MPlayer2 Gone Dark, MPV Is Still Happening

[Daktyl198]

Some people say the colors and post-processing are off in VLC but that could be just FUD.

From my personal experience, VLC's color is is off compared to MPlayer2/MPV. This is most likely caused by the default filters VLC has enabled, and if you took the time to set it up right you could probably get a great picture out of VLC... but I'd rather just use MPV and not have to mess with it :P

I am not looking into starting any sort of flamewar. I couldn't care less. But I'm curious. I have switched to VLC a long time ago. It seems more robust, more complete, and it plays well with tv-maxe. All codecs are built in, etc.

But there muse be a reason why many people prefer MPlayer, any thoughts? Thanks!

Well, most of VLC's built-in codecs are provided by the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project, which means they contain the same codecs as MPV (which dynamically links to whichever ffmpeg/libav you have installed). Depending on your distribution, this could mean that MPV has newer codec version than VLC.

As for being "more robust", I'm not sure. Overall, MPV has features that VLC doesn't have, but VLC has a few features that MPV doesn't have, so they're kind of on-par. MPV may be seen as being "lighter weight" since it dosn't come with a full-fledged GUI (though it does come with a perfectly usable OSD) but it has demanding options as well (--vo=opengl-hq for instance).

I don't know what tv-maxe is, so I can't comment on that.

[johnc]

I am not looking into starting any sort of flamewar. I couldn't care less. But I'm curious. I have switched to VLC a long time ago. It seems more robust, more complete, and it plays well with tv-maxe. All codecs are built in, etc.

But there muse be a reason why many people prefer MPlayer, any thoughts? Thanks!

I initially preferred it because it supported VDPAU when (at the time) VLC didn't. Otherwise I think the VLC interface looks a bit cheesy but that's just a superficial comment. Some people say the colors and post-processing are off in VLC but that could be just FUD.

[mendieta]

VLC

I am not looking into starting any sort of flamewar. I couldn't care less. But I'm curious. I have switched to VLC a long time ago. It seems more robust, more complete, and it plays well with tv-maxe. All codecs are built in, etc.

But there muse be a reason why many people prefer MPlayer, any thoughts? Thanks!

[CorkyAgain]

mpv-build

mpv-build is a cool idea. I'm on Debian and can't seem to install the -dev versions of the ffmpeg library packages without forcing an uninstall of several other packages I want to keep. So until I learned about mpv-build I've been unable to configure and build mpv.

My thanks to the mpv developers for recognizing and providing a solution to this kind of problem!

[Daktyl198]

I tried again mpv not very long ago and it wasn?t possible to change the audio and subtitles language, making it useless to me. It really needs a GUI.

it has a small built-in GUI if it's compiled with LUA support that has buttons to change the language/subtitles. Alternatively, there are key combinations to do it (I think ctrl+J/K for subtitles, but I'm probably wrong... I use the GUI )

If anybody wants to see the full list of changes from MPlayer and MPlayer2, go here: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/bl...en/changes.rst

[mmstick]

I tried again mpv not very long ago and it wasn?t possible to change the audio and subtitles language, making it useless to me. It really needs a GUI.

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

[Nille]

This is untrue: while mpv introduced a LOT of Windows improvements this platform is officially supported on MPlayer and mplayer2 as well!

MPlayer and Mplayer2 are extremely buggy on Windows, its unusable. mpv is maybe an option if they Support DXVA.

[Sama Vim]

I'll stick with mplayer 1.2 with added vaapi support and realtime scheduling.

I've also been satisfied with mplayer over the years and saw no real reason to change mplayer2. Every few months I'll use their SVN to update my boxes and that's worked out pretty well all along.

[stqn]

I tried again mpv not very long ago and it wasn?t possible to change the audio and subtitles language, making it useless to me. It really needs a GUI.

[s_j_newbury]

If any Gentoo users want to use my patched version of mplayer-1.2, I've started pushing my local ebuilds out onto github. I've been meaning to do this for ages! Expect many more ebuilds to appear as I sort out what I've been sitting on for far too long...

https://github.com/sjnewbury/gentoo-playground