mpv is

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg. It runs on several

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s, including

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems (

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

, BSD-based,

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

) and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

, along with having an Android

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as H ...

called mpv-android. It is

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

, running on ARM,

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM– ...

, x86/

IA-32 IA-32 (short for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit", commonly called i386) is the 32-bit version of the x86 instruction set architecture, designed by Intel and first implemented in the 80386 microprocessor in 1985. IA-32 is the first incarnatio ...

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

, and

MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

.Debian - Details of package mpv
/ref>

History

mpv was forked by Vincent Lang, also known as wm4, in 2012 from mplayer2, which was forked in 2010 from MPlayer. The motive for the fork was to encourage developer activity by removing unmaintainable code and dropping support for very old systems. As a result, the project had a large influx of contributions. Since June 2015, the project's

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

is in the process of being relicensed from

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

version 2 (GPLv2) or later to GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (LGPLv2.1) or later to allow using mpv as a

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vi ...

in more applications.

Changes from MPlayer

mpv has had several notable changes since it was forked from MPlayer; the most user-visible being the addition of an on-screen-controller (OSC) minimal GUI integrated with mpv to offer basic mouse-controllability. This was intended to make interaction easier for new users and to enable precise and direct seeking. *;Video websites: By using

youtube-dl youtube-dl is a free and open source download manager for video and audio from YouTube and over 1,000 other video hosting websites. It is released under the Unlicense software license. As of September 2021, youtube-dl is one of the most starre ...

, mpv natively supports playback of

high-definition video High-definition video (HD video) is video of higher resolution and quality than standard-definition. While there is no standardized meaning for ''high-definition'', generally any video image with considerably more than 480 vertical scan lines ...

(HD) content and audio on YouTube and over 1000 other supported sites. This allows mpv to replace site-specific video players based on

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Flash ...

or HTML5. *;High quality video output: mpv includes a customizable video output driver based on

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

as well as the

Vulkan API Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfo ...

, which supports over 100 options for controlling playback quality, including the use of advanced upscaling filters,

color management In digital imaging systems, color management (or colour management) is the controlled conversion between the color representations of various devices, such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, film printers, computer printer ...

, and customizable

pixel shaders In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of ...

. *;Audio scaling algorithm:The player is equipped with a scaletempo2 parameter for speed changing at constant pitch, for which it uses the ''Waveform Similarity Overlap-and-add (WSOLA)'' algorithm, citing more smoothness than the original ''scaletempo'' used in the original ''mplayer'', and ''rubberband''. *;Improved client API: Beyond working as a stand-alone media player, mpv is designed to be used directly by other applications through a library interface called libmpv. This required making all mpv code thread safe. An example of an application which uses libmpv is Plex. This form of player control, along with a JSON IPC mechanism, replaces MPlayer's "slave mode". *;Encoding subsystem: mpv includes a new

video encoding In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...

mode that can be used to save files being played under different formats. This allows mpv to work as a

transcoder Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target devic ...

, supporting many video formats. This feature serves as a direct replacement for the MEncoder component of MPlayer, which was a separate program rather than being built into the player. *;Lua scripting: mpv's behavior and functions are customizable via use of small programs written in the Lua scripting language, which can be used for tasks like cropping video, providing a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, ins ...

(GUI) or automatically adjusting the display's refresh rate.

Removed functions

* all support for VCD discs

Interface and graphical front-ends

Like the original MPlayer, mpv is still primarily a command-line application although it has a more advanced user interface than MPlayer that can use not only the keyboard but also the mouse for mpv’s on screen controller (OSC). However, this OSC is still not a full-featured

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

, and there are a number of front-ends available, which use GUI widgets for Qt, GTK, or some other widget toolkit to give mpv a more complete graphical interface. The following are all

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

front-ends of mpv (based on "libmpv" or the command-line version of mpv) which try to provide more features and more user-friendly interface than mpv, and/or better integration with various

s or

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a grap ...

s. * Baka MPlayer - media player on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

, and

although macOS version requires the user to compile from source, with

Qt5 Qt (pronounced "cute") is cross-platform software for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems wi ...

widgets, written in C++. Its main goal is uncluttered, simple design. Its development stalled in January 2017 in favor of another mpv frontend by the same developers, Mochi Player, which is not quite finished yet. * Deepin Movie - for

- Written by and default video player for the Chinese

Deepin Deepin (stylized as deepin; formerly known as Linux Deepin and Hiweed Linux) is a Linux distribution based on the Debian "stable" branch. It features the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE), built on Qt and available for a variety of distribution ...

distro and desktop environment. GNOME MPV (Celluloid) 0

* Celluloid (formerly GNOME MPV) - for

- based on GTK Its goal is to be a simple GTK-based graphical interface for mpv that meets the

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its character ...

. * IINA -

10.10+ media player with native macOS

Cocoa Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter an ...

interface It is a full-featured native macOS graphical interface for mpv that makes use of new features in the most recent versions of macOS. mpv config file and script system are also integrated. * Kawaii-Player -

and

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on ...

- media player and media server with

widgets. Its goal is to not just be a multimedia player but also an audio/video library manager and portable media server and

torrent Torrent or torrents may refer to: * A fast flowing stream Animals * Torrent duck, a species of the family Anatidae * Torrent fish * Torrent frog, various unrelated frogs * Torrent robin, a bird species * Torrent salamander, a family of sa ...

streaming server/player. * Media Player Classic Qute Theater (mpc-qt) -

and

media player with

widgets, written in C++. Its goal is to reproduce and ultimately improve upon the functionality of Media Player Classic Home Cinema (mpc-hc), a Windows-only program, as a cross-platform mpv-based multimedia player that also works on

operating systems like Linux. * mpv.net -

media player with native Windows interface. Its goal is to provide the standard mpv OSC interface on Windows along with a customizable Windows context menu, C# scripting, and a Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) for addons. * OvoPlayer -

and

music player that supports many backends, based on LCL

widgetset Widgetsets support platform-sensitive development with the Lazarus IDE system. They act as adapter libraries that provide an interface between a platform-inpedentent sourcecode written in Free Pascal and platform-specific system A system is ...

s, written in

Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Frenc ...

. Its goal is to be a flexible audio player that supports as many audio engine backends like mpv as possible. * SMPlayer - full-featured, cross-platform and skinable with advanced features and

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

and

Chromecast Chromecast is a line of digital media players developed by Google. The devices, designed as small dongles, can play Internet-streamed audio-visual content on a high-definition television or home audio system. The user can control playback w ...

support that can use MPlayer or mpv. Available for

and

, and written in C++ with Qt4/Qt5. * Sugoi Player - media player on

(that might work on

and

but those are untested) forked from Baka MPlayer, with

widgets, written in C++. It aims to improve upon and continue development of an mpv frontend based on Baka MPlayer, since Baka MPlayer’s development stalled in January 2017. * xt7-player-mpv -

media player with Qt5 or Qt4 widgets, written in Gambas 3 (a dialect of

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

). Its goal is usability, and a variety of extra features like

and SHOUTcast integration, media tagging, library and playlist management, as well as adding more features beyond that.

References

External links