mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player | Hacker News Reader

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

mpv.io

195 pointsprzemoc83 comments

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 then mpv was forked out of mplayer2 because uau wouldn't merge things from other developers

Lachs0r's Windows binaries: http://mpv.srsfckn.biz/

I discovered it few days ago. Currently trying to set up Xmonad to work with it's fullscreen.

What are the main pros comparing to, lets say, VLC?

The main selling point of mpv, IMHO, is video quality and color correctness. You can get pretty nice results (on par with MadVR on Windows) with --vo=opengl-hq and it's many suboptions.

Minimalism is also something people are interested in. mpv has 1/5 the code of mplayer and 1/6 of VLC but still has relevant features.

They appeal to different kind of users. For example, even if I am in the mpv team, I will recommend VLC to my 'average Joe' friend as I know he would be put off by the CLI usage and config file editing.

It's nice to see a renewed interest in developing mplayer. Do you know if there are plans to get it packaged by the major distros?

I know it was added to deb-multimedia some days ago and it is also in the gentoo-multimedia overlay and on AUR.

I think many distributions would consider mpv a duplicate of mplayer, so for one to be packaged officially the other would have to be removed. Realistically that's not going to happen anytime soon.

My experience with mplayer (and hopefully mpv) has been that it's very resilient - it's able to play almost any video file, even those that crash or lock up VLC. And it's blazingly fast too.

While I have VLC installed, I think I haven't used it for ages, constantly relying on mplayer2 almost since its inception, until today that is. :)

In the past VLC used to display wrong colors or downgrade video quality for better performance, not sure how it is now (possibly a bit better).

Relevant: http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=Media_Playe...

low startup time, powerful command line options

> powerful command line options

Don't be fooled by simplified mpv --help output. :)

    Usage:   mpv [options] [url|path/]filename
    
    Basic options: (complete list in the man page)
     --start=<time>    seek to given (percent, seconds, or hh:mm:ss) position
     --no-audio        do not play sound
     --no-video        do not play video
     --fs              fullscreen playback
     --sub=<file>      specify subtitle file to use
     --playlist=<file> specify playlist file

There is much more in man page.

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/en/op...

"The procedure entry point strlen could not be located in the dynamic link library msvcrt.dll" - got this from the Lachs0r's "latest" when testing on Windows XP SP3 (which is still officially supported). What Windows is targeted?

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

> (from the changelog) Support for playing URLs of popular streaming sites directly (e.g. mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...)

While a nice effort, this will really put a fast freshness date to their builds. Popular streaming sites continuously changes their api's to prevent third-party software from using their service.

The support is done through libquvi, so the distro only needs to update libquvi-scripts to make it behave.

It's really rare to see SRUs (or the equivalent back-porting) for things like this, though. On distros I've used, amsn would break in stable for months at a time when Microsoft decided to change the protocol; the generally-accepted advice was "use the package from {development/unstable/whatever the newest branch is}" which would itself require bringing in all the random new dependencies and possibly breaking X/the desktop environment/something else.

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 .mkv files which didn't play correctly, so I downgraded from 1.1.10 to 1.1.5, and they play just fine. That's right, the 3-year old player plays the newest .mkv files much better than the 2-year old player or the newest player.

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.</FUD> All the codecs are included with the program.

Reading this github doesn't tell me why I should use mpv instead of vlc 1.1.5. Actually, it tells me I'll have to go find these random codec packs again, opening myself to possible CSRF attacks and other malware from poorly-secured or malicious codec providers. I'm already trusting the media player install package to not be evil, and I'd rather only have to trust 1 install package instead of it and several codec install packages.

2. I actually downgraded from VLC 2.0 to 1.1.10 because of VLC's terrible responsiveness. I don't know what changed, but it has made VLC 2.0 too annoying to use. The delay is a second or 2, which is a second or 2 longer than it used to be, and a second or 2 longer than it needs to be. When I go from a quiet video to a loud video, and I roll the mousewheel to lower the volume, that volume change needs to happen immediately, not after a 1-2 second delay.

