January 20, 2014

Mpv, A Free And Open-source General-purpose Video Player.

Mpv is a fork of mplayer2 (see former post ) and effectively its successor. Mpv stands for mpv plays videos. Notable changes from mplayer2 include removal of lots of unneeded code, better OSD ( On screen display ) rendering (using libass), support for playing URLs of popular streaming sites directly ( link ).
It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.

There are instructions to build mpv, but being lazy I googled for a deb-package....
Go to http://ppa.launchpad.net/cellstorm/test/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mpv/ and download the package for your architecture.

I use gdebi to install it. Search for gdebi in Software Center.
Then right click the mpv package and choose Open With Gdebi Package Installer.

You can start mpv from a terminal :


Or in Files navigate to a video, right click and choose Open With > mpv Media Player.

For a full list of options type man mpv in a terminal.


The On Screen Controller (short: OSC) is a minimal GUI integrated with mpv to offer basic mouse-controllability.

User-local settings are stored in ~/.mpv/config. The complete list of options is located here. An example.
My settings :
hwdec=vdpau
vo=vdpau


You can speed up the player using the GPU VDPAU API. See here and here.

My card supports VDPAU ( Nvidia GT 330 ) partially : Feature Set A.

mplayer -vc help | grep vdpau in a terminal gives :  

ffmpeg12vdpau ffmpeg    working   FFmpeg MPEG-1/2 (VDPAU)  [mpegvideo_vdpau]
ffwmv3vdpau ffmpeg    problems  FFmpeg WMV3/WMV9 (VDPAU)  [wmv3_vdpau]
ffvc1vdpau  ffmpeg    problems  FFmpeg WVC1 (VDPAU)  [vc1_vdpau]
ffh264vdpau ffmpeg    working   FFmpeg H.264 (VDPAU)  [h264_vdpau]
ffodivxvdpau ffmpeg    working   FFmpeg MPEG-4,DIVX-4/5 (VDPAU)  [mpeg4_vdpau]


Playing a mp3 :

6 comments:

  1. Hi kinda noob at this
    what the command line to get mpv basic option in terminal

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not sure what you mean....to get it started in a terminal, just type "mpv"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I did that and it say "command not found"
      and i also tried "man mpv" this one say "no manual entry for mpv"
      i just want to try if i could change the aspect ratio to 16:9 in the configuration

      Delete
    2. Did you install the package for your architecture ? What does "apt-cache policy mpv" in a terminal show ?

      Delete
    3. no didnt install architecture but i already have mpv running and for the other its say command not found.

      Delete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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