Command line video player
Go to file
wnoun 6111f57ef9 player: expose pixel aspect ratio, bitrate and rotation value on tracks 2019-09-21 16:55:59 +02:00
.github github: remove LGPL relicensing boilerplate 2019-09-21 13:53:31 +02:00
DOCS player: expose pixel aspect ratio, bitrate and rotation value on tracks 2019-09-21 16:55:59 +02:00
TOOLS video: add vf_fingerprint and a skip-logo script 2019-09-19 20:37:05 +02:00
audio ao_oss: Fallback to stereo when the device does not support >2 channels 2019-09-21 15:38:46 +02:00
ci ci: remove now unuspported libdvdread 2019-09-13 18:19:50 +02:00
common recorder: always mux all packets on discont/close 2019-09-19 20:37:05 +02:00
demux demux_cue: auto-detect CUE sheet charset 2019-09-21 15:18:20 +02:00
etc builtin.conf: add clarifications 2019-09-19 20:37:05 +02:00
filters f_swscale: fix a typo 2019-09-19 20:37:05 +02:00
input input: ignore empty lines on drag-drop mime data 2019-09-21 15:39:47 +02:00
libmpv client API: add mpv_command_ret 2019-09-21 14:24:42 +02:00
misc rendezvous: fix a typo 2018-10-01 10:41:01 +02:00
options demux_cue: auto-detect CUE sheet charset 2019-09-21 15:18:20 +02:00
osdep stream_libarchive: Always use LC_CTYPE_MASK for libarchive 2019-09-21 12:53:47 +02:00
player player: expose pixel aspect ratio, bitrate and rotation value on tracks 2019-09-21 16:55:59 +02:00
stream stream_libarchive: Always use LC_CTYPE_MASK for libarchive 2019-09-21 12:53:47 +02:00
sub osd: allow sub-text to work even if sub-visibility is disabled 2019-09-21 15:36:58 +02:00
ta ta: destroy/free children in reverse order 2019-09-19 20:37:05 +02:00
test misc: add linked list helpers 2018-05-24 19:56:35 +02:00
video wayland: read xcursor size from XCURSOR_SIZE env 2019-09-21 15:43:54 +02:00
waftools win32: remove -municode from mpv binary 2019-09-19 20:37:05 +02:00
.gitignore
.travis.yml travis: rework scripts to re-enable macOS 2019-09-02 00:34:49 +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: remove old googlegroups mailing list address 2019-09-14 16:40:50 +02:00
RELEASE_NOTES docs: add mentions of the Vulkan rendering abstraction replacement 2019-04-22 15:58:10 +03:00
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
version.sh version.sh: update MPVCOPYRIGHT to include the current year, 2019 2019-04-16 20:11:30 +02:00
wscript rpi: Update for modern systems 2019-09-20 11:39:06 +02:00
wscript_build.py build: don't add swift object when swift disabled 2019-09-21 16:23:51 +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)
  • vdpau 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).
  • For good nvidia support on Linux, make sure nv-codec-headers is installed and can be found by configure.
  • Libav support is broken. (See section below.)

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.

FFmpeg vs. Libav

Generally, mpv should work with the latest release as well as the git version of FFmpeg. Libav support is currently broken, because they did not add certain FFmpeg API changes which mpv relies on.

FFmpeg ABI compatibility

mpv does not support linking against FFmpeg versions it was not built with, even if the linked version is supposedly ABI-compatible with the version it was compiled against. Expect malfunctions, crashes, and security issues if you do it anyway.

The reason for not supporting this is because it creates far too much complexity with little to no benefit, coupled with absurd and unusable FFmpeg API artifacts.

Newer mpv versions will refuse to start if runtime and compile time FFmpeg library versions mismatch.

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.

Relation to MPlayer and mplayer2

mpv is a fork of MPlayer. Much has changed, and in general, mpv should be considered a completely new program, rather than a MPlayer drop-in replacement.

For details see FAQ entry.

If you are wondering what's different from mplayer2 and MPlayer, an incomplete and largely unmaintained list of changes is located here.

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