Command line video player
Go to file
Kacper Michajłow 4fe67933c2 misc/language: store string length instead of null terminator
Allows to construct bstr directly without strlen, while keeping language
table the same size.
2024-05-09 17:12:55 +02:00
.github github/workflows: link MSVC artifacts in comments 2024-05-06 22:01:17 +02:00
DOCS player/loadfile: match language and subcodes 2024-05-09 17:12:55 +02:00
TOOLS tools: add narrow left arrow glyph for OSD 2024-05-05 13:47:20 +02:00
audio Revert "ao: in ao_play_data, wakeup core for untimed AO as well" 2024-05-08 11:14:01 +02:00
ci ci: add Windows native build 2024-05-06 22:01:17 +02:00
common msg: print all messages to one stream 2024-05-06 22:21:46 +02:00
demux demux_edl: make protocol comparison case insensitive 2024-05-08 18:52:40 +02:00
etc powershell-completion: add PowerShell command line completion 2024-05-05 15:38:46 +02:00
filters various: fix trailing whitespace 2024-05-07 11:23:08 +02:00
fuzzers fuzzer_loadfile_direct: exclude paths also for file:// 2024-05-09 02:01:24 +02:00
input various: fix indentation 2024-05-07 11:23:08 +02:00
libmpv various: make mentions of macOS consistent 2024-02-21 20:46:53 +01:00
misc misc/language: store string length instead of null terminator 2024-05-09 17:12:55 +02:00
options various: move strings.h inclusion to common.h 2024-05-06 22:01:17 +02:00
osdep various: fix tabs in code 2024-05-07 11:23:08 +02:00
player player/loadfile: match language and subcodes 2024-05-09 17:12:55 +02:00
stream stream: don't try to read from all-sparse/no-data files 2024-05-07 12:22:09 +02:00
sub sd_ass: don't log if subtitles have unknown duration 2024-05-05 13:59:41 +02:00
ta ta: inline OOM checks 2023-11-28 10:46:16 +01:00
test player/loadfile: match language and subcodes 2024-05-09 17:12:55 +02:00
video dmabuf: fix warnings on 320-bit build 2024-05-08 18:52:40 +02:00
.editorconfig editorconfig: add max line 2023-11-09 21:30:25 +00:00
.gitignore gitignore: update for meson wraps 2023-10-23 20:35:13 +02:00
.swiftlint.yml github/workflows: add swift linting 2024-05-05 18:30:58 +02:00
Copyright DOCS: update LGPL building instructions 2023-08-10 11:05:31 +02:00
LICENSE.GPL DOCS: use upstream license files 2021-08-25 15:56:58 +02:00
LICENSE.LGPL DOCS: use upstream license files 2021-08-25 15:56:58 +02:00
README.md DOCS: make mentions of macOS consistent 2024-02-21 20:46:53 +01:00
RELEASE_NOTES Release 0.38.0 2024-04-17 21:18:44 +02:00
VERSION Update VERSION 2024-04-17 21:19:56 +02:00
meson.build player/loadfile: match language and subcodes 2024-05-09 17:12:55 +02:00
meson_options.txt cocoa-cb: add support for macOS color space transformation (EDR/HDR) 2024-05-05 19:02:50 +02:00
mpv_talloc.h

README.md

mpv logo

mpv

Overview

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.

There is a FAQ.

Releases can be found on the release list.

System requirements

  • A not too ancient Linux (usually, only the latest releases of distributions are actively supported), Windows 10 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.

mpv does not go out of its way to break on older hardware or old, unsupported operating systems, but development is not done with them in mind. Keeping compatibility with such setups is not guaranteed. If things work, consider it a happy accident.

Downloads

For semi-official builds and third-party packages please see mpv.io/installation.

Changelog

There is no complete changelog; however, changes to the player core interface are listed in the interface changelog.

Changes to the C API are documented in the client API changelog.

The release list has a summary of most of the important changes on every release.

Changes to the default key bindings are indicated in restore-old-bindings.conf.

Compilation

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.

Example:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

For libplacebo, meson can use a git check out as a subproject for a convenient way to compile mpv if a sufficient libplacebo version is not easily available in the build environment. It will be statically linked with mpv. Example:

mkdir -p subprojects
git clone https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo.git --depth=1 --recursive subprojects/libplacebo

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)

Libass dependencies (when building libass):

  • gcc or clang, yasm on x86 and x86_64
  • fribidi, freetype, fontconfig development headers (for libass)
  • harfbuzz (required for correct rendering of combining characters, particularly for correct rendering of non-English text on macOS, and Arabic/Indic scripts on any platform)

FFmpeg dependencies (when building FFmpeg):

  • gcc or clang, yasm 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) which first compiles FFmpeg libraries and libass, and then compiles the player statically linked against those.

If you want to build a Windows binary, you either have to use MSYS2 and MinGW, or cross-compile from Linux with MinGW. See Windows compilation.

Release cycle

Once or twice a year, a release is cut off from the current development state and is assigned a 0.X.0 version number. No further maintenance is done, except in the event of security issues.

The goal of releases is to make Linux distributions happy. Linux distributions are also expected to apply their own patches in case of bugs.

Releases other than the latest release are unsupported and unmaintained.

See the release policy document for more information.

Bug reports

Please use the issue tracker provided by GitHub to send us bug reports or feature requests. Follow the template's instructions or the issue will likely be ignored or closed as invalid.

Using the bug tracker as place for simple questions is fine but IRC is recommended (see Contact below).

Contributing

Please read contribute.md.

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.

License

GPLv2 "or later" by default, LGPLv2.1 "or later" with -Dgpl=false. See details.

History

This software is based on the MPlayer project. Before mpv existed as a project, the code base was briefly developed under the mplayer2 project. For details, see the FAQ.

Contact

Most activity happens on the IRC channel and the GitHub issue tracker.

  • GitHub issue tracker: issue tracker (report bugs here)
  • User IRC Channel: #mpv on irc.libera.chat
  • Developer IRC Channel: #mpv-devel on irc.libera.chat