MPV 0.38 Media Player Released With New Options & Fixes

[plandream]

I ALWAYS preferred mplayer, however back in the day there were a FEW media things that WOULD play in VLC but NOT mplayer, but yes much like you in the last decade plus rarely to I bother w/vlc. The vlc controls are total ass, along with their intransigence to really support skipping forward and back at a deterministic rate... (although mplayer and subsequent derivatetives also do NOT ALWAYS honor their targeted skip targets, but they're FAR AND AWAY better than vlc which doesn't even really try... and thats one peeve amongst many against VLC...)

I guess end of day for me, vlc was always more of a 'feel good' story than anything that I REALLY wanted to use... as in if there was a way to do it wrong, vlc would do it wrong... and wrong in the worst possible way...

Its like I mentioned above back in the day there were a very few media files that just would not play on mplayer (or derived) players, but in many instances they would on vlc with all of it's incumbent warts... today I cannot recall anything that an mplayer derived player will NOT play back, rendering vlc simply a historical curiosity to me...

There are still some ancient files that won't work on mpv. Only reason I have vlc installed.

[Berniyh]

i haven't used VLC in over a decade because there are just better alternatives. MPV a fine example. i was really annoyed with KDE 6 apparently needing VLC now. at least on arch.

I think over time that will go away. KDE itself doesn't really need VLC, but at least as of now it needs a backend for phonon. At the beginning, when phonon was introduced it was xine, but because xine was unpopular even back then (and is now dead for a long time already), someone wrote the vlc backend, which soon became the default.
Distributions (I think it was Fedora) didn't like that dependency, so they wrote another backend, using gstreamer. However, this backend was never the default (apart from said distributions) and more importantly, was never well maintained.
It's sole purpose was to provide an alternative to the VLC backend, an approach which is seldomly a good one.

Anyways, I think over time most parts of KDE/Plasma will move away from phonon and start using QtMultimedia, which does not depend on VLC. Some parts of KDE actually already use that instead of phonon.

[TemplarGR]

i haven't used VLC in over a decade because there are just better alternatives. MPV a fine example. i was really annoyed with KDE 6 apparently needing VLC now. at least on arch.

Me too, actually i have never actually used VLC as my main player, ever. Even on Windows i prefered things like K-Lite Codec pack with Media player Classic and even Smplayer windows version. VLC always sucked.

But what is the issue with KDE6 on Arch? I am on KDE6 on Arch right now and i am using smplayer with mpv just fine.

[CTown]

I always tought that! Finally someone said it too!

I wish every DE used mpv/libmpv, even COSMIC.

There is an unofficial phonon backend based on MPV. I have never used it myself. It was updated for Qt6 as well.

https://github.com/OpenProgger/phonon-mpv

[cl333r]

Yay MPV!!!

I used to prefer VLC but MPV in my experience is much faster, plays more stuff and handles errors/corrupted files better.... VLC's slogan "plays everything" is no longer the case I think.

Also a deal-breaker for me is that VLC does not allow to easily adjust gamma like MPV does with a simple hot key (as far as I know). And the new (planned) interface is yet another good reason to choose MPV I think.

Imho adjusting brightness, contrast and such must always be a hotkey away in any video player. So I prefer mpv, but I'll always be lacking the graphical playlist that you can just drag media files onto to play and arrange them with your mouse.

[uid313]

But mpv is not user-friendly to use.

I discovered Celluloid which is a GTK front-end for mpv which is very nice.

[Axl_Mas]

I am using MPV with SMplayer front-end, for my needs it is the best couple!

https://github.com/smplayer-dev/smplayer

[George99]

I use mpv for video and vlc for music. Both of them have their advantages.

[Kjell]

i haven't used VLC in over a decade because there are just better alternatives.

Are there even any better players than MPV?

[Kenta_Hirono]

But mpv is not user-friendly to use.

I discovered Celluloid which is a GTK front-end for mpv which is very nice.

I use Celluloid (former gnome-mpv) too, but you need to use mpv.conf file for some options like gpu-next coz are still unsupported.

I hope in the future mpv crew will integrate some shader upscalers like sssr or fsrcnnx or fsr or nis.