Command line video player
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Kacper Michajłow 8c3a7da619 sub/osd/console: adjust font sizes
The current OSD font size is excessively large, causing most
messages—except for very short ones to overflow horizontally.

I conducted testing across multiple devices of varying screen sizes and
under different scenarios. The adjusted font size strikes a good balance
for readability on non-high-DPI displays, while high-DPI displays should
utilize DPI scaling as needed.

Additionally, I compared the font sizes of subtitles and UI elements
across various VOD platforms, which generally use smaller font in most
cases.

The current sub font size was significantly larger than even PGS
subtitles, which are quite large on their own. Now, they are comparable.

The subtitle font size was chosen based on recommendations from the BBC
Subtitle Guidelines. It is set to 8% of the video height with a
recommended scaling factor of 0.67. Therefore, at 720p (the reference
size for mpv font scaling), the calculation is 8% * 0.67 * 720 = 38.592,
rounded down to 38. This value falls within the recommended scaling
range of x0.5–x1 for desktop PCs/Laptops and TVs (32"–42"). For more
information, see
https://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/forproducts/guides/subtitles/#Presentation-font-size.

OSD font size is smaller than font as those elements shouldn't be
distractful and only noticable when the user wants to look at them.

Outline size is set to 5.5% of font size.
2024-11-18 09:50:22 +01:00
.github .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE: ask for last known working version 2024-11-06 18:00:42 +01:00
DOCS sub/osd/console: adjust font sizes 2024-11-18 09:50:22 +01:00
TOOLS various: convert tabs to spaces 2024-10-18 18:32:26 +02:00
audio ao_audiotrack: make audiotrack jni multi-instance and multi-thread safe 2024-11-06 18:54:50 +01:00
ci ci/win32: restrict shaderc version to fix build errors 2024-11-08 09:59:29 +01:00
common encode_lavc: fix memory leak on --ofopts=help 2024-11-02 01:40:41 +01:00
demux demux_playlist: add data:// to self-expanding protocols 2024-11-02 01:40:41 +01:00
etc etc/restore-old-bindings.conf: fix comment description 2024-10-29 20:36:38 +01:00
filters hwdec_vaapi: try format upload lazily 2024-10-12 01:36:44 +02:00
fuzzers fuzzer_options_parser: limit input size to 2048 bytes 2024-11-14 18:55:29 +01:00
input input/cmd: increase the command length for --input-cmdlist 2024-11-16 16:58:38 +01:00
libmpv various: make mentions of macOS consistent 2024-02-21 20:46:53 +01:00
misc misc/codepoint_width: assume tabstop width to be 8 2024-10-21 20:06:48 +02:00
options options: increase the default --image-display-duration 2024-11-13 14:15:16 +00:00
osdep mac/type: change never mutated variable to let 2024-11-05 18:34:15 +01:00
player sub/osd/console: adjust font sizes 2024-11-18 09:50:22 +01:00
stream stream: allow max_size of 0 for stream_read_complete 2024-10-22 03:16:51 +03:00
sub sub/osd/console: adjust font sizes 2024-11-18 09:50:22 +01:00
ta ta_utils: add talloc_replace 2024-09-08 17:33:27 +02:00
test misc/codepoint_width: assume tabstop width to be 8 2024-10-21 20:06:48 +02:00
video wayland: cleanup check_for_resize function 2024-11-11 22:11:23 +00:00
.editorconfig github/workflows: add editorconfig linting 2024-10-24 17:40:26 +02:00
.editorconfig-checker.json github/workflows: add editorconfig linting 2024-10-24 17:40:26 +02:00
.gitignore gitignore: update for meson wraps 2023-10-23 20:35:13 +02:00
.luacheckrc .luacheckrc: add_hook is not undocumented 2024-11-02 14:03:02 +02:00
.swiftlint.yml github/workflows: add swift linting 2024-05-05 18:30:58 +02:00
Copyright Copyright: fix -Dgpl=false description 2024-10-25 14:01:16 +02:00
LICENSE.GPL
LICENSE.LGPL
MPV_VERSION Update MPV_VERSION 2024-09-23 19:37:35 +02:00
README.md DOCS: mention restore-osc-bindings.conf 2024-10-29 20:36:38 +01:00
RELEASE_NOTES Release 0.39.0 2024-09-23 19:36:41 +02:00
meson.build meson: define _UCRT_NOISY_NAN to workaround the non-constant NAN define 2024-11-17 03:19:17 +01:00
meson.options meson: rename meson_options.txt to meson.options 2024-11-13 14:16:48 +00:00
mpv_talloc.h
pyproject.toml ci/lint: add flake8-commas check 2024-10-06 22:15:08 +02:00

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 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.

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.

Changes to the default OSC bindings are indicated in restore-osc-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, nasm 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, 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) 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.

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.

Questions can be asked in the discussions or on IRC (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)
  • Discussions: discussions
  • User IRC Channel: #mpv on irc.libera.chat
  • Developer IRC Channel: #mpv-devel on irc.libera.chat