No interface, lots of features, and light as a feather

Nov 27, 2014 14:36 GMT  ·  By

mpv is an open source media player that has been forked from mplayer2 and MPlayer. It works entirely from command line and it's extremely light and easy to use.

When users hear about a media player, they usually picture an application with a nice interface, controls, and a user-friendly GUI. mpv is a media player that has none of these qualities and yet it provides a number of great features, despite having no kind of interface.

It's built to run directly from the terminal and it can be a great tool, if you don't have anything against running things straight from the terminal.

mpv has been making the rounds for a while now and the developers have been improving it constantly. It still doesn't sport a welcoming version number, but the application is stable and it comes with a large number of features like VDPAU, VAAPI and VDA video decode acceleration.

The command line is your friend

Installing mpv is not the easiest thing to do and it will take users a few minutes to see how it's working. Fortunately, the developers provide the source code, and if you're willing to spend 10 minutes compiling the software, it shouldn't be a problem.

The availability of the application varies from one distribution to another. Ubuntu has an older version in the repository, but you don't have to compile it. Operating systems like Arch Linux already have the latest release.

"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.  mpv has a OpenGL based video output that is capable of many features loved by videophiles, such as video scaling with popular high quality algorithms, color management, and more. While mpv has no official GUI, it has a small controller that is triggered by mouse movement," reads the official website.

These are just a few of the features you can find in the application. In order to play something, users need to specify the application, the name of the media file, and whatever option is needed, like loading subtitle, for example.

The developers have also said that a new version of the application is now available for download. You can download the source packages for mpv 0.7.0 for the Linux platform, and you can get the binaries for Windows and Mac OS X from the same source.

mpv media player (5 Images)

mpv in action
mpv in the terminalmpv options
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