MPV, which was forked in 2012 from MPlayer2, is a free, open-source, and cross-platform video player with a minimalist GUI and a feature-rich command-line version. It is one of the best free media players in the market nowadays.
MPV supports various video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. But the best part is that everything it requires to play media files is contained within; thus, no external codecs are needed
Exactly one year after the previous 0.34 release, MPV 0.35 has some significant new features and improvements. So let’s have a look at them.
MPV 0.35 Video Player Highlights
The big news in this release is that MPV now has PipeWire audio backend support available. In practice, it should behave similarly to -ao jack.
As you may be aware, in recent years, PipeWire has become well-established and widely adopted as the default audio server by most major Linux distributions, replacing the previously used PulseAudio.
Adding support for it to MPV is a significant step that will only contribute to the popularity of this already great media player within the Linux community.
[ao] Trying audio driver 'pipewire'
[ao/pipewire] requested format: 48000 Hz, stereo channels, floatp
[ao/pipewire] device buffer: 960 samples.
[ao/pipewire] using soft-buffer of 9600 samples.
[cplayer] AO: [pipewire] 48000Hz stereo 2ch floatpCode language: JavaScript (javascript)Another significant new feature that impressed us was the addition of DMA buffering capability. I.e.in its use, MPV should be more efficient or have fewer copies between system and video memory. But you may wonder, “What is the practical use of this?”
To put it simply, if you watch videos on a laptop and everything works well, your battery will last a little longer because the CPU has less to do.
Finally, we will mention that this release adds the Meson build system as an alternative to WAF, a Python-based framework for configuring, compiling, and installing applications.
The new MPV 0.35 video player requires FFmpeg (a collection of libraries and tools for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams) 4.0 or higher on your system.
Please refer to the release notes or the project’s website for detailed information about all changes.
