Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to Safari
Specs
Pros
Pro Needs no additional codecs
Everything MPV needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed.
Pro Caches livestreams
Intelligently caches livestreams and enables jumping within the cached stream.
Pro Fewer crashes than VLC
I love VLC, don't get me wrong, but on plenty of files VLC seems to stutter, freeze, or crash. mpv plays those files.
Pro best default configuration for performance
most options for playback are already preconfigured for best performance on every platform
Pro Keyboard friendly
Although many GUI front-ends are available, it is mainly keyboard driven with ample of keybindings by default. This makes MPV extremely quick to operate.
Pro Hardware accelerated
Supports multiple hardware acceleration techniques that makes it suitable for many different ranges of hardware platforms. Like VAAPI, VDPAU, Open-GL, Open GL ES, etc.
Pro Many official and third party GUI front-ends
MPV and libmpv can be used with official terminal program but also with GUI front-ends like GNOME MPV, smplayer, etc.
Pro Thumbnail seeking
I've recently discovered that the Lua scripting interface provides a method for running a second instance behind each primary invocation of mpv, which second instance can generate thumbnail previews for the entire length of the media file at any size and time interval you'd like. It's like YouTube moved into my neighborhood (KDE Plasma desktop) and all the property values doubled overnight.
Pro With LUA scripting you can automatically adjust monitor refresh rate, matching video framerate (FPS), in order to get perfect playback.
Pro Integrates with Firefox to accelerate internet video playback
There are ways to integrate it with Firefox so that FF uses MPV/libmpv to playback internet video and as result using the hardware accelerations available with MPV/libmpv
Cons
Con Lack of a typical GUI can be jarring to some
The minimal interface comes at the cost of beginner-friendliness. You need to know keyboard shortcuts by heart, settings are set in text files, right-clicking won't bring up a menu, etc.
Con Minimal interface
While highly configurable like other popular players, none of this is accessed through the GUI but rather by editing a configuration file.
Con lack of gui
you don't have menus or windows with options to control technical aspects of video playback.
Con is it not skinnable
it is stripped of any gui, only minimal for efficiency. But it is available to any program as a library.
Con can't use other libraries except ffmpeg
it is so efficient it only needs ffmpeg as codec library, whis is the best and most powerful framework
Recommendations
Comments