I like that responsiveness is one of the bullet points.

I would have downloaded it and tried it out, but I don't know how to make this on Windows.

> 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.</FUD> 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 don't know how it is on Windows).

>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

mplayer and mplayer2 use the Windows codec libraries.

Playing a video usually means having to learn about codec packs like ffdshow from Google searches and random internet forums, and then finding the legitimate website for the codec pack (not a linkspam site or a rehosting company like cnet who bundle Ask toolbar into the installer), then locating and downloading the codec pack on the (sometimes intentionally) badly designed website, and giving it blanket permission to alter files on your hdd.

I don't want this to become a fanboy flamewar, but the above process is time consuming, technically difficult & also requires a broad and complex network of social trusts. Whereas VLC "just works", well at least the older versions.

---

I don't know where my responses would lead a media player developer. I don't like licensed codecs, but I understand that encoding groups will use the codecs which work best; illegally if necessary since encoding tv & movies for free downloading are all still legal and moral grey-areas. And I know people want to be paid for their art which others have demand for. And free media player developers don't want to pay to license codecs when they gain no benefit over just supporting whatever codec libraries the OS has installed.

Are you thinking of Media Player Classic? Mplayer/Mplayer2 use their own bundled ffmpeg as VLC does.

...I thought mplayer was media player classic...

There is absolutely no connection between the two. Media Player Classic is an open-source imitation of the "classic" UI of Windows Media Player, and is only for Windows and was originally closed-source (but is now GPLed). MPlayer is an open-source cross-platform media player that doesn't have a default GUI.

You should edit your post then, mplayer is completely different. It plays tons of formats, and is my personal favorite media player.

It's too old to edit.

None of what you are saying about mplayer has been true for years. And it has never been necessary to download codec packs for mplayer2.

Just wanted to let you know that this comment of yours from last year was a huge help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4476649

Thanks!

Oh thanks! That's always nice to hear.

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.

Uh...what?

The UI is plain, but all of the controls I regularly need are there. And I ABSOLUTELY LOVE that every hotkey is rebindable. If you don't like "change subtitles" to be V, you can change it to be P or even Alt-V. (Why can't we rebind Windows Copy to be Alt-W instead of Ctrl-C?)

And last I checked, the UI can be skinned too, but I grew up with plain interfaces.

So why does it have one set of controls in window mode, and a totally different set of controls in full screen mode? Who decided that?

I don't know -- I'm using a 3 year old version where the windowed and fullscreen controls are almost the same. (the only difference is fullscreen doesn't have "shuffle" or "playlist")

The same guy who did the same for Quicktime and tons of other programs back in the day...

You're quite right. It's almost unusable on Windows in its default configuration.

I particularly like how difficult it is to toggle full-screen playback with the keyboard. F11 makes it full screen, but doesn't hide the controls. Ctrl-H hides the controls, but also disables keyboard shortcuts!

So now, when you want to get out of full-screen mode, you have to know that you need to press Esc followed by F11. Not even double-click gets you back to windowed mode.

This kind of asymmetric mode toggling drives me up the walls. That, and the fact it doesn't pause when you click the video.

This must be some new weird change with the most recent version. The version I use has F as the fullscreen button, and either F or ESC will exit fullscreen. And the controls auto-hide.

That's why I stick to the 1.1.5 version!

No, F11 is the only way documented in the menu to get full-screen playback. F is not documented anywhere in the player UI; instead, it's buried away in the keybinding section of the preferences. The whole point of showing accelerators in the menu is to enable keyboard shortcuts for frequent commands to be learned; that VLC doesn't do this consistently is, alone, an indictment of its UI.

