regardless of the problems this may cause, or how much tech debt it generates - those are (in the end) business decisions, and while you can make a case to the boss that implementing the special case feature is going to cause huge problems, it's…

If you say "no, we're not pursuing this feature because it's impossible" and users have used other software that implements the feature to a reasonable degree of functionality, you're not doing yourself any favours in terms of shutting down demands. You'd be better off either not giving a reason at all, or giving reasons that are clearer to people who aren't as knowledgable.

Reasons are actually stated, they explained it is not feasible for the general case.

Once the devs have made clear they don’t plan to do exceptions (as other softwares do) then users should accept it and move on instead of keep harassing volunteers.

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

#270

Post by ksdnjweusdnkl21 »

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.
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