MPV Player 0.28 Adds Initial Vulkan Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: MPV Player 0.28 Adds Initial Vulkan Support

The MPlayer-forked MPV Player is out with a new feature release that presents several interesting features...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MPV-Player-0.28-Released

[gerry_here_to_learn]

vulkan for a video player? what would be the desire/benefit of this?

[Gusar]

vulkan for a video player? what would be the desire/benefit of this?

Much more control over the presentation queue. Which is very important particularly when you're doing temporal scaling (interpolation).

Note that the 0.28 release contains rev1 of the vulkan work, which doesn't actually make use of the cool new stuff vulkan has over opengl in this area. Rev2, which was merged into mpv git master right after the release, contains the new goodies.

[aufkrawall]

vulkan for a video player? what would be the desire/benefit of this?

Probably mostly better driver situation on Android (maybe not right now, but Vulkan will become more important on Android).

0.28 also has some other nice changes like seekable cache for livestreams or better Wayland support (I think video-sync=display-resample now works as long as virtual desktop isn't switched).

[shmerl]

Will that work in combination with something like vaapi, or it's a completely separate thing?

[Marc Driftmeyer]

vulkan for a video player? what would be the desire/benefit of this?

That's like asking why video players on OS X would be Metal 2 API compliant, and not expecting someone to eventually chime in with a, `duh.'

[timofonic]

Will that work in combination with something like vaapi, or it's a completely separate thing?

Hardware decoding is one thing, "painting" the image is another. Well, it's more complicated and I even don't understand it. I'm sure some of the MPV developers or advanced users would be able to explain it a lot better than me.

Never understimate what a bunch of video nerds can do. MPV is a really amazing project that deserves a lot more attention than it has, it's both very resource efficient and it has endless possibilities (filtering, scripting, plugins, use it as a library on another software...). They got the best stuff out there and joined i, then worked a lot to make new things and some really crazy people do great code stuff that gets merged (the Vulkan is one of the many crazy ideas of one of the developers).

I don't understand why VLC is a lot more popular, yet most they do is quite outdated (their plugins to watch videos from certain sites are unusable most of the time) or just getting code from others. That's good because that's how a good Free Software ecosystem works, but useful projects provide feedback (help improving ffmpeg instead coding their own shit) and new stuff.

MPV does it a lot better and are just volunteers, VLC is structured in a formal non-profit foundation that receives a lot more funding. VideoLan people should be ashamed of how incompetent and corrupt they are.

Developers: I understand teamwork and joining forces as much as possible is difficult, but it's what makes humanity to be better. I understand forking may be necessary sometimes due to different of personal ideas, but be open to merging if the result is better for the former both sides.

[Gusar]

timofonic : VLC is a lot more popular for one simple reason - it has a GUI. That makes it much more user-friendly, particularly on Windows. mpv though is for video nerds, as you've said, and very popular among the anime crowd, due to its advanced scalers and filtering abilities (user shaders!)

shmerl : There's no VAAPI/Vulkan interop yet, though considering how low-level Vulkan is, one could possibly import raw memory from the hardware decoder into a Vulkan context with the VK_KHR_external_memory extension and then go from there. But no one has been working on that yet.

[Kano]

Just compiled mpv git with installed vulkan dev files but did not see vulkan with --vo=help. Mainly I wanted to test vaapi and nvdec with it.

[fctcris]

Just compiled mpv git with installed vulkan dev files but did not see vulkan with --vo=help. Mainly I wanted to test vaapi and nvdec with it.

Pretty sure you also need libshaderc for it to work.