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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

#331

Post by hollerith »

nine_k wrote: post #219
Bluestein wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to be in maintenance mode. Sad to hear.- PS. On a tangent, rethorically - baring bugs and security - at one point is (if ever) software "finished"? "We built this search engine. It works. The infrastructure has team enough to run it. But we have this huge payroll of people." So "improvements" and "features" (and constant UI and UX changes) ... ... "enshittification" ensues.- When is "good enough" ... good enough?

A web search engine is never done because spammers never cease attempts to.game it in new ways, and because new phenomena keep appearing on the web, from presidents posting official news on twitter to the proliferation of AI-generated texts with subtly incorrect information. A media player, though, has fewer challenges.

Media player projects are in an arms race with exploit devs, though, especially since Google keeps introducing and popularizing new media formats.

Speaking of which: which project tkaes security more seriously, vlc or mpv?

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

#332

Post by _V_ »

I switched to MPV years ago - for some reason VLC started to stutter when opening a file, which is quite annoying. It does not matter whether it is local ol remote file, format does not matter - every open and every seek will trigger this few-second long stutter.

MPV does not do this, so over the years I began to use it as my daily driver.

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

#333

Post by DonHopkins »

mannyv wrote: post #100
sergiotapia wrote: post #83

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.

Again: There is no reason to start caching previous frames until AFTER the user has paused and pressed the "back frame" key. Only THEN does it need to rewind to the previous i-frame and re-render and cache frames. And there is no measurable cost to remembering the timestamp of the last i-frame, so you know where to rewind to.

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

#334

Post by Bluestein »

latexr wrote: post #304
Bluestein wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to be in maintenance mode. Sad to hear.- PS. On a tangent, rethorically - baring bugs and security - at one point is (if ever) software "finished"? "We built this search engine. It works. The infrastructure has team enough to run it. But we have this huge payroll of people." So "improvements" and "features" (and constant UI and UX changes) ... ... "enshittification" ensues.- When is "good enough" ... good enough?

> PS. On a tangent, rethorically - baring bugs and security - at one point is (if ever) software "finished"? “PS” originates from “post scriptum”, meaning “written after”. It doesn’t make sense to have it at the start of the text. But to answer your question, yes, it is definitely possible for software to be done and finished. I’ve done it multiple times, where I have built something that does exactly what I set it o…

> The general obsession with the idea that “software is never done, only abandoned” needs to end,

My thinking was along those lines. Or at least along the lines of "engineering and/or organizational processes should exist to know when to stop".-

PS. Thanks for your attention to detail. It was a "PS" to an otherwise one-sentence comment.-

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

#335

Post by wrasee »

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…

But he didn't "just" say no:

> If it's so easy, why are you not doing it? Talk is cheap.

> I'll be waiting for your patch. Surely you're not as lazy and incompetent as the existing volunteer developers.

I'd say that is pretty toxic.

Specifically, that is no way to talk about other volunteer developers that contribute their time. It is precisely the kind of language that keeps people away from contributing to open source. It's the very definition of toxic.

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

#336

Post by lupusreal »

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…

> I never understood why VLC was so widely praised.

Because it's the one you can reasonably suggest to all your utterly nontechnical friends and relatives to get them to stop downloading random sketchy exe's from the internet to install codecs.

mpv, and mplayer before it, has always been better for me and I find VLC to be pretty shoddy. But when it comes to people like my mom, I don't hesitate to sing praise for VLC. In that context, VLC is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I don't muddy the waters by even mentioning mpv.

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

#338

Post by Sporktacular »

natrys wrote: post #337

This is S tier software. I remember using this on a laptop with 2gb RAM years ago. The combo of mpv and youtube-dl could deal with large number of sites (not just youtube), when even the browser struggled.

I think youtube-dl is no longer under development. Any suggestions for an alternative?

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

#339

Post by lupusreal »

Dalewyn wrote: post #300
j1elo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What commercial video player do you use which is better than both mpv and VLC?

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

#340

Post by OscarDC »

ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote: post #270

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.

> actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that.

This may also be due to legal issues / restrictions in the contract they had with that content's right holders or subtitles providers.

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