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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

#291

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

nagisa wrote: post #264
vocx2tx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For 1, there might be settings that can help.

I used to use mplayer(of which mpv is a fork) to watch pirate streams of premier league games several years ago, via acestream. Since this was live, lag was a real issue; you can't buffer ahead when there's nothing to buffer yet. Eventually I figured out that mplayer had settings to do things like buffer for 2 minutes at the beginning of the stream before playing. You could also configure it by megabytes pre-buffered. This solved my lag issues very neatly. I can't remember what the settings were, it's been a long time and I don't have those config files anymore. But it should all be in the docs somewhere.

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

#292

Post by latexr »

The_Colonel wrote: post #199
justin66 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developer responds to a comment: But many players are able to do it for years. with: If it's so easy, why are you not doing it? He's not just a butthole, he's a stereotypical open source developer butthole. On the other hand, if he worked for Microsoft, he'd be claiming that it takes a PhD to do it...

The dev said they are happy to accept patch for this feature. Remember that you're not entitled to demand new features, as a (non-paying) user, you can't allocate dev's time to work on what you want.

> The dev said they are happy to accept patch for this feature.

Did they? Because I read a bunch of the thread and “happy” is he last word I’d use to describe the developer’s sentiment. All I see is “let’s see you provide a patch, and I don’t believe you will”.

Everything about it screams that if a patch were provided, they’d do anything in their power to find reasons for refusal.

Even if I cared about VLC, reading those replies guarantees I would never attempt to submit the patch.

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

#293

Post by langcss »

martin293 wrote: post #284
langcss wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, how comes you can do the workaround one suggested of entering a time one second ago then going forward a frame at a time?

You can only do it for certain formats

Sure but I thought VLC only supports features that work for all formats, and supporting features that work for only some formats is a no no and for that reason previous frame is not possible. Yet skip to time is allowed.

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

#294

Post by latexr »

romanows wrote: post #202
lairv wrote: post #69

I use it to inspect video frames by frames, particularly being able to go back one frame. VLC doesn't support it, this thread about the feature is hilarious https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=120627

I was hoping that mpv would work a bit better than vlc for sending video to chromecast, but unfortunately, another similarly amusing thread: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/177

Far from me to defend the whole mpv team[1], but the dev in that thread is a ghost (deleted user). I remember them, they were always rude and eventually got kicked out of the project and loudly complained about “being removed from the project [they] created”. I never found the exact reason why, though I can’t help but think the attitude had something to do with it.

[1] Some are quite nice and competent. Others are exceedingly rude and will e.g. jump on an issue that had thus far been entirely cordial just to, without provocation, insult users for using whatever OS they don’t like.

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

#295

Post by RulerOf »

sph wrote: post #281
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…

You speak as if VLC is the pinnacle of video player technology. I know it is an open source darling, but it's been a buggy, overengineered mess since forever, which is why many use alternatives as mpv, IINA when I used macOS, SMplayer, etc. On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. It is the only player to stutter for me on Windows, to get lost in its settings page, to have a te…

> On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised.

It's praised because it "plays everything."

It developed this reputation in an era when even average people were installing numerous DirectShow "codec packs" (often of dubious pedigree) in an often futile effort to "play that thing I just downloaded" from the P2P file sharing network du jour.

For a number of reasons, installing a bunch of these codec packs would often leave video playback broken globally[1]. Since VLC is cross-platform, it does not use DirectShow, and would "fix" a system that had been "broken" by other software.

[1]: most of these issues could be fixed with the GraphEdit utility, which offered a simple but powerful UI for configuring and testing every codec in the system. GraphEdit should have been included with Windows, and be something you could invoke from within Control Panel.

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

#296

Post by badsectoracula »

sph wrote: post #281
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…

You speak as if VLC is the pinnacle of video player technology. I know it is an open source darling, but it's been a buggy, overengineered mess since forever, which is why many use alternatives as mpv, IINA when I used macOS, SMplayer, etc. On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. It is the only player to stutter for me on Windows, to get lost in its settings page, to have a te…

> On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised.

