mpv

We are excited to announce the release of mpv 0.41.0.

Key highlights:

• The libplacebo based gpu-next is now the default, instead of gpu
• Vulkan hardware decoding is preferred over other APIs
• New context_menu.lua script for right-click context menus
• AAudio backend for modern, JNI-free audio output on Android
• Improved default color management for gpu-next, and handling on Wayland
• Color representation protocol support for Wayland
• Tablet input support for Wayland
• Clipboard writing support for Wayland and a clipboard backend for X11
• Ambient light support on Linux (using sysfs ALS)
• Built-in helpers to register mpv as a media app on Windows

This release requires FFmpeg 6.1 or newer and libplacebo 6.338.2 or newer.

Features

New

• clipboard-wayland: support clipboard writing
• wayland: add support for wp-color-representation-v1
• wayland: tablet input support
• vo_gpu_next: add support for blend-subtitles=video
• meson: add mpv-register and mpv-unregister helpers on Windows
• context_menu.lua: add this script
• select.lua: add edit-config-file and edit-input-conf
• osc.lua: add indicator for buffering/loading
• osdep/linux-als: support 'ambient-light' property on Linux
• clipboard-x11: add x11 clipboard backend
• ao/aaudio: implement native AAudio backend for Android

Changed

• vd_lavc: prefer Vulkan hwdec when available
• vd_lavc: prefer non-copy hwdec before falling back to -copy variant
• vo: move vo_mediacodec_embed to not be the default on Android
• sub/osd_libass: don't rerender OSD if not changed
• vo: prefer vo_gpu_next over vo_gpu by default
• vo_gpu_next: respect ICC profile color space over any metadata
• vo_gpu_next: linearize sRGB as a pure 2.2 power function
• meson: warn if building with SDL2 due to known problems
• osxbundle: make bundle category configurable and default to video
• ao_pipewire: avoid setting any media.role by default

Options and Commands

Added

• sub: add control for libass caching options (glyph-limit, bitmap-max-size)
• vo: add options to control background tile appearance (transparency)
• command: add default and forced flags to the track add commands
• vo_gpu_next: add options to control subtitle peak for HDR output
• video/out/d3d11: add d3d11 composition mode support
• vd_lavc: add --hwdec-threads
• stream_bluray: add --bluray-angle
• vo_gpu_next: add options to control output colorspace metadata more precisely
• sub: make --sub-fix-timing configurable
• vo_gpu_next: add --hdr-reference-white
• audio/out: add --audio-set-media-role

Changed

• options: revert --prefetch-playlist default back to 'no'
• vo_gpu_next: change --target-colorspace-hint to 'auto' by default
• options: handle runtime --wid change
• options: reduce swapchain-depth to 2 by default
• screenshot: add osd and scaled flags to screenshot commands

Fixes and Minor Enhancements

• vo_kitty: add auto-multiplexer-passthrough option
• vd_lavc: enable FFv1 hwaccel by default
• clipboard-wayland: prevent reading from hung up fd
• demux_mkv: fix compilation after deprecated definitions removal
• filters: handle flipping video if displaymatrix indicates so
• player/scripting: fix race condition when destroying clients
• {osd,msg}: use PU codepoints for escape codes instead of invalid UTF-8
• vo_dmabuf_wayland: only load needed hardware decoding drivers
• video/image_writer: tag accurate bit depth
• demux_lavf: fix unconstrained cache size with wrapped AVFrame packets
• libarchive: fix reading name of certain UTF-8 files
• sub/sd_lavc: fix decoding with libaribb24
• ao_avfoundation: fix memory leak
• osc.lua: fix volume icon not updating while paused
• context_wayland: implement target_csp for wayland
• vo_gpu: fix target colorspace for redrawn frames
• vo_dmabuf_wayland: don't set HDR metadata on SDR transfers
• vo_gpu_next: don't do partial updates on hint luminance
• sub/ass_mp: add missing paddi

mpv logo

mpv

• External links
• Overview
• System requirements
• Downloads
• Changelog
• Compilation
• Release cycle
• Bug reports
• Contributing
• License
• Contact

External links

• Wiki
• User Scripts
• [FAQ][FAQ]
• Manual

Overview

mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line. It supports

a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.

There is a [FAQ][FAQ].

Releases can be found on the [release list][releases].

System requirements

• A not too ancient Linux (usually, only the latest releases of distributions

are actively supported), Windows 10 1607 or later, or macOS 10.15 or later.

• A somewhat capable CPU. Hardware decoding might help if the CPU is too slow to

decode video in realtime, but must be explicitly enabled with the --hwdec

option.

• A not too crappy GPU. mpv's focus is not on power-efficient playback on

embedded or integrated GPUs (for example, hardware decoding is not even

enabled by default). Low power GPUs may cause issues like tearing, stutter,

etc. On such GPUs, it's recommended to use --profile=fast for smooth playback.

The main video output uses shaders for video rendering and scaling,

rather than GPU fixed function hardware. On Windows, you might want to make

sure the graphics drivers are current. In some cases, ancient fallback video

output methods can help (such as --vo=xv on Linux), but this use is not

recommended or supported.

mpv does not go out of its way to break on older hardware or old, unsupported

operating systems, but development is not done with them in mind. Keeping

compatibility with such setups is not guaranteed. If things work, consider it

a happy accident.

