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.
Releases can be found on the release list.
--hwdec
option.--vo=xv
on Linux), but this use is not recommended or
supported.For semi-official builds and third-party packages please see mpv.io/installation.
There is no complete changelog; however, changes to the player core interface are listed in the interface changelog.
Changes to the C API are documented in the client API changelog.
The release list 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.
Compiling with full features requires development files for several
external libraries. One of the two build systems supported by mpv is
required: meson or waf. Meson can be obtained from your distro
or PyPI. Waf can be downloaded by using the ./bootstrap.py
script. It will get the latest version of waf that was tested with mpv.
Some documentation about the differences between the build systems are
located in build-system-differences.
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 a list of the available build options use
./waf configure --help
. If you think you have support for
some feature installed but configure fails to detect it, the file
build/config.log
may contain information about the reasons
for the failure.
NOTE: To avoid cluttering the output with unreadable spam,
--help
only shows one of the two switches for each option.
If the option is autodetected or enabled by default, the
--disable-***
switch is printed; if the option is disabled
by default, the --enable-***
switch is printed. Either way,
you can use --enable-***
or --disable-**
regardless of what is printed by --help
.
To build the software you can use ./waf build
: the
result of the compilation will be located in build/mpv
. You
can use ./waf install
to install mpv to the prefix
after it is compiled.
Example:
./bootstrap.py
./waf configure
./waf
./waf install
Essential dependencies (incomplete list):
Libass dependencies (when building libass):
FFmpeg dependencies (when building FFmpeg):
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) which first compiles FFmpeg libraries and libass, and then compiles the player statically linked against those.
If you want to build a Windows binary, you either have to use MSYS2 and MinGW, or cross-compile from Linux with MinGW. See Windows compilation.
Every other month, an arbitrary git snapshot is made, and is assigned a 0.X.0 version number. No further maintenance is done.
The goal of releases is to make Linux distributions happy. Linux distributions are also expected to apply their own patches in case of bugs and security issues.
Releases other than the latest release are unsupported and unmaintained.
See the release policy document for more information.
Please use the 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.
Using the bug tracker as place for simple questions is fine but IRC is recommended (see Contact below).
Please read 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.
GPLv2 "or later" by default, LGPLv2.1 "or later" with
--enable-lgpl
. See details.
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.
Most activity happens on the IRC channel and the github issue tracker.
#mpv
on
irc.libera.chat
#mpv-devel
on
irc.libera.chat