F11 and Alt-Enter are generally the two idioms for getting full-screen behaviour on Windows. Both work in Media Player Classic. Alt-Enter comes from the old DOS box from Windows 3; I'm not sure, but I think IE 4 pioneered F11. In any case, F11 works with Firefox, Chrome and IE; Alt-Enter also works with IE, Mintty, etc.

Nop. 2.0.5 here (2.0.8 is the latest) and f works just fine. I guess barrkel had enough time to whine on a forum but not enough to look in the program's preferences.

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.

What's so horrible about it? It looks like most media players. The playlist could use some love, but if you're only playing a single (long) video at a time it doesn't matter to much.

The playlist actually has a lot of options which are randomly buried in the settings. You can change settings so double-clicking a video file just adds it to the end of the playlist. Or you can make every new video open in its own new player. Like I said, feature creep is one of VLC's biggest problems.

Some but not all of the changes I make to the configuration (like key bindings in particular) don't take effect until I restart VLC. What the fuck???

http://forums.logitech.com/t5/G-Series-Gaming-Keyboards/G19-...

"In VLC, as of 1.1.11, you have to go to interface, preferences, hotkeys, and doubleclick the GLOBAL hotkey you need to set. Press the media key on the keyboard, and it'll return but will act like nothing changed. Click "Apply" and it should show you the media key identification of the key you pressed. Once you have setup all your keys, save, and completely exit and restart VLC."

For me, on both Mac and Windows, VLC key bindings fail to take effect until I restart it (any key bindings, not just global media hotkeys), and many options simply don't get saved at all. I have to hand edit the configuration text file. Ridiculous.

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=91154

"Saving can fail. And sometimes it can even output corrupted file."

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=13340

"As for saving, make sure you click 'Save' on the options dialog. OK applies them without saving, while Save applies and saves them."

Yes I am pressing the "Save" button. There is no "OK" button, and if there was both an OK and a Save button, that would still be a terrible user interface design.

Basic simple things like that just don't work. Maybe my preferences file keeps getting corrupted, but that should NOT happen, ever. At least it should give me an error message instead of just silently losing. Shameful.

Then there's the way it decides to resize the playlist window really big for no reason at all. Why can't the playlist window just stay the same size?

It crashes all the time, and then when I restart it, it ALWAYS asks if I want to report the last crash to the development team. No I don't, and I also don't want it to ask me that every fucking time. I just want it to shut the fuck up and play a video. Of course there is no option I can find to turn off that annoying modal pop-up dialog. A not-terribly-designed user interface would have a checkbox on the annoying modal dialog that says "Never ask me this ever again", and I wouldn't have to go through an unsuccessful wild goose chase through the millions of advanced options searching for a way to turn that dialog off.

The simple preference user interface has checkbox options to disable video and audio. What's the point of that? In fact, those are the first options in the video and audio sections! Who would ever want to disable video or audio in a video player? You already have a volume and mute control, and you can disable video and audio tracks from the menus. So why is that the first option in the simple preferences user interface? Was there a huge demand from novice users for that option? Terrible user interface design.

There are many other things about the UI design that are extremely annoying, a lot having to do with the out of control feature creep and totally uncoordinated committee design. All those advanced options, yet there is no way to set it to always show advanced options every time. Isn't it ironic that it has millions of options, but no option to always show the millions of options by default? Or maybe it's just failing to save the "advanced mode" option. So lame.

It gives me the distinct impression that nobody on the development team gives a shit.

I had a problem similar to the one you described, but it went away when I moved backwards to VLC 1.1.5. I think 1.1.10/1.1.11 was just a very buggy release, as mkv playback is also broken on that version.

Those are "options buried in the settings", quite the opposite of "feature creep". You've got to enable them, and doing so makes the application behave thew way that you want it to, and not be confined to the default configuration.

The programs that have a problem are the ones that dumb-down the UI to the point that it's impossible to deviate from the defaults.

It is the iTunes of the open source media world. An abomination, at least it isn't as bad as Calibre.

