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Overview

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.

System requirements

mpv does not go out of its way to break on older hardware or old, unsupported operating systems, but development is not done with them in mind. Keeping compatibility with such setups is not guaranteed. If things work, consider it a happy accident.

Downloads

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

Changelog

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.

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

Compilation

Compiling with full features requires development files for several external libraries. Mpv requires meson to build. Meson can be obtained from your distro or PyPI.

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

mkdir -p subprojects
git clone https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo.git --depth=1 --recursive subprojects/libplacebo

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, see Windows compilation.

Release cycle

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

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

Releases other than the latest release are unsupported and unmaintained.

See the release policy document for more information.

Bug reports

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.

Questions can be asked in the discussions or on IRC (see Contact below).

Contributing

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.

License

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

History

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.

Contact

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