MPV
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application types
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Android
- BSD
- F-Droid
- Haiku
- Xfce
- Chocolatey
- Flathub
- Snapcraft
Features
Properties
- Lightweight
- Minimalistic
- Configurable
- Privacy focused
Features
- Integrated Codecs
- Low resource footprint
- Command line interface
- Extensible by Plugins/Extensions
- Lua scripting
- Video playback
- Drag and Drop
- HDR source support
- GNU/linux-libre
- Ad-free
- Hardware Accelerated
- Portable
- Works Offline
- No registration required
- Dark Mode
- Support for 4K
- Support for subtitles
- No Tracking
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Download YouTube Playlist
- Music Looper
- Lossless Audio
yt-dlp integration- MPlayer support
- Mplayer2 support
Tags
- FOSS
- movie-player
- Video Player
- floating-player
- Xfce
MPV News & Activities
Recent News
- POX published news article about MPV
MPV 0.41 switches to GPU-Next by default, improves Wayland support & Vulkan decodingMPV 0.41 introduces several major updates for video playback and platform integration. The update s...
- POX published news article about MPV
Video player MPV 0.40 brings native HDR support on Linux, console autocompletion, and moreMPV 0.40 has been released, introducing several significant updates to this open-source video playe...
- POX published news article about MPV
MPV 0.39 released with NVIDIA RTX and Intel VSR scaling, and multi-touch supportMPV, the popular free media player for the command line, has released version 0.39, bringing severa...
Recent activities
Featured in Lists
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I use these software on my Windows 10 Systems
What is MPV?
MPV is an audio and movie player based on 
MPlayer and 
mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. It shares some features with the former projects while introducing many more.
- Streamlined CLI options MPlayer's options parser was improved to behave more like other CLI programs, and many option names and semantics were reworked to make them more intuitive and memorable.
- On Screen Controller While mpv has no official GUI, it has a small controller that is triggered by mouse movement.
- High quality video output mpv has an OpenGL based video output that is capable of many features loved by videophiles, such as video scaling with popular high quality algorithms, color management, frame timing, interpolation, and more.
- GPU video decoding mpv leverages the FFmpeg hwaccel APIs to support VDPAU, VAAPI, DXVA2, VDA and VideoToolbox video decoding acceleration.
- Embeddable A straightforward C API was designed from the ground up to make mpv usable as a library and facilitate easy integration into other applications.
MPV information
Developed by
MPV Team Licensing
Open Source and Free product.Written in
Rating
Average rating of 4.4Alternatives
113 alternatives listedNews
4 news article related to MPVSupported Languages
- English
AlternativeTo Categories
Video & Movies, Audio & Music, OS & Utilities, System & HardwareGitHub repository
- 33,249 Stars
- 3,185 Forks
- 1076 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
Simple, Clean, Lightweight and plays video files other players cant probably due to corrupt headers, I Frames, etc... highly recommended
Kind of meme app. Maybe there are some interesting features, but as a video player program is completely useless. Bare bone GUI, with only seekbar, volume control and full screen toggle. Any configuration options are available only from command line or config file. In VIDEO PLAYER! And in many situations you need to configure mpv due to problems with hardware acceleration or blurry scaling or inconsistent framerate (ech linux and Wayland) or tearing (Wayland once again ). In my case, on linux, mpv show over-warm yellowish image for every video file. Want to fix it? Welcome to few hundred pages manual! Pass. As I mentioned before, it is kind of meme app, like those command line web browsers.
Just because you don't know how to use it, it doesn't make it a "meme app."
It's based on MPlayer, one of the most reliable and well-known open-source video players.
If you need something that works decent out of the box, try VLC. If you want more customizability, try SMPlayer.
GUI on PC is a thing at least from 1995, and even before there was Amiga, Mac, heck, even Commodore64 had alternative GUI OS. Just because linux users haven't a clue how to create GUI app doesn't make meme app less meme, and it's freaking video player, last type of programs that should be cli based.
Yes the default GUI is bare bones as is the player itself, but its enough for basic usage and the player is lightweight and lightning fast, unlike VLC. There are other OSCs (GUI skins) that make it more user friendly (uosc is nice). Config in text file is prehistoric. But you can do it! I'm rooting for you for you and there is also mpv Glow configurator with gui or gui focused fork MPV-EASY Player Being simple and no nonsense doesn't make it meme app
So download one of the many GUI programs that use MPV as a backend.
@Melatonin @kendo Yeah, there are some "GUI skin" apps for MPV, but for linux they are also really bare bone. Like seeker bar and volume control are now GTK or QT elements. There are only two apps based on MPV which allowed you access to config options: MPC-QT (on linux available only on arch and as flatpak - pass) and MVP.net (Windows only).
It's got a barebones UI, no single-instance behavior, hardware decoding disabled by default... and to top it all off, the installation process is not straightforward. So it's very much not average-user-friendly. If you want a media player that just works and is easy to use out of the box, steer clear of mpv. You'll need to be somewhat tech-savvy and dive into documentation pieces and even scripting to squeeze out its capabilities. However, if you're willing to do that, it can become an extremely powerful and deeply customizable tool. I personally love it. To give you an example: it's the only player I've found so far capable of seamlessly playing several audio tracks simultaneously (there's a way to force this on
VLC Media Player, but it's very unreliable and will crash the player often). Plus, you get to assign any keybind to perform whatever function you might want. Highly recommended.
If you just know how to tinker with the conf files (which is very easy now coz of ai) it could turn out to be the best player ever. So much simple and far better experience than every other player out there including but not limited to vlc. An additional tip for silicon macs install with macports as it builds the app, much better and native otherwise you would have to do much more tinkering like installing rosetta etc as it is not native to silicon macs and will have a worse experience.
The best video player on Windows.
If you need GUI, try SMPlayer, which utilizes MPV.
I honestly find
VLC Media Player to be a bit overrated, and that the other alternatives (particularly MPV) don't get enough of the love.
MPV is an amazing Windows media player; lightweight and runs videos very smoothly. As part of the minimalist lifestyle it holds, it doesn't contain much of a GUI, but that's not really much to worry about in my opinion. I'd say the installation is the tricky part actually, but once you have that settled, you can freely enjoy watching your videos :)
I like MPV, it handles high resolution videos better than MPC-HC on Windows, and on Linux it just plain shines performance wise. Configuration is also not that difficult to figure out. But the bare-bones approach hurts when it comes to the UI look & feel. Many things are available through keyboard shortcuts and it has a basic control pane, but it just doesn't feel as comfortable and solid as having a proper GUI. Feels like the developers decided to give up on it and made it more stripped down akin to mobile apps. That's probably the only bad thing about it, still a great player.