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

mpv.io

461–470 of 576 posts

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

#461
post #20

A fantastic mediaplayer, quite minimalistic and performant; it does what it's supposed to do! Also has a fantastic commit where the author rants about locales: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02... worth a read for some chuckles.

Wow that comment is so educating. I guess I'll pay more attention now to standard functions I use in C code.

As for weirdness of C standard, I guess it is because they wanted to make it compatible with obscure proprietary platforms which might not even exist anymore.

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

#462
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That strikes me as such a strange statement, I’ve always considered it to be among the most impressive OSS projects out there. It tackles enormous complexity, works everywhere, and has a trove of a million hidden features. For example, I use it to headless play streams from CLI.

If you enter video-related enthusiast scenes, such as fansubbed anime releases, mpv is recommended over anything else across the board. There are releases that break in VLC, and mpv is usually first to support new features. It also has particularly good defaults in terms of good and accurate playback, so where you might see some people say "install mpc-hc and these scripts and change these settings", with mpv it's ju…

As someone who went MPC-HC + MadVR + ReClock -> mpv years ago (well, I also switched to Gentoo, to be fair). This is completely right.

BUT mpv still isn't perfect. The script in https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/8463 is really needed to handle some stuff (mainly clandestine anime) and the libplacebo/gpu-next transition wasn't exactly the smoothest (my config still has hotfixes for https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/10716 and https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/14474).

Nitpicking aside, it really is the new gold standard these days, and for good reasons.

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

#463
post #206
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be disabled by default?

In addition to what others have said, hardware decoding comes with other drawbacks. There’s occasionally decoding inaccuracies and there’s no support for most video filters (unless you’re using `auto-copy`)

Do you know if/why on apple silicon Macs there’s a difference between videotoolbox and videotoolbox-copy ? I thought the SoC memory is shared and that there wouldn’t be a need for copying data from VRAM to RAM.

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

#464
post #397
post #15

The best media player in existence: superb minimalist UI, makes use of hardware accelaration, and just plays videos. Its continued excellence is one of the reasons why I will probably remain a pirate for life. Streaming services spend millions on their players and don't come close.

It seems to me that YouTube cripples their web player on purpose to "entice" you to download their app and upgrade to premium.

I have YouTube ReVanced, which is better than premium, which is still not as good as mpv.

Other services are strictly premium, paid affairs. Still not as good as mpv.

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

#465
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I've had (significant) issues with color representation playing back "HDR" media in mpv.

Then you must have not used "mpv --vo=gpu-next". Playing HDR and Dolby Vision encoded movies has been solved a long time ago in mpv, but they usually need the option shown above, which may not be the default on your system. There are plenty of additional options in mpv that provide a finer control of how HDR colors are handled. While playing a movie with mpv, press "I", so that mpv will display the information it has…

I have used vo=gpu-next, actually. Still green/purple.

"I" shows: Primaries: bt.2020. Colormatrix: bt.2020-ncl. Levels: full. If that means anything.

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

#466
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still very green/purple. It's fine, I was able to find a non-HDR version.

Then you probably have either a very old mpv or one that was compiled without including the "gpu-next" video output driver. Or else the GPU drivers for your GPU card have not been updated for a very long time. A recent mpv and recent GPU drivers should solve this problem, because it was frequently encountered only up to a couple of years ago.

mpv 0.36.0 from July 2023, nvidia 555.58.02 drivers from August 2024 (Fedora 39).

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

#467
post #358

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…

Never had to deal with your third point, I just open it via the CLI and it's pretty verbose regarding issues it encounters.

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

#468

Can it do smooth scrubbing (i.e. scrolling the progress bar)? So many media players only show the key frames when scrubbing, making it a much less pleasant experience. Some mobile phones (Apple, Samsung) built-in media players seem to do it nicely, but I've never found a desktop media player that does it (VLC can't). Probably would require a lot of extra decoding behind the scenes to extract all the frames, but worth…

Yes, though you do have to enable that. For me I tend to have it buffer the video. That way I can even seek backwards of web streams.

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

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the other people commenting were being at all rude. They asked nicely if a feature would be possible. He replied with a blank "No" and from then on it was pretty much "but other players can do it so it must be possible" and him rudely and incorrectly asserting that it isn't and that anyway if it was why don't they do it if they want it so much. The correct response would have been something like "it's m…

I think the answer (read from between the lines) is more: "There is no way to make it work for the general case of all video formats, and we don't implement a feature unless it works for the general case, so we choose not to implement it at all. If that means that we don't have that feature for the file formats where it would works, that's a sacrifice that we are willing to take."

Agreed, and this is actually a really good point:

> we don't implement a feature unless it works for the general cas

I used to make that mistake a lot. My boss would say "can we do this", for example report memory usage per operation. And I would say "no because sometimes memory is shared between operations so it would be meaningless". In other words I couldn't do it perfectly so I said we couldn't do it at all.

That's what the VLC guy is doing and I didn't realise until I worked with that boss that it is COMPLETELY WRONG!

Just because you can't do it perfectly doesn't mean giving up entirely is the best you can do. In cases like this you can absolutely do something that works sometimes but not in every case and that is way better for users than just giving up.

Lots of programmers fall into that trap though.

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

#470
chiming in to say VLC is the best audio clip player I've found. every time in past I surveyed the space all other options I tried had one or more showstoppers like too buggy or not the right API. VLC (and driving it via either Golang or CLi) has been reliable, decently documented and ultra configurable.
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