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mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line. It supportsa wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.

There is aFAQ.

Releases can be found on therelease list.

• A not too ancient Linux (usually, only the latest releases of distributionsare 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 todecode video in realtime, but must be explicitly enabled with the--hwdecoption.
• A not too crappy GPU. mpv's focus is not on power-efficient playback onembedded or integrated GPUs (for example, hardware decoding is not evenenabled 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 makesure the graphics drivers are current. In some cases, ancient fallback videooutput methods can help (such as--vo=xv on Linux), but this use is notrecommended or supported.

mpv does not go out of its way to break on older hardware or old, unsupportedoperating systems, but development is not done with them in mind. Keepingcompatibility with such setups is not guaranteed. If things work, consider ita happy accident.

For semi-official builds and third-party packages please seempv.io/installation.

There is no complete changelog; however, changes to the player core interfaceare listed in theinterface changelog.

Changes to the C API are documented in theclient API changelog.

Therelease list has a summary of most of the important changeson every release.

Changes to the default key bindings are indicated inrestore-old-bindings.conf.

Changes to the default OSC bindings are indicated inrestore-osc-bindings.conf.

Compiling with full features requires development files for severalexternal libraries. Mpv requiresmesonto build. Meson can be obtained from your distro or PyPI.

After creating your build directory (e.g.meson setup build), you can view a listof all the build options viameson configure build. You could also just simplylook at themeson_options.txt file. Logs are stored inmeson-logs withinyour build directory.

Example:

meson setup buildmeson compile -C buildmeson install -C build

For libplacebo, meson can use a git check out as a subproject for a convenientway to compile mpv if a sufficient libplacebo version is not easily availablein the build environment. It will be statically linked with mpv. Example:

mkdir -p subprojectsgit 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 libavfilterand 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, particularlyfor correct rendering of non-English text on macOS, and Arabic/Indic scripts onany 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 beexplicitly 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 installedand can be found by configure.

Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normalLinux 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 playerstatically linked against those.

If you want to build a Windows binary, seeWindows compilation.

Once or twice a year, a release is cut off from the current development stateand is assigned a 0.X.0 version number. No further maintenance is done, exceptin the event of security issues.

The goal of releases is to make Linux distributions happy. Linux distributionsare also expected to apply their own patches in case of bugs.

Releases other than the latest release are unsupported and unmaintained.

See therelease policy document for more information.

Please use theissue tracker provided by GitHub to send us bugreports or feature requests. Follow the template's instructions or the issuewill likely be ignored or closed as invalid.

Questions can be asked in thediscussions or on IRC (seeContact below).

Please readcontribute.md.

For small changes you can just send us pull requests through GitHub. For biggerchanges come and talk to us on IRC before you start working on them. It willmake code review easier for both parties later on.

You can checkthe wikior theissue trackerfor ideas on what you could contribute with.

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

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 theFAQ.

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

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