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

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

#351

Post by Bluestein »

lupusreal wrote: post #336
sph wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Because it's the one you can reasonably suggest to all your utterly nontechnical friends and relatives

I concurr.-

PS. On a related tangent the amount of unpaid "support" tech knowledgeable individuals are doing for (particularly) FAANG is enormous.-

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

#352

Post by lupusreal »

DonHopkins wrote: post #301
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…

"I'll be waiting for your patch. Surely you're not as lazy and incompetent as the existing volunteer developers."- Rémi Denis-Courmont I see Rémi Denis-Courmont's arrogant attitude and disrespect for users and developers hasn't improved in all these years. And neither has VLC's spectacularly awful UI. Coincidence, or cause and effect? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573499 DonHopkins on Feb 5, 2017 | parent |…

You've got some very confused beliefs about what mkv is and why it's used. Mkv is a container, not a codec, which is most often used to store lossy video and audio tracks. It can store lossless tracks too, but that is uncommon in practice. Other popular containers, such as mp4 (e.g. MPEG-4 Part 14), can also store lossless tracks.

The biggest reason anime people prefer mkv to mp4 is because mkv supports the ASS/SSA subtitle format, which is favored by the anime subbing community for its extremely versatile formatting options. For instance, it is common for subbers to cover up signs containing Japanese text with translated subtitle text, tracked to the video, styled and transformed to appear virtually seamless. Less relevant but still important to some people, mkv supports a plethera of old (and very lossy) video codecs, which is sometimes relevant when it comes to repackaging old encodes of hard to find media. Being able to copy in the old video codec without transcoding preserves what little quality there is while allowing you to package it with modern subtitles. Mkv also has superior support for chapters, metadata, etc.

But I get it, you hate anime and think weebs are pervs. I thought you were a man who values tolerance highly, but whatever man. It has little bearing on technical matters. Incidentally, anime people generally favor mpv above VLC, because the ASS/SSA support is a lot better in mpv (mpv uses it for rendering the psuedo-GUI.)

As for the bugs and UX issues in VLC, I assume that your claims are more accurate than your understanding of media containers, but VLC is nevertheless the best video player to recommend to nontechnical users you might find yourself playing tech support for. They won't tinker with it and therefore won't discover most of the issues you're talking about. What they'll get out of it is a media player that plays whatever file they throw at it, without feeling the need to run sketchy "codec packs" they found god knows where on the internet.

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

#353

Post by breck »

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

This thread is amazing. Thanks for pointing it out.

What's lovely is that it is indeed possible, but not trivial, and you can see Remi is sort of baiting to catch smart talented programmers to the project.

You can see the patience and long term horizon needed to lead a volunteer open source project. Time to study VLC more.

Thanks!

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

#354

Post by a1o »

KingMob wrote: post #227
a1o wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even about doing it, once added you have to maintain it, and then tomorrow a new format arises that makes this more a hassle, or some memory issue in an existing format is fixed in a way that changes it's memory profile and now VLC will crash with an out of memory. Seriously, I don't get these people that have infinite demands from open source developers and contribute zero.

It's because the developer is misconstruing a non-technical decision they made as a technical limitation. The commenters are trying to point this out, which misses the reality that the developer probably isn't going to budge from their requirement of universal support. That dev's rationalization also sends a signal to any commenter with the technical chops to submit a PR, that it will probably be rejected for not sup…

If someone really wanted to do it they will be contributing already continually and at some point start working on this with the expectation that they are the one maintaining it. And it would be fine because by then developers would already trust that person since they've been reliable.

It's not about "technical chops", it's about being constantly available, reliable person that shows to contribute day after day. If you don't do that why should a dev make the scope of their work bigger if they won't be able to keep putting the same quality of work?

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

#356

Post by lupusreal »

_flux wrote: post #297
mrob wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> just subtracting the inverse of frame rate from the current frame's timestamp

Variable frame rate (VFR) videos break this approach. It might seem like an esoteric edge case, TV and movies aren't VFR after all, but VFR is extremely common in videos from smartphones.

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

#357

Post by oefrha »

variadix wrote: post #111
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?

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…

> I think technically he’s correct (I haven’t worked on media decoding code, but I understand how common video encoding formats work).

He’s technically simply wrong (I have worked on media decoding code, hell I’m working on a related project today). His player supports seeking back by 10 seconds or whatnot, but he insists that somehow to implement precise seeking to the previous frame, you need to seek from the very beginning of the video, no two ways about it:

> There is not a slight technical difficulty. On a logical level, this feature is algorithmically impossible, except for the extreme: You can decode all frames up to the previous one. But this would be far too slow for anything except really short videos.

It’s obvious bullshit, if you encounter one of those pathological videos (that don’t really exist except in his mind or in some test suites) you just give up after a reasonable amount of time, same as how you give up if you can’t seek back ~10s in a reasonable amount of time.

And players do give up seeking all the time already, not just on these hypothetical one-I-frame-per-hour videos, but real world videos with messed up pts/dts with no reasonable way to go back a short interval.

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

#358

Post by Thaxll »

MPV is great for powerusers, for the vast majority of people just use VLC.

I used both over the year and there are still things that are really annoying in mpv:

- you can't render on a Chromecast

- opening a file that does not work does nothing, you don't know what's happening, is the file corrupted, is the codec not supported ??

- the no ui idea is nice for opening a single file, but then you go to the rabbithole of millions of settings / config to do anything more complicated, playlists? ( why can't I drag and drop on the window )

- it's hard to compile, so it's up to you to find up to date version on your distro

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

#359

Post by oefrha »

DonHopkins wrote: post #328
mdf wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a middle ground: Painstakingly describe the solution first, along with its downside of not being general in the same way as some of the existing features (I guess for example seeking back 10 seconds) are not, and ask whether a patch implementing this solution would be welcome before implementing it.

Oh, I already tried that, and it didn't work. https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=103604&p=407... I wanted to report a big about VLC's extraordinarily badly designed "Magnification/Zoom" user interface, so first I searched the forum to see if there was any other discussion about it, which there naturally was. So I painstakingly wrote up an extremely detailed description of a bunch of interrelated bugs rel…

To be fair, as a maintainer I also dread walls of text from super motivated people about details to which I assign very low priority. I’m never an asshole about it, though.

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

#360

Post by thrusong »

mpv is a key part of my home theatre automation I wrote in PHP.

It runs on a Pi 4. PHP assembles playlists with a Dolby ad, a vintage dancing hot dog ad, trailers, and the feature. It runs mpv through proc_open.

It monitors the progress and controls mpv through a socket to know when to dim or raise the lights, open or close the curtain, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7YEVGWJjvI

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