mpv was forked by Vincent Lang, also known as wm4, in 2012 from mplayer2, which was forked in 2010 from MPlayer.[8] The motive for the fork was to encourage developer activity by removing unmaintainable code and dropping support for very old systems. As a result, the project had a large influx of contributions.[9]
mpv has had several notable changes[11] since it was forked from MPlayer; the most user-visible being the addition of an on-screen-controller (OSC) minimal GUI integrated with mpv to offer basic mouse-controllability. This was intended to make interaction easier for new users and to enable precise and direct seeking.
Video websites: By using yt-dlp, mpv natively supports playback of high-definition video (HD) content and audio on YouTube and over 1000 other supported sites.[12] This allows mpv to replace site-specific video players based on HTML5.
Audio scaling algorithm: The player is equipped with a scaletempo2 parameter for speed changing at constant pitch, for which it uses the Waveform Similarity Overlap-and-add (WSOLA) algorithm, citing more smoothness than the original scaletempo used in the original mplayer, and rubberband.[16]
Improved client API: Beyond working as a stand-alone media player, mpv is designed to be used directly by other applications through a library interface called libmpv. This required making all mpv code thread safe. An example of an application which uses libmpv is Plex.[17] This form of player control, along with a JSON IPC mechanism, replaces MPlayer's "slave mode".
Encoding subsystem: mpv includes a new video encoding mode that can be used to save files being played under different formats. This allows mpv to work as a transcoder, supporting many video formats.[18] This feature serves as a direct replacement for the MEncoder component of MPlayer, which was a separate program rather than being built into the player.
Lua scripting: mpv's behavior and functions are customizable via use of small programs written in the Lua scripting language, which can be used for tasks like cropping video, providing a graphical user interface (GUI) or automatically adjusting the display's refresh rate.[19]
Like the original MPlayer, mpv is still primarily a command-line application although it has a more advanced user interface than MPlayer that can use not only the keyboard but also the mouse for mpv's on screen controller (OSC). However, this OSC is still not a full-featured GUI, and there are a number of front-ends available, which use GUI widgets for Qt, GTK, or some other widget toolkit to give mpv a more complete graphical interface.
The following are all open source front-ends of mpv (based on "libmpv" or the command-line version of mpv) which try to provide more features and more user-friendly interface than mpv, and/or better integration with various operating systems or desktop environments.[20]
Baka MPlayer - media player on Windows, Linux, and macOS although macOS version requires the user to compile from source, with Qt5 widgets, written in C++. Its main goal is uncluttered, simple design.[21] Its development stalled in January 2017 in favor of another mpv frontend by the same developers, Mochi Player, which is not yet complete.
C-Play - is a video/media player developed for cluster environments where you need multiple computers and/or displays to run your video/image content on. The displays could be flat or curved, and the video content 180 fulldome / fisheye, 360 equirectangular or equiangular cubemap or regular flat content, as well as stereoscopic (Side-by-side or Top-Bottom). Installers and testing is primarily performed for Microsoft Windows, but the code is cross-platform, written in C++ with Qt6/Qt5 QML UI.[22]
Deepin Movie - for Linux - Written by and default video player for the Chinese Deepin distro and desktop environment.[23]
GNOME MPV (Celluloid) 0.18 with its preferences
Celluloid (formerly GNOME MPV) - for Linux - based on GTK. Its goal is to be a simple GTK-based graphical interface for mpv that meets the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.[24]
Haruna Media Player - for Linux, Windows - based on Qt/QML. A KDE media player project with YouTube support and customizable shortcuts. [25]
IINA - macOS 10.10+ media player with native macOS Cocoa interface. It is a full-featured native macOS graphical interface for mpv that makes use of new features in the most recent versions of macOS. mpv config file and script system are also integrated.[26]
Media Player Classic Qute Theater (mpc-qt) - Linux and Windows media player with Qt5 widgets, written in C++. Its goal is to reproduce and ultimately improve upon the functionality of Media Player Classic Home Cinema (mpc-hc), a Windows-only program, as a cross-platform mpv-based multimedia player that also works on Unix-like operating systems like Linux.
mpv.net - Windows media player with native Windows interface. Its goal is to provide the standard mpv OSC interface on Windows along with a customizable Windows context menu, C# scripting, and a Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) for addons.[28]
OvoPlayer - Linux and Windows music player that supports many backends, based on LCLwidgetsets, written in Pascal. Its goal is to be a flexible audio player that supports as many audio engine backends like mpv as possible.[29]
Sugoi Player - media player on Windows (that might work on Linux and macOS but those are untested) forked from Baka MPlayer, with Qt5 widgets, written in C++. It aims to improve upon and continue development of an mpv frontend based on Baka MPlayer, since Baka MPlayer's development stalled in January 2017.[31]
xt7-player-mpv - Linux media player with Qt5 or Qt4 widgets, written in Gambas 3 (a dialect of BASIC). Its goal is usability, and a variety of extra features like YouTube and SHOUTcast integration, media tagging, library and playlist management, as well as adding more features beyond that.[32]
wm4. "LGPL relicensing (#2033)". mpv-player/mpv (source code repository). GitHub. Archived from the original on 2017-09-14. Retrieved 2017-09-14. ...GPL-incompatible dependencies such as OpenSSL are a big issue for library users, even if the library user is ok with the GPL....{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
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