Are all the codecs that VLC ships with freely redistributable? I was under the impression that many required licensing agreements even to distribute for free which impedes open source projects without a corporate backing from doing so.

AFAIK, they're not, which is one of the reasons that newer versions of VLC have problems playing videos which play fine on older versions -- because the license-requiring codecs have been removed, and only sometimes replaced by free codecs or workarounds.

Does VLC 1.1.5 support HI10P (10-bit H.264 video)? That would be one reason to upgrade, as many anime releases now use HI10P (http://wiki.bakabt.me/index.php/Hi10P).

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's hoping the various groups resolve their differences somehow or a clear winner emerges.

I believe the new filter infrastructure is now in ffmpeg. Infact they added many filters lately (1.2 and 2.0 releases) and ported most of libmpcodecs (mplayer's) filters.

mplayer still doesn't support mkv segment linking.

Looking through the changes that mpv introduces, it looks like they've brought back encoding. The primary motivation for yet-another-mplayer-fork, is that they are explicitly removing complex, obsolete code in an effort to encourage fresh blood to join the developers; given that what they are removing includes 'teletext' support, this is probably not a bad thing.

I am sure that there will be an outcry among teletext users how the devs dared to remove their favourite feature!

Let’s see when/what Debian releases…

In central Europe teletext is still supported by all TVs and broadcasting companies. A lot of older people read the latest news via teletext. The browsing effect is similar to HN, it shows just the news headlines and the interface is text only - no fancy graphics or ads. With a single button press you see a short summary. That way you can read the news of the day in less than 5min - something that is hard to achieve for Joe Doe with the internet.

I am probably the only mplayer+teletext user in Australia. I'm trying to strip out the subtitles from a DVB-T stream and do an analysis of the words used on a commercial vs a public channel.

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?

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

It does now, even supporting libass to render ASS/SSA subtitles.

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 (Madshi, software being Madvr) that it is a shame to Os X and desktop linux. FRC (smooth motion without any of the soap opera effect people hate) completely removes the need to use 23.976 Hz on your monitor, so you can use what your monitor is build to use. With Jinc + anti-ringing filter as the scaler, your image looks gorgeus even how much you need to upscale it.

These are the reasons my HTPC still runs Windows even though I love mpv and would like to change but my eyes can't make the jump just yet.

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 good thing in theory, I might just remain content with mplayer2. Now at least a single point has been given.

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).

The whole media playing world is just a weird place with lots of twists and turns, and lots of sharp edges. There is always a new fork, some new clever filter, or a new API spawning somewhere, nothing never stabilizing. And of course lots of things being subjective and/or hardware-dependent making finding the "best" solution difficult.

Reminds me of http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=12 .

It's great to see mpv talked about on HN. I started using uau's patches for MPlayer a while ago (mainly for mkv segment linking, which has already been mentioned in the comments here and is a feature that MPlayer-svn still lacks.) That set of patches got renamed to mplayer2 and since mplayer2 development ground to a halt, mpv was the logical next step.

Development is fast and the developers are friendly and helpful. It's exciting to see improvements in the accuracy and quality of the GL video output and, since I like to use the same video player on Windows and Linux, it's also nice to see much needed attention to detail in the Windows port, including support for Unicode filenames. Overall, mpv is probably my favourite media player and I recommend it to any MPlayer/mplayer2 user.

The lack of a GUI may be a problem for some users, but hopefully that's fixed soon. A new slave mode is planned that doesn't suffer from the problems of the old MPlayer one, which was always very incomplete and required GUI frontends to parse MPlayer output that was intended for users. There's also the possibility of using lua and libass to draw a minimal QuickTime-like on screen display with a seekbar.

Sadly it doesn't work with SMPlayer. They seemed to have changed some options.

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.

Lets see if VLC has finally added sane output support... /me checks http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=av

Nope. sigh

[X11, SDL, FrameBuffer] These are all basically dumb framebuffers.

[XVideo] Ahh, the X Video Extension... from 22 years ago. It only accelerates some specific parts of the process such as the final colorspace conversion.

