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Comment by przemoc | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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?

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 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.

"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

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