Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mpv.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 576 posts

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

#471

Post by mysteria »

One cool thing about mpv is that it can transcode audio encoded in different surround sound formats (AAC, FLAC, Atmos, etc.) into regular Dolby Digital for use with old pre HDMI AVRs using SPDIF. AFAIK it's the only player that can do this natively without any additional work on the OS level.

I'll just add this here but if you want this kind of transcoding for the entire system rather than just mpv you can use dcaenc with its virtual 6 channel input encoding everything to DTS. I send the encoded audio to the AVR using a cheap TI PCM27XX sound card with optical output.

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

#472

Post by djbusby »

literallycancer wrote: post #400
djbusby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We love VLC because it plays anything, everytime. And has done this, for a long time, since times when other players struggled. Maybe it's not the "Best" - it is still the goodest.

VLC doesn't play everything though. mpv plays stuff that VLC can't play. I never have to worry about codecs or installing anything.

Sure. My point is that VLC gets a special place. It "just works" for a decade before MPV, still does and across 3+ platforms!

MPV is great too! I think it's important to also recognize how rad VLC was and continues to be.

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

#473

Post by mardifoufs »

cypress66 wrote: post #282
user3939382 wrote: post #171

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.

VLC is only praised in "normie" places. It is hated in places like anime forums, 4chan, etc.

Maybe not hated but yeah I think the memes about the first memes I've seen about artifacts/stuttering in VLC are basically as old as VLC itself. And new ones keep getting made

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

#474

Post by mardifoufs »

mnsc wrote: post #452
thiht wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying going forward 1 frame in a video is in the scope, but going back 1 frame is out of scope. Weird stance.

If that feature would introduce a need to reactor or re-architect major parts of the the logic since everything has been built with the purpose of the playing video forwards supporting as many codecs as possible. Then, yes. And as a long time user of vlc video playback (and transcoding) I have never wanted to go back one frame. I always wanted to go back like 15 seconds, and that has worked forever.

Sure but that's completely different than claiming that it's out of scope or technically impossible. And that's completely different than your earlier example of implementing 3d rendering or something like that. They could just say that they don't want to do the feature, I think the pain point here is the claim that it is not possible.

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

#475

Post by Levitating »

IshKebab wrote: post #469
hobofan wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Tha…

VLC is able to abstract over a ton of extremely complicated codecs by providing some common tools that work for all of them.

I guess if VLC has a feature, you can always expect it to work. That's their design choice. There's nothing "COMPLETELY WRONG" about that.

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

#476

Post by spoaceman7777 »

Levitating wrote: post #475
IshKebab wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Tha…

VLC is able to abstract over a ton of extremely complicated codecs by providing some common tools that work for all of them. I guess if VLC has a feature, you can always expect it to work. That's their design choice. There's nothing "COMPLETELY WRONG" about that.

The most entertaining part of this thread is that VLC is actually in the process of replacing its backend with the mpv-derived libplacebo.

In the end, VLC has admitted defeat

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

#477

Post by sangnoir »

eviks wrote: post #387
maeln wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC is *amazing* at its design purpose: being a rock solid video player. The GUI, the UX, and other things can be criticized, but I dare you to find another video player that will play just about *anything*, and without having to install external codec separately with weird licence. You can throw at it a broken mp4 file, a https url with basic auth, a weirdly encoded video, a DVD full of scratches, etc, chances are V…

> without having to install external codec separately with weird licence. What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time And 99.99% of the time you don't play "everything, with scratches", so UX issues are much more consequential than that

> What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time

Then VLC is not for you - and there's nothing wrong with it or you - you just happen to have differing priorities. Back when the Internet was more p2p, the ability to play uncommon media formats and containers was crucial. Even today, VLC offers a lot of value to anyone who has to playback media whose encoding they have no control over.

VLC has other useful features as well (like streaming while playing back, allowing for multicomputer watch parties on the same network)

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

#478

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway11747 wrote: post #363
romanows wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a former developer that's no longer affiliated with the project since 2021 or thereabouts. They did not part on good terms because he behaved in the same way towards other mpv developers, "my way or the highway". So you probably shouldn't let anything that old sour your opinion on the current mpv. (I don't belong to either side, just have been using the player since its inception.)

[deleted]

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

#479

Post by iwishiknewlisp »

What I like most about mpv is how you can control it through its socket. Often times I will play a movie or tv show on a separate monitor, so being able to pause or rewind or change volume without switching workspaces is important. I have in my i3 config, keybindings so I can easily control mpv with my keyboard: https://github.com/ediw8311xht/dotfiles/blob/6a765910ab5ac17...

Additionally, mpv has a powerful script system. One of my favorite scripts is fast foward through intro, which is crucial for watching a tv show. https://github.com/rui-ddc/skip-intro. Another nice script is https://github.com/familyfriendlymikey/mpv-cut, which enables creating clips in mpv. There are a ton of other useful scripts, and its not difficult to create a custom script yourself using lua.

Mpv automatically resuming is also nice for watching tv shows or movies. Only problem is that if you shutdown mpv through killing the window then automatically resuming from history gets messed up.

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

#480

Post by iwishiknewlisp »

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.

Mpv is great with subtitles. Not just being able to switch through subtitle tracks and configure positioning, but also being able to automatically find and play external subtitle files when playing a video. I wrote an article about this: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mpv-subtitles-automatic. Only issue I found is the documentation for what subtitle formats are supported is lacking. You have to look through ffmpeg code to actually find what formats are actuallly supported.

Additionally, https://subdl.com/ with https://github.com/alexanderwink/subdl is a great resource for finding and downloading subtitles from the comand line.

Post reply on HN