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.
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).
- 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).
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