mpv

mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line. It supports a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. System requirements A not too ancient Linux (usually, only the latest releases of distributions are actively supported), Windows 10 1607 or later, or macOS 10.15 or later. A somewhat capable CPU. Hardware decoding might help if the CPU is too slow to decode video in realtime, but must be explicitly enabled with the --hwdec option. A not too crappy GPU. mpv's focus is not on power-efficient playback on embedded or integrated GPUs (for example, hardware decoding is not even enabled by default). Low power GPUs may cause issues like tearing, stutter, etc. On such GPUs, it's recommended to use --profile=fast for smooth playback. The main video output uses shaders for video rendering and scaling, rather than GPU fixed function hardware. On Windows, you might want to make sure the graphics drivers are current. In some cases, ancient fallback video output methods can help (such as --vo=xv on Linux), but this use is not recommended or supported. There is no complete changelog; however, changes to the player core interface are listed in the [interface changelog][interface-changes]. Changes to the C API are documented in the [client API changelog][api-changes]. Compiling with full features requires development files for several external libraries. Mpv requires meson to build. Meson can be obtained from your distro or PyPI. After creating your build directory (e.g. meson setup build ), you can view a list of all the build options via meson configure build . You could also just simply look at the meson options.txt file. Logs are stored in meson-logs within your build directory. Essential dependencies (incomplete list): gcc or clang X development headers (xlib, xrandr, xext, xscrnsaver, xpresent, libvdpau, libGL, GLX, EGL, xv, ...) Audio output development headers (libasound/ALSA, pulseaudio) FFmpeg libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libswscale libavfilter and either libswresample or libavresample) libplacebo zlib iconv (normally provided by the system libc) libass (OSD, OSC, text subtitles) Lua (optional, required for the OSC pseudo-GUI and youtube-dl integration) libjpeg (optional, used for screenshots only) uchardet (optional, for subtitle charset detection) nvdec and vaapi libraries for hardware decoding on Linux (optional) FFmpeg dependencies (when building FFmpeg): gcc or clang, nasm on x86 and x86 64 OpenSSL or GnuTLS (have to be explicitly enabled when compiling FFmpeg) libx264/libmp3lame/libfdk-aac if you want to use encoding (have to be explicitly enabled when compiling FFmpeg) For native DASH playback, FFmpeg needs to be built with --enable-libxml2 (although there are security implications, and DASH support has lots of bugs). AV1 decoding support requires dav1d. For good nvidia support on Linux, make sure nv-codec-headers is installed and can be found by configure. Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normal Linux distributions. For ease of compiling the latest git master of everything, you may wish to use the separately available build wrapper ([mpv-build][mpv-build]) which first compiles FFmpeg libraries and libass, and then compiles the player statically linked against those. If you want to build a Windows binary, see [Windows compilation][windows compilation]. The goal of releases is to make Linux distributions happy. Linux distributions are also expected to apply their own patches in case of bugs. For small changes you can just send us pull requests through GitHub. For bigger changes come and talk to us on IRC before you start working on them. It will make code review easier for both parties later on. You can check the wiki or the issue tracker for ideas on what you could contribute with. This software is based on the MPlayer project. Before mpv existed as a project, the code base was briefly developed under the mplaye