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mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

mpv.io

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Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#71
post #14

Why not VLC? I suppose mplayer and its forks are good for cross platform. On Windows, and if you ask me, the best experience i have now is MPC-BE. Which is based on MPC-HC, which is based on MPC.

Personally I've always preferred mplayer's no-nonsense interface. That's been the biggest thing that has kept me an mplayer user for several years now.

VLC also seems to mandate a larger performance hit while playing a video, no matter what.

For the most part, VLC and mplayer provide a similar experience, and both tools have major dependencies on ffmpeg. It's just a matter of preference on the interface, and if you utilize any of VLC's niceties that justify its performance decrease (I've heard this happens because VLC forces software processing of the image at some stage to facilitate easy application of filters, and mplayer (and its descendants) doesn't. I don't know if this is true or not).

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#72

Aw, I was hoping to see that slave mode was fixed. I want to use slave mode to make a music player with my own user interface and library/playlist manager in Ruby without having to worry about how to actually play the music. Unfortunately slave mode in mplayer seems kind of unstable and sometimes even gives the wrong answer (I think it's a known bug). I wasn't aware of mplayer2, I'll have to try that and see if it wo…

While MPD is probably ideal for your use case, there are lots of toolkits that facilitate this delegation. Many Linux apps utilize GStreamer to do this, including several very prominent ones. Heck, even VLC and mplayer are just "interfaces" on top of decoders. It's pretty uncommon to rewrite this type of code, considering its complexity. There a lot of tools that allow you to reuse media decoders and output frameworks.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#73
post #3

As a user this is all just a big mess. Mplayer2 had some nice improvements (does straight mplayer support mkv segment linking yet?) but also removed some important features (e.g. mencoder). (Side note: ffmpeg has been refusing patches to add new filters because they're working on a new filter infrastructure. For something like 4 years now). It's even worse if you're on windows and want to use a frontend as well. Here…

mencoder is an abomination. Unless you have an actual real-life use case where mencoder works and ffmpeg doesn't, use ffmpeg; practically everything else does, regardless of licensing (ffmpeg has a wall of shame, which I'm sure comprises only a small sample of infringers, on their site).

Last time I tried encoding with raw ffmpeg it couldn't even render subtitles.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#74
post #3

As a user this is all just a big mess. Mplayer2 had some nice improvements (does straight mplayer support mkv segment linking yet?) but also removed some important features (e.g. mencoder). (Side note: ffmpeg has been refusing patches to add new filters because they're working on a new filter infrastructure. For something like 4 years now). It's even worse if you're on windows and want to use a frontend as well. Here…

mencoder is an abomination. Unless you have an actual real-life use case where mencoder works and ffmpeg doesn't, use ffmpeg; practically everything else does, regardless of licensing (ffmpeg has a wall of shame, which I'm sure comprises only a small sample of infringers, on their site).

What's wrong with mencoder? I use it for everything, how is ffmpeg better?

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#75

I have been a VLC user on Windows for years. I've actually stuck with VLC 1.1.5 for 2 reasons: 1. It plays any local video I throw at it. Other people tell me "It doesn't play some of my videos" but I haven't seen this actually occur. Or when I do, it's because they're using a newer version of VLC which has removed support or changed processing. VLC has terrible license problems and awful feature creep. I had some .m…

VLC may play lot of videos, but it has the most systematically terrible user interface of any program I have ever seen. Just absolutely horrible, on a level that could not possibly just the results of ignorance and carelessness, but it actually seems to optimized to actively fuck the user on purpose.

OK, perhaps I was too harsh saying that VLC had the most systematically terrible user interface of any program I have ever seen. I had forgotten about The Gimp. They are both suffering from the same kind of pathological user interface problems that seem to result from a pretentious and cliquish committified developer community whose individual members each care much more about overdeveloping their particular paroquial corners of the applications than how it all fits together as a whole, and who religiously refuse to even consider looking at competing commercial products because to expose themselves to any non-open-source software would make them impure and suck out all their precious bodily fluids. But at least VLC's name wasn't chosen for the express purpose of being bigoted and obnoxious and repelling ordinary mainstream users, under the false pretense of being whimsically humorous and self deprecating like Git.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#76
I've been using mpv for a few months now and have to say that I grew to like it. Coming from mplayer I'm used to not asking myself "Can my player play this piece of data" but just throw it in and see what happens. mpv does this just as well (if not better) than mplayer.

Besides that theres a zillion little usability improvements that make using it much better than mplayer, which is one of the main reasons why I stuck with it.

The integration of libquvi is also pretty nice; Just throw a youtube URL into mpv and it'll play - even the ones you can only view with flash in the browser. :)

But beware, this was a bitch to get running on Gentoo. YMMV.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#77
post #20

Been using mpv for many months as my only video player on my laptop Archlinux setup and everything has been great. Been telling people to check it out and no single complaint has been given, and most have changed solely to mpv. The -opengl-hq option is a great option to easily get acceptable quality playback without the hassle. But even still, Windows is so much ahead in video playback by just a hobby of one guy (Mad…

Been using mpv the last few days, replacing mplayer2. It doesn't seem to be activating VDPAU correctly despite using the sample config file as a template. The console output clearly indicates VDPAU vo, but I still get 40% CPU usage with HD footage and occasional slowdowns (including the slightly-modified classic MPlayer "your computer is too slow to play this!" message) while playing videos. While mpv sounds like a g…

Did you actually activate vdpau with `--hwdec=vdpau`? If you did can you please open a issue so that your specific problem can be investigated?

The switch changed from mplayer/mplayer2 and mpv uses the new hwaccel api where available (instead of the custom decoder).

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#78
post #2

Apparently I was living under a rock, because I was unaware of mpv... Maybe you too? mpv is a free and open-source general-purpose video player. It is based on the MPlayer and mplayer2 projects which it greatly improves. Changes from mplayers: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/en/ch... Quoting JEEB's explanation from IRC: > sounds like mplayer2, which used to be uau's patchset for mplayer. And th…

anyone knows an Ubuntu PPA for mpv ? couldn't build on mint 15, because of outdated *-dev packages, so out of lazyness I ask for binaries.

no ppa yet, but someone made a github repo with fresh dependencies https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv-build

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#79

I've been using http://mplayerx.org/ exclusively. It seems to handle files better than vlc for me, and has a nicer mac like player.

That player has a nice GUI but renders colors incorrectly with common h264 HD videos that use planar YUV colorspace (pretty much all of them use it).

It always uses the BT.601 colormatrix to perform the YUV -> RGB colorspace conversion. While for HD material one should use the BT.709 colormatrix.

In practice you will notice darker reds that are closer to purple for this implementation error.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#80
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And unlike mplayer, mplayer2, wmp, and most other players out there, you don't have to goto some random website and download some random codec pack, and install it with who knows what malware. All the codecs are included with the program. You're absolutely right to tag that as FUD, because I have never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs" in order to get videos to play in MPlayer on Linux (I do…

>never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs" Second that. I have had videos which couldn't be played on VLC (codecs or missing frames) play nicely with mplayer. Easily the best versatile player, especially if you are conversant with the command line options ( or take a quick look at man page).

At least some time ago, for Windows there was a (main) installer that included the player and the most used codecs, and there also was available an additional package with the uncommon codecs. This is what I've got after a quick search: http://data.netfast.org/downloadse.html
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