[ASCII Art] I assume they mean libaa. How last decade. Besides, everybody knows the Cool Kids all moved on to libcaca's seductive ECMA-48 color escape sequences anyway. :p

In all seriousness, I've used mplayer{,2} because it brings my CPU usage down into to the <1%-2% range on most videos thanks to pretty much all of the work being done on the video card by way of VDPAU. How much do I care about this? Well let's see:

  (100% == one fully ussed core of my old 3GHz Core2, gpu is a 9800gtx)
  video is: 1280x720 23.976fps h.264 High profile L4.0   (no audio)

  CPU usage w/ vdpau: mpv  2.8%, /usr/bin/X 5.2%
  CPU usage w/ x11:   mpv 10.4%, /usr/bin/X  36%

[aside]Wow; it seems mpv has improved the software rendering engine. mplayer{,2} used to be about 10% to 15% higher![/aside]

Even on non-Nvidia hardware, the software has always had a very strong focus on efficiency. Their GL output drivers are great, and even the bad, old Matrox G200 I was stuck for far too long was fully supported. I wouldn't have been able to watch some videos without the hardware-assist.

There are other reasons I've always liked mplayer too, but the fact that it actually plays the videos that were a slideshow in vlc (and most other players) made the choice obvious.

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).

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.

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.

I remember when I had to use MPlayer as it was the only video player with dual core support (some special build) and as my graphic cards are always rather old that was the only way for me to watch 720p videos :)

Some general comments about comments here:

Never checked back on VLC, back when I tried it 4-5 years ago it was terribly buggy and crashed all the time.

Codec Packs are a thing of the past for me ever since I discovered CCCP [1] many years ago

MPC-HC [2] or SPlayer [3] (back when it was released there were some GPL violations,open sourced afterwards [4]) are my go-to players. MPC with CCCP plays everything, SPlayer is extremely simple while maintaining top quality.

[1] http://www.cccp-project.net/

[2] http://mpc-hc.org/

[3] http://www.splayer.org/index.en.html (down, cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.spl...)

[4] https://code.google.com/p/shooter-player/

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 works any better.

But does anyone know of a program or library with a proper interface for controlling a music player?

Have you heard of MPD? I think it's pretty much what you're looking for, there's even a ruby library. Check it out, it's a great piece of software. http://www.musicpd.org/

That or xmms2.

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.

With all the talk of VLC for media playback...

I use mplayer almost daily for no-frills internet radio listening. I have my terminal window open all day anyway, so no need to waste resources (screen real-estate or otherwise) on iTunes or VLC.

For example, Groove Salad's AAC stream:

mplayer -playlist http://somafm.com/groovesalad130.pls

Seeing a focus on OSX improvements in mpv, I am hoping we'll see it installable via homebrew some day soon.

It is installable via homebrew very easily: https://github.com/mpv-player/homebrew-mpv

The formula also builds `mpv.app`, I use that to open files directly from the Finder.

Great, thank you for the tip. It worked!

I ran in to a few speedbumps along the way, but it turns out I just needed the HEAD version of FFMPEG installed first.

Interesting, it should actually build with ffmpeg 1.2 correctly (as a matter of fact I have been using it until 2 days ago).

If you can reproduce it, I'd love a bug report.

I've been trying to use it after reading about it on reddit, but so far I've been unsucessful at getting mpv to do "real" fullscreen. I'm using XMonad with a xmobar at the top of the screen, and with all --fstype modes I've tried, it has always been laid over the actual video. Has anybody been able to get it to do fullscreen with xmonad?

I know people have been using it with XMonad. There is a fresh issue from today (https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/179), is this helpful in any way?

Is there a GUI frontend like SMPlayer?

I found one, but I haven't tried it since I got used to the keyboard shortcuts, and it's also Windows only.

Baka MPlayer - http://bakamplayer.netii.net/index.php

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