MPlayer2 Gone Dark, MPV Is Still Happening

[aphirst]

I started using mpv back in September or so, when I was still using Catalyst. I wanted to be able to use one video playback application for all my needs.

• I had gotten frustrated with mplayer, which didn't support MKV segments. I also had issues getting it to play Hi10P videos, and I recall the mplayer-vaapi (vaapi because using Catalyst) patches being a bit flakey (at least, for me).
• I couldn't use mplayer2 because it only supported vdpau natively, and the vaapi-vdpau library was slow as all hell.
• I had gotten frustrated with VLC since it doesn't support certain kinds of Speex audio inside certain kinds of container, necessary when viewing "mobile" low-bitrate streams from Twitch.tv using Livestreamer.

So I found out about mpv. VA-API support out of the box, MKV segments out of the box, Hi10P support out of the box. I had a few niggles at the start due to not understanding how they'd implemented the different video-out devices, but it was a vastly cleaner experience overall.

Not too long after I "upgraded" to the FOSS ATI driver, and short of a minor VDPAU-related subtitle performance bug (almost certainly related to my weak hardware and some "quirk" of mesa) things remained just as peachy. This is now more or less irrelevant too, since the 0.3.0 implemented being able to use vdpau hardware-decoding with the opengl renderer (which seems to have better ASS performance than the vdpau renderer, for me anyway).

I'm not really sure why people are so attached to mplayer and mplayer2, mpv's development is leaps and bounds more active, has measurably better performance (at least for me), and provides both a better out-of-the-box experience (while being just as configurable if not more so), and also even provides GUI-like on-screen controls (which admittedly I disable). My guess is that people are actually attached to various mplayer and mplayer2 frontends, which won't work with mpv (deliberately, they want to completely rework the slave mode so that it isn't insane, and there was even talk of restructuring it entirely into a library, libmpv).

[johnc]

I'm not really sure why people are so attached to mplayer and mplayer2, mpv's development is leaps and bounds more active, has measurably better performance (at least for me), and provides both a better out-of-the-box experience (while being just as configurable if not more so), and also even provides GUI-like on-screen controls (which admittedly I disable). My guess is that people are actually attached to various mplayer and mplayer2 frontends, which won't work with mpv (deliberately, they want to completely rework the slave mode so that it isn't insane, and there was even talk of restructuring it entirely into a library, libmpv).

Of course that's the reason. I think it might have been better to get a first base that still works with the front ends (i.e., not rip the slave mode out immediately) and then build a replacement and then deprecate the old functionality. You generally want to have a replacement in place first before getting rid of the old stuff when you're dealing with user-oriented software. That's just my approach though.

[stqn]

Just click on the subtitle or audio track button? on the OSD?

Ok, I reinstalled the latest version of mpv to try again and it *does* have audio and subtitles buttons; but there is no way that I can see to load an external subtitle.

[aphirst]

but there is no way that I can see to load an external subtitle.

mpv /path/to/video --sub=/path/to/subtitle

Not sure if there's a way to do it automatically based on filename, all my stuff has subtitles muxed in. Should be in the man though.

[gradinaruvasile]

Ok, I reinstalled the latest version of mpv to try again and it *does* have audio and subtitles buttons; but there is no way that I can see to load an external subtitle.

At least the automatic subtitle loading works just as in just every movie player around:
You name the subtitle file EXACTLY as the video (minus the extension) - including capitalization. So, you have Clip1212.avi, and a .srt subtitle for it has to be named Clip1212.srt (or whatever type it is for the extension). It works for me...

Run-time keys:
v - toggles the subtitles visibility
j - cycles the available subtitles

[Serge]

At least the automatic subtitle loading works just as in just every movie player around:
You name the subtitle file EXACTLY as the video (minus the extension) - including capitalization. So, you have Clip1212.avi, and a .srt subtitle for it has to be named Clip1212.srt (or whatever type it is for the extension). It works for me...

Run-time keys:
v - toggles the subtitles visibility
j - cycles the available subtitles

It is possible to configure how mpv auto-loads subtitles. You can set it to load only when the subtitle file name matches the media file name in all but extension, or to load more aggressively. It is even possible to specify which directory names mpv will traverse when auto-loading subtitles (a change from mplayer2, where the directories to traverse were hard-coded). These options can be set in the config file so that they do not need to be included in the command line. The mpv man page has the details.

[stqn]

All these options are nice but they don?t replace a file requester to chose the subtitles I want to load, unfortunately. I?ll have to stick to VLC for now?

[mmstick]

All these options are nice but they don?t replace a file requester to chose the subtitles I want to load, unfortunately. I?ll have to stick to VLC for now?

Have you ever thought about, I don't know, muxing the subtitles into the container like a normal person?

[curaga]

Have you ever thought about, I don't know, muxing the subtitles into the container like a normal person?

You bother to re-mux every movie you download? I highly doubt that's what "normal persons" do either.

[mmstick]

You bother to re-mux every movie you download? I highly doubt that's what "normal persons" do either.

It doesn't take very long to do with the mkvmerge GUI. I don't have to be a normal person to tell you that it's easy to do for normal people. Personally, I carry my own tools for this kind of stuff so I can mux an infinite number of videos automatically ( https://github.com/mmstick/ubuntu-10bit-encoding-tools ) since I have over 13,000 episodes.