MPlayer2 Gone Dark, MPV Is Still Happening

The once popular MPlayer2 fork of MPlayer has sadly not seen any new development activity in nearly one year, but another less well-known fork of MPlayer is still showing a future with its most recent activity just being from hours ago.

MPlayer2 was first covered on Phoronix in March of 2011. MPlayer2 was started by an MPlayer developer ejected from the community and he added support for ordered video chapters, dynamic system library loading, better NVIDIA VDPAU support, better pause handling, performance improvements, and other changes. For a while the project was alive and kicking through 2012 and the open-source media player even received Wayland support and other new work.

We didn't have anything to report on with MPlayer2 at all in 2013, but now it seems the project is no more or at least on temporary hiatus. A Phoronix reader wrote this morning, "Well, I think now it's really dead. No Git activity for ages."

In going through the MPlayer2 Git code, there's been no new code commits in the past eight months. There's also been no new commits since the original 2.0 release three years ago.

The rest of the MPlayer2 project site has also not seen any recent activity.

While MPlayer2 might not be kicking -- for now at least -- there is the previously-covered MPV project. MPV is a fork of the MPlayer/MPlayer2 code-bases.

MPV sought to push changes faster than MPlayer2 while still pulling in code from upstream MPlayer. Among MPV's early features over MPlayer2 were Microsoft Windows support, dropping support for other platforms, support for playing URLs of popular streaming services, improved OpenGL support, new encoding functionality, and other fixes. Fortunately, MPV is still happening.

Those interested in this fork of the MPlayer project can go see MPV-Player on GitHub. The most recent commits are from just hours ago and there's frequent development activity covering a wide range of areas within the open-source cross-platform media player.