Downloads

For semi-official builds and third-party packages please see

mpv.io/installation.

Changelog

There is no complete changelog; however, changes to the player core interface

are listed in the [interface changelog][interface-changes].

Changes to the C API are documented in the [client API changelog][api-changes].

The [release list][releases] has a summary of most of the important changes

on every release.

Changes to the default key bindings are indicated in

[restore-old-bindings.conf][restore-old-bindings].

Changes to the default OSC bindings are indicated in

[restore-osc-bindings.conf][restore-osc-bindings].

Compilation

Compiling with full features requires development files for several

external libraries. Mpv requires meson

to build. Meson can be obtained from your distro or PyPI.

After creating your build directory (e.g. meson setup build), you can view a list

of all the build options via meson configure build. You could also just simply

look at the meson_options.txt file. Logs are stored in meson-logs within

your build directory.

Example:

meson setup build

meson compile -C build

meson install -C build

For libplacebo, meson can use a git check out as a subproject for a convenient

way to compile mpv if a sufficient libplacebo version is not easily available

in the build environment. It will be statically linked with mpv. Example:

mkdir -p subprojects

git clone https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo.git --depth=1 --recursive subprojects/libplacebo

Essential dependencies (incomplete list):

• gcc or clang
• X development headers (xlib, xrandr, xext, xscrnsaver, xpresent, libvdpau,

libGL, GLX, EGL, xv, ...)

• Audio output development headers (libasound/ALSA, pulseaudio)
• FFmpeg libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libswscale libavfilter

and either libswresample or libavresample)

• libplacebo
• zlib
• iconv (normally provided by the system libc)
• libass (OSD, OSC, text subtitles)
• Lua (optional, required for the OSC pseudo-GUI and youtube-dl integration)
• libjpeg (optional, used for screenshots only)
• uchardet (optional, for subtitle charset detection)
• nvdec and vaapi libraries for hardware decoding on Linux (optional)

Libass dependencies (when building libass):

• gcc or clang, nasm on x86 and x86_64
• fribidi, freetype, fontconfig development headers (for libass)
• harfbuzz (required for correct rendering of combining characters, particularly

for correct rendering of non-English text on macOS, and Arabic/Indic scripts on

any platform)

FFmpeg dependencies (when building FFmpeg):

• gcc or clang, nasm on x86 and x86_64
• OpenSSL or GnuTLS (have to be explicitly enabled when compiling FFmpeg)
• libx264/libmp3lame/libfdk-aac if you want to use encoding (have to be

explicitly enabled when compiling FFmpeg)

• For native DASH playback, FFmpeg needs to be built with --enable-libxml2

(although there are security implications, and DASH support has lots of bugs).

• AV1 decoding support requires dav1d.
• For good nvidia support on Linux, make sure nv-codec-headers is installed

and can be found by configure.

Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normal

Linux distributions. For ease of compiling the latest git master of everything,

you may wish to use the separately available build wrapper ([mpv-build][mpv-build])

which first compiles FFmpeg libraries and libass, and then compiles the player

statically linked against those.

If you want to build a Windows binary, see [Windows compilation][windows_compilation].

Release cycle

Once or twice a year, a release is cut off from the current development state

and is assigned a 0.X.0 version number. No further maintenance is done, except

in the event of security issues.

The goal of releases is to make Linux distributions happy. Linux distributions

are also expected to apply their own patches in case of bugs.

Releases other than the latest release are unsupported and unmaintained.

See the [release policy document][release-policy] for more information.

Bug reports

Please use the [issue tracker][issue-tracker] provided by GitHub to send us bug

reports or feature requests. Follow the template's instructions or the issue

will likely be ignored or closed as invalid.

Questions can be asked in the [discussions][discussions] or on IRC (see

Contact below).

Contributing

Please read [contribute.md][contribute.md].

For small changes you can just send us pull requests through GitHub. For bigger

changes come and talk to us on IRC before you start working on them. It will

make code review easier for both parties later on.

You can check the wiki

or the issue tracker

for ideas on what you could contribute with.

License

GPLv2 "or later" by default, LGPLv2.1 "or later" with -Dgpl=false.

See details.

History

This software is based on the MPlayer project. Before mpv existed as a project,

the code base was briefly developed under the mplayer2 project. For details,

see the [FAQ][FAQ].

Contact

Most activity happens on the IRC channel and the GitHub issue tracker.

• GitHub issue tracker: [issue tracker][issue-tracker] (report bugs here)
• Discussions: [discussions][discussions]
• User IRC Channel: #mpv on irc.libera.chat
• Developer IRC Channel: #mpv-devel on irc.libera.chat

[FAQ]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ

[releases]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/releases

[mpv-build]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv-build

[issue-tracker]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues

[discussions]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/discussions

[release-policy]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/release-policy.md

[windows_compilation]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/compile-windows.md

[interface-changes]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/interface-changes.rst

[api-changes]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/client-api-changes.rst

[restore-old-bindings]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/etc/restore-old-bindings.conf

[restore-osc-bindings]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/etc/restore-osc-bindings.conf

[contribute.md]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/contribute.md