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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

#511

Post by account42 »

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…

It's the opposite in my experience. Commercial software only cares at most about what is useful to the average user while anything for power users is written off as too expensive to maintain. And these days even if you pay you are often not the main customer since your data and attention is sold to someone else anyway, in which case what is useful to you matters even less.

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

#512

Post by adrian_b »

loeg wrote: post #465
adrian_b wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I" must show two sets of "Format: Levels: Colormatrix: Primaries: Transfer:", one set for "Display:" and one set for "Video:".

"mpv" or any other player must make a conversion from the color space used for encoding the video file to the color space supported by the monitor. A monitor that has not been reconfigured after the initial installation is likely to use the sRGB color space. Any good monitor should have a configuration menu that allows the selection of a better color space, but mpv can convert BT.2020 to sRGB, if necessary (which will reduce the saturation of many colors).

Did mpv print after being launched a line starting with "VO: [gpu-next]"?

Where "gpu-next" is not available, mpv will start anyway, but it will use one of the other video drivers, none of which convert correctly Dolby-encoded video.

On the computer where I normally play HDR/Dolby Vision movies, I use an NVIDIA GPU, so I know for sure that gpu-next works fine with it.

I do not remember whether I have played any HDR/Dolby Vision movie with an AMD or Intel GPU, but I doubt that any of those is incompatible with gpu-next.

In any case, if mpv prints "VO: [gpu-next]" without any error message and if "I" shows for "Display:" the correct color space supported by your monitor, e.g. sRGB or DCI-P3, then you should try to upgrade the GPU driver, which could be too old. Like I have said, IIRC this problem has been solved in 2022 and since then I have never encountered again color conversion errors, so you must have some software component that is older than 2022.

Because my monitor is configured to use the color space DCI-P3 (with 10-bit colors), I alias "mpv" to "mpv='mpv --vo=gpu-next --target-prim=dci-p3'", and it has been working fine for the last two years, including with any HDR and/or Dolby Vision movie.

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

#513

Post by account42 »

rocketvole wrote: post #432
defrost wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of MPC-HC v1.7.13 (2017) maybe try MPC-HC v2.3.4 (2024) https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc In many ways it's a display wrapper about codec components, the display part is in active maintainance and bug fix mode (last update two weeks ago) and the codecs are constantly being improved (and expanded as new ones emerge). https://www.codecguide.com/ There are two or three MPC-HC spin offs that are tweaking the core…

it's annoying that the clsid fork isn't associated with the website- it adds a lot of confusion to what is probably the video player that compromises between user friendliness and customizability. It's usually the video player that I recommend to people because it seems beter than vlc and has a GUI for settings as opposed to mpv.

This is one of the many reasons why forks should use a distinctive name to differentiate themselves. Just realeasing new versions with the same name as the upstream project is generally a dick move.

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

#515

Post by sureIy »

latexr wrote: post #498
sureIy wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No man, you don’t understand. I take every step possible to avoid people opening issues, they just either disregard the 4 steps between the problem and the GitHub issue, or just come out swinging saying I should just implement it “because many people want it” or I should suggest an alternative. My issue template specifically says “do not request this feature” and they still delete it and request it. I have no patienc…

> My issue template specifically says “do not request this feature” and they still delete it and request it. If they can delete it, that’s the first problem you should fix. Don’t use the old style of GitHub templates where it just dumps a bunch of prewritten text. Use the modern style with the YAML template that makes a GUI form. You can have mandatory checkboxes which say “I am not requesting [feature]”, with a link…

> that’s the first problem you should fix.

But you see how this is a battle against stupid people? I also had checkboxes before for other issues, people still blindly check them.

There is no winning. If people insist that they’re right and that I’m rude for closing the 25th issue that, ahem, reading 5 words would have avoided, I just block them and move forward.

> seeing every little comment as a personal attack

I’m patient when people open duplicate issues because they couldn’t find them, but this is different.

Imagine you’re talking to someone in person and you tell them “please don’t eat the cake” straight to their face, 4 times on the way to the kitchen. Then 5 minutes later they yell at me asking why the cake tastes like cardboard and glue.

Is that not completely disrespectful? I very much doubt you’ll think of them highly after that accident, unless they’re 5 year olds.

> in which way you see the people in this issue being assholes, particularly before the maintainer arrived and closed the issue without even beginning to understand the request?

I was talking about my own experience. As for him, it’s clear that he did understand the issue and he did not agree that it should be part of the player, for several reasons he then went on to explain.

I also get why one would want a player to also be able to cast videos, but then his suggestion to just use libmpv in a caster app made complete sense.

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

#516

Post by adrian_b »

loeg wrote: post #466
adrian_b wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

My output of "mpv --version":

  mpv 0.38.0 Copyright © 2000-2024 mpv/MPlayer/mplayer2 projects
  libplacebo version: v6.338.2
  FFmpeg version: 6.1.1
I do not remember which was the first version that worked fine. For some time, "gpu-next" was not included by default in the releases, but you had to compile a custom variant to include it.

Pay attention that "libplacebo" is required. If libplacebo is absent, then the Dolby Vision conversion will not work. This could be the reason of your problem, if your Linux distribution does not have libplacebo as an automatic dependence of mpv, or if mpv has been compiled without support for libplacebo.

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

#517

Post by account42 »

hobofan wrote: post #427
IshKebab wrote: post #378

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."

Except even that answer makes no sense since VLC implements time-based seeking which has the same requirements as seeking to a specific frame number. The only additional part to implement is automatically skipping forward a number of frames after the closest preceeding seek point.

Adding a requirement of supporting this perfectly with literally all formats you can think of is not reasonable at all since a video player that stuck to that principle would not be able to support any controls at all. It's the kind of bullshit excuse developers or corporations like to give when they don't want to implement something but also don't want to be honest about that.

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

#518

Post by account42 »

spoaceman7777 wrote: post #476
Levitating wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Both use FFMPEG anyway so it's not like VLC's codec abstraction was really something that sets it apart.

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

#519

Post by account42 »

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…

Exactly an in this case it even works 99.99% and VLC already has a related feature (seeking to a specific time) that has pretty much the same codec requirements.

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

#520

Post by sureIy »

latexr wrote: post #498
sureIy wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No man, you don’t understand. I take every step possible to avoid people opening issues, they just either disregard the 4 steps between the problem and the GitHub issue, or just come out swinging saying I should just implement it “because many people want it” or I should suggest an alternative. My issue template specifically says “do not request this feature” and they still delete it and request it. I have no patienc…

> My issue template specifically says “do not request this feature” and they still delete it and request it. If they can delete it, that’s the first problem you should fix. Don’t use the old style of GitHub templates where it just dumps a bunch of prewritten text. Use the modern style with the YAML template that makes a GUI form. You can have mandatory checkboxes which say “I am not requesting [feature]”, with a link…

For entertainment purposes, I’ll give you another example of someone I encountered on my repos.

One guy opens 2 extremely long and conversational issues describing how my software is really ugly and it should be more like other software. Then went ahead suggesting that the other developer hasn’t updated his software for a while because he got lazy (their words), so I should just rip his code and improve it, disregarding mine.

This went back and forth for a while, eventually arriving at the solution they wanted: that miraculous feature I don’t want to implement and that they knew I didn’t want to implement. Closed and locked both issues, so they opened another one.

What am I supposed to do? I said no and you keep saying you know better.

Is it because I’m burned out or because they’re the usual OSS user who has nothing to offer and a lot to expect?

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