For me the alternatives back when i first wanted a video player that could play various file formats were Media Player Classic (which worked only on Windows and relied on external codecs that sometimes didn't fully work), mplayer (which had annoying arcane commandline switches and weird shortcut keys), Totem (which used gstreamer which 90% of the time either didn't had the codecs i wanted or they were very buggy). More recently the only alternative seems to be mpv (which seems to be a mplayer fork that persists with the arcane switches and apparent hate of anything resembling a discoverable GUI).

VLC on the other hand is available on anything that has a display (or at least anything that has a display and i'd want to play videos on it - that is currently Linux and Android and sometimes Windows) and has a GUI that while might be a bit on the overloadedly bloated side, at least it shows everything you may (and often you may not) want to configure, with actual menus, categories, tooltips, etc. And when it comes to the most common aspect, playback of videos, it shows a simple and to the point UI with the play, seek, volume, etc buttons that you'd need 99% of the time (that admittedly most other players do too, except they don't do the 99% rest of the GUI that VLC does).

So, basically VLC is my preferred video player largely because 20 years ago i didn't had to read a tutorial on how to select the subtitle language (or something along these lines) and was able to play pretty much any video i threw at it without any extra fuss.

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

#297

Post by _flux »

mrob wrote: post #273
armada651 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already have to maintain seeking code, stepping back one frame is just a specialized case for your seeking code.

You already have to maintain code for seeking by time. There's not necessarily any easy way to convert between time and frame count.

VLC knows the timestamp of the current frame. From that information it can seek to a frame that is before the current frame, possibly by just subtracting the inverse of frame rate from the current frame's timestamp and if seeking to that time results in seeking to the same frame, try again a bit older.

I'm relatively sure this can be implemented in terms of timestamp-based seeking. Quite possibly the metadata of the frames is already in the memory, further simplifying the process.

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

#298

Post by Hendrikto »

Panzer04 wrote: post #181
NavinF wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

That blows up pretty quickly though? Even a 10 minute video will take in the worst case ~20 seconds to decode at that rate. Not really an excuse not to have it (since most video wont be encoded in such an insane way), but the developers owe no obligation to users to implement it.

Theoretically. Practically, 10+ minute videos with just a single i frame at the beginning do not exist.

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

#299

Post by badsectoracula »

littlestymaar wrote: post #288
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…

> 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. VLC used to be the dominant video player for this reason, but then everything has crystallized around h.264 (and h.265) which made the breadth of codec support not as important anymore, making VLC slowly losing relevance because they aren't focused on user…

> h.264 (and h.265) which made the breadth of codec support not as important anymore

You say that but just yesterday i used VLC to play some old videos i had which AFAICT were in RealVideo format or something like that.

And i transcode everything i want to watch in my Android tablet (where i also use VLC) to mpeg2 because the tablet is ancient (10+ years old) and can't handle anything newer, so i am glad that VLC a) still works on the ancient Android OS it has and b) still supports an old outdated but CPU light video format :-P.

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

#300

Post by Dalewyn »

j1elo wrote: post #118
lairv wrote: post #69

I use it to inspect video frames by frames, particularly being able to go back one frame. VLC doesn't support it, this thread about the feature is hilarious https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=120627

Wow those answers are indeed funny. I agree that as an OSS dev/maintainer, it's easy to fall on the vice of over-generalization and crusade for the perfect solution, and it feels that's exactly what happened there. > this feature is algorithmically impossible > You're just looking at one specific video, not the general problem. > is not generally possible. As a fellow multimedia dev, man, who cares? Sometimes we forg…

>Sometimes we forget that software ought to be useful, not hypothetical ideals of truth.

I've long since come to the understanding that if I want software that are useful, I must go and pay for it. Commercial software exist to make money, and to make money they must be useful.

If I want software that are hypothetical ideals of truth, I go and shitpost at the nearest neckbeard communion. Free-beer software exist to satisfy a man's desire to display his voluminous beard, everything else is tertiary.

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