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Comment by daGrevis | Hacker News Reader

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...

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