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

If anyone is looking for the mpv core with a GUI on macOS, take a look at IINA https://github.com/iina/iina

It’s also the only way I can play HDR on macOS that looks decent (besides the native players like QuickLook/Quicktime/Photos).

I went into a rabbit hole recently playing iPhone-recorded Dolby hdr videos and tweaking all the various mpv settings but nothing really looked the same as in Photos. Iina is closer but also not exactly the same as the native players.

IINA has issues with color space conversions. I've heard that the specific issue is that it always (incorrectly) assumes a BT601 matrix for all videos, though I haven't verified it myself and cannot really right now. (I did verify its colors differing from stock mpv before writing this comment, though.) Various mpv wrappers exists, but for reasons like these stock mpv is the only fully reliable version.

infuse will also do good job, but it's using apple engine instead of ffmpeg, and it's paid for the good stuff https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infuse-video-player/id11362209...

mpv is always faster than IINA, especially with 4K playback on older MacOS. mpv is near perfect

Huh, that explains it, I was wondering why I was having problems with some video that VLC would even playback correctly, I didn't think to try the stock mpv.

Have you filled a bug report about this?

I’m not the person you asked, and I don’t have that issue, but this common trend of replying to any criticism with “have you filed a bug report?” rubs me the wrong way.

I have opened detailed issues on IINA which describe