Command line video player
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dudemanguy ea4685b233 wayland: use callback flag + poll for buffer swap
The old way of using wayland in mpv relied on an external renderloop for
semi-accurate timings. This had multiple issues though. Display sync
would break whenever the window was hidden (since the frame callback
stopped being executed) which was really annoying. Also the entire
external renderloop logic was kind of fragile and didn't play well with
mpv's internal structure (i.e. using presentation time in that old
paradigm breaks stats.lua).

Basically the problem is that swap buffers blocks on wayland which is
crap whenever you hide the mpv window since it looks up the entire
player. So you have to make swap buffers not block, but this has a
different problem. Timings will be terrible if you use the unblocked
swap buffers call.

Based on some discussion in #wayland, the trick here is relatively
simple and works well enough for our purposes. Instead we basically
build a way to block with a timeout in the wayland buffer swap
functions.

A bool is set in the frame callback function that indicates whether or
not mpv is waiting for a frame to be displayed. In the actual buffer
swap function, we enter into a while loop waiting for this flag to be
set. At the same time, the wl_display is polled to block the thread and
wakeup if it receives any events from the compositor. This loop only
breaks if enough time has passed or if the frame callback bool is
received.

In the near future, it is better to set whether or not frame a frame has
been displayed in the presentation feedback. However as a first pass,
doing it in the frame callback is more than good enough.

The "downside" is that we render frames that aren't actually shown on
screen when the player is hidden (it seems like wayland people don't
like that). But who cares. Accurate timings are way more important. It's
probably not too hard to add that behavior back in the player though.
2019-10-10 17:41:19 +00:00
.github github: try to get contributors to read contribute.md 2019-10-01 21:44:57 +02:00
DOCS DOCS: explicitly mention that property observing has an initial event 2019-10-08 21:11:55 +02:00
TOOLS skip-logo.lua: fix skipping in the first two frames 2019-10-08 21:26:43 +02:00
audio ao_alsa: don't silence legitimate underrun if final chunk underruns 2019-10-06 20:46:22 +02:00
ci ci: remove --enable-zsh-comp 2019-09-27 13:19:29 +02:00
common recorder: don't use a magic index for mp_recorder_get_sink() 2019-09-29 01:41:19 +02:00
demux demux_timeline, demux_edl: correctly enable cache in pseudo-DASH mode 2019-10-08 23:55:05 +02:00
etc options: rename --video-aspect to --video-aspect-override 2019-10-04 21:34:22 +02:00
filters f_auto_filters: use f_autoconvert for hw download 2019-10-02 23:13:26 +02:00
input input: add keybind command 2019-09-21 16:58:14 +00:00
libmpv DOCS: explicitly mention that property observing has an initial event 2019-10-08 21:11:55 +02:00
misc demux: sort filenames naturally when playing a directory / archive 2019-09-29 01:13:00 +03:00
options options: rename --video-aspect to --video-aspect-override 2019-10-04 21:34:22 +02:00
osdep cocoa-cb: remove get_property_* usages and split up mpv helper 2019-10-06 13:29:48 +02:00
player video: always decode 2 frames on playback restart 2019-10-06 23:31:58 +02:00
stream demux: restore some of the DVD/BD/CDDA interaction layers 2019-10-03 00:22:18 +02:00
sub sub: make font provider user-selectable 2019-09-25 22:11:48 +02:00
ta ta: destroy/free children in reverse order 2019-09-19 20:37:05 +02:00
test command: add sub-start & sub-end properties 2019-09-22 09:19:45 +02:00
video wayland: use callback flag + poll for buffer swap 2019-10-10 17:41:19 +00:00
waftools zsh completion: move generation to runtime and improve 2019-09-27 13:19:29 +02:00
.gitignore player: move builtin profiles to a separate file 2016-09-15 14:50:38 +02:00
.travis.yml travis: use macOS 10.14 image with xcode 11 instead of xcode 10.2 2019-09-22 17:15:45 +03:00
Copyright DOCS/contribute.md: license clarifications 2019-09-21 13:58:09 +02:00
LICENSE.GPL Copyright: some more licensing clarifications 2017-10-13 15:44:55 +02:00
LICENSE.LGPL Copyright: some more licensing clarifications 2017-10-13 15:44:55 +02:00
README.md README.md: minor cleanups 2019-10-02 13:53:35 +02:00
RELEASE_NOTES vo_drm: 30bpp support 2019-09-22 15:59:24 +02:00
VERSION Update VERSION 2018-07-22 18:47:16 +02:00
appveyor.yml appveyor: remove broken packages, install libplacebo 2019-07-03 17:30:50 +03:00
bootstrap.py build: add --no-download option to bootstrap.py 2018-08-13 19:09:35 +02:00
mpv_talloc.h mpv_talloc.h: rename from talloc.h 2016-01-11 21:05:55 +01:00
version.sh version.sh: update MPVCOPYRIGHT to include the current year, 2019 2019-04-16 20:11:30 +02:00
wscript cocoa-cb: remove get_property_* usages and split up mpv helper 2019-10-06 13:29:48 +02:00
wscript_build.py cocoa-cb: remove get_property_* usages and split up mpv helper 2019-10-06 13:29:48 +02:00

README.md

mpv logo

mpv

Overview

mpv is a media player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.

Releases can be found on the release list.

System requirements

  • A not too ancient Linux, Windows 7 or later, or OSX 10.8 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 is not intended to be used with bad GPUs. There are many caveats with drivers or system compositors causing tearing, stutter, etc. 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.

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. Below is a list of some important requirements.

The mpv build system uses waf, but we don't store it in the repository. The ./bootstrap.py script will download the latest version of waf that was tested with the build system.

For a list of the available build options use ./waf configure --help. If you think you have support for some feature installed but configure fails to detect it, the file build/config.log may contain information about the reasons for the failure.

NOTE: To avoid cluttering the output with unreadable spam, --help only shows one of the two switches for each option. If the option is autodetected by default, the --disable-*** switch is printed; if the option is disabled by default, the --enable-*** switch is printed. Either way, you can use --enable-*** or --disable-** regardless of what is printed by --help.

To build the software you can use ./waf build: the result of the compilation will be located in build/mpv. You can use ./waf install to install mpv to the prefix after it is compiled.

Example:

./bootstrap.py
./waf configure
./waf
./waf install

Essential dependencies (incomplete list):

  • gcc or clang
  • X development headers (xlib, xrandr, xext, xscrnsaver, xinerama, libvdpau, libGL, GLX, EGL, xv, ...)
  • Audio output development headers (libasound/ALSA, pulseaudio)
  • FFmpeg libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libswscale libavfilter and either libswresample or libavresample)
  • 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:

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

FFmpeg dependencies:

  • 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 DAHS 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

Every other month, an arbitrary git snapshot is made, and is assigned a 0.X.0 version number. No further maintenance is done.

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

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 --enable-lgpl. See details.

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.freenode.net
  • Developer IRC Channel: #mpv-devel on irc.freenode.net