MPV 0.38 Media Player Released With New Options & Fixes

[L_A_G]

Not as famous as VLC, but so much more performant and lighter.

From what I've found VLC is something of a media victorinox (Swiss army knife) so its bloat and popularity is more unavoidable than anything else. Nothing else supports that number of media formats, features and platforms. Never had a video that hasn't played on VLC. Not so much on MPV. Lets not even get into running on every OS/platform under the sun or all those native features like video playback over networks or VR video. VLC isn't so much an application but a suite.

Not that I use VLC unless I need something that isn't on MPV, but VLC is an excellent fallback.

[schmidtbag]

I get that MPV is lightweight, customizable, highly compatible, and performant, but a lot of people here act like VLC is somehow incompetent just because it's a little on the hefty side or perhaps doesn't play some bootlegged version of an obscure movie using a long dead codec. VLC does everything I've wanted it to do without having to adjust anything at all, and that has been the case for nearly 2 decades of me using it. I've tried MPV but felt the UI was a little too simplistic, and I've never liked media players where the controls appear on top of the video. Sure, perhaps there's a way to customize it to behave differently, but not in a way I found obvious.
Bear in mind, I give MPV a shot once every 5 years or so. It does change a bit in that amount of time, but I just haven't found a compelling reason to switch away from VLC.

EDIT:
Right now my only complaint about VLC is the UI doesn't scale well at 4K. I'm sure there's a solution to that, I just haven't looked.

[Rovano]

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

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

Also. For many years now.
At first, mplayer was used as a chassis. Later one could choose mplayer or mpv.
Moreover, it is multi-platform.

What sometimes can't be properly set up on VLC, I click in SMPlayer and I have it.

I never understood the popularity of VLC. You set something and you have to restart it for the change to take effect.

I feel a little sorry for the author of SMPlayer. He deserves the popularity of his product.

[murlakatamenka]

Huh, nobody mentioned awesome mpv-uosc (uosc as in micro OSC, micro On-Screen Controller):

https://github.com/tomasklaen/uosc

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Other than that sure, SMPlayer is great, I've used it on Шindoшs back in the days. It even has a specific touch-friendly mode or interface iirc. Easy recommendation for proper, full-featured click-and-clack MPV for anyone.

[stqn]

Huh, nobody mentioned awesome mpv-uosc (uosc as in micro OSC, micro On-Screen Controller)

Didn’t know about it, seems nice! I might try that or smplayer again. Mostly need a gui just to be able to load subtitles, everything else I need I can do with keyboard shortcuts. The timeline thumnails/preview of uosc is nice though.

[pong]

Which of these player CLIs / UIs support volume limiting / compressing easily? And / or is there lately some easy way to do that with the overall sound system pipewire, whatever?

The last I recall from years ago the nominal solution seemed to be messing with ladspa plugins / configurations for PA or some such thing
which seemed a bit excessively intricate for what should be a common UI setting.

[ipsirc]

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

Fill a bugreport asap!

[ipsirc]

Which of these player CLIs / UIs support volume limiting / compressing easily? A

You can use any ffmpeg filter with mpv. There are ready-to-use scripts already:
acompressor - Dynamic range compressor using acompressor ffmpeg filter with controls to dynamically adjust parameters.
drcbox - Dynamic Audio Normalizer filter with visual feedback.

Look more scripts at https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/User-Scripts

[plandream]

Fill a bugreport asap!

Is it worth it to fill a bug report for some ancient codecs?

[Rovano]

Which of these player CLIs / UIs support volume limiting / compressing easily? And / or is there lately some easy way to do that with the overall sound system pipewire, whatever?

The last I recall from years ago the nominal solution seemed to be messing with ladspa plugins / configurations for PA or some such thing
which seemed a bit excessively intricate for what should be a common UI setting.

https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects