Awesome

Features

• 🛠 Easy configuration
• 📦 No third-party dependencies
• 🚸 Simple installation (installer scripts included)
• 🏁 Cross-platform (embrace my beloved Golang!)
• ℹ️ Displays song metadata (title, artist, album)
• ⏳ Displays real time player state and timestamps
• 🔕 Toggle activation on the fly by key binding
• 👻 Automatically hide when player is paused
• 🖼 Customizable image assets

Why?

Currently, there are two alternatives I found on GitHub.

1. cniw/mpv-discordRPC
2. noaione/mpv-discordRPC

Discord RPC

In order to interact with Discord Rich Presence using RPC, the client needs to connect to Discord's IPC socket. However, both of the above alternatives do not keep a connection with Discord's IPC socket, which I think is rather unreliable.

See also: how mpv-discord works.

Third-party Dependencies

Both of the above alternatives require users to install third-party dependencies such as python-pypresence or lua-discordRPC. I found it hard to set up the dependencies and I also don't want to mess up my environment.

Installation

Installer scripts for Windows, Linux and OSX are provided.

1. Download .zip from the latest release and extract it.
   • or you can download .zip by clicking on the green download button in GitHub
   • or you can also use git clone https://github.com/tnychn/mpv-discord.git
2. Run the installer script of your platform.
   • run install_darwin.sh in Terminal for OSX
   • run install_linux.sh in Terminal for Linux
   • run install_windows.bat by double clicking on it for Windows
3. Before using, you must specify binary_path in the config file first.

Configurations

For OSX and Linux, config file is located in ~/.config/mpv/script-opts.

For Windows, config file is located in where the mpv.exe executable is.

• key (default: D): key binding to toggle activation on the fly
• active (default: yes): whether to activate at launch
• client_id: specify your own client ID to customize the images shown in Rich Presence
• binary_path: full path to mpv-discord's binary file
• socket_path (default: /tmp/mpvsocket):
  • use_static_socket_path=yes: set the full path to the static IPC socket path
  • use_static_socket_path=no: set the full path to the directory placing the IPC socket with a dynamic name
• use_static_socket_path (default: yes): whether to use static IPC socket path or dynamic name in the path
• autohide_threshold (default: 0): time in seconds before hiding the presence once player is paused (0 is off)

dynamic name is in the format of mpv-discord-1234 where 1234 will be the PID of the mpv instance.

Customization

Go to Discord Developer Portal, create an application and upload the following art assets with their corresponding asset keys:

• mpv: large image (app logo)
• play: small image used when playing
• pause: small image used when paused
• loop: small image used when playing and looping
• buffer: small image used when buffering

Then, set the client_id option in the config to the application ID.

You can also find the already provided client ids and their image assets here.

How It Works

This plugin consists of 3 files.

1. discord.lua -- mpv user script
2. discord.conf -- configuration file
3. mpv-discord binary -- backend binary of the plugin

When mpv launches, mpv will run all the user scripts including discord.lua. Then discord.lua will read the configurations from discord.conf and do two things: (1) create an input-ipc-server socket of mpv. (2) start a subprocess of the mpv-discord binary. Then, mpv-discord will interact with the input-ipc-server to get the player state and properties of mpv. Finally, mpv-discord will update Discord's Rich Presence with the properties through Discord's IPC socket.

Contributing

If you have any ideas on how to improve this project or if you think there is a lack of features, feel free to open an issue, or even better, open a pull request. All contributions are welcome!