Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

Can it do smooth scrubbing (i.e. scrolling the progress bar)?

So many media players only show the key frames when scrubbing, making it a much less pleasant experience. Some mobile phones (Apple, Samsung) built-in media players seem to do it nicely, but I've never found a desktop media player that does it (VLC can't).

Probably would require a lot of extra decoding behind the scenes to extract all the frames, but worth it on a modern machine.

I don't really know what "scrubbing" is, but If you add "exact" to seek then it will use exact (non-keyframe) seeks. I think that's what you want? For example from my input.conf:

  Right            seek  5                    # In seconds; these are limited by keyframes
  Left             seek -5
  Shift+Right      seek  2 exact              # Smaller non-keyframe-limited, seeks with shift
  Shift+Left       seek -2 exact

Obviously, this is slower. Sometimes much slower (depending on the file).

I don't believe the scrollwheel works to seek video, not sure, but MPV can go frame by frame. It's bound to the keyboard by default, but you can tweak your config and bind it to the scrollwheel.

Outside of low bitrate streaming (youtube), most media has sufficient keyframes (I frames) that this distinction really doesn't matter. I don't know what mpv does, though.

Yes, you have to turn it on through hr-seek=yes but then you can seek arbitrarily; great when I have to quickly step through something but not actually miss anything.

For the scrolling you can bind smoething like a .1s seek to the wheel

https://mpv.io/manual/master/#options-hr-seek

By default, mpv has vertical-scroll bound to volume and horizontal-scroll bound to scrubbing.

> Obviously, this is slower. Sometimes much slower (depending on the file).

Anecdotally, I’d change that “sometimes” to “often”. After years of using `exact` I finally stopped. It always felt that the wait was longer than going to the previous keyframe and rewatching the bit. Now if I could only find the perfect timing to go back, though.

A lot of stuff I watch is 720p, and it's okay with that. But with some types of higher quality files it can be (very) slow.

That said, I have replaced most of my "exact seeks" with "sub-seek"; in input.conf:

  Alt+Right        sub-seek  1   # Go to next/previous sub (within demuxer-readahead-secs)
  Alt+d            sub-seek  1
  Alt+Left         sub-seek -1
  Alt+a            sub-seek -1

And then in mpv.conf:

  demuxer-readahead-secs=120     # sub-seek only works within this cache
  demuxer-hysteresis-secs=60     # Fill cache only if lower than this; saves battery

This allows me to fairly quickly skip past stuff that's not too interesting, while still actually following the gist of what's going on.

I think it's also bound by default, but I'm not sure what that is from the top of my head. You'll definitely need to set that cache as it's only 2 seconds or so by default.

Yes, though you do have to enable that. For me I tend to have it buffer the video. That way I can even seek backwards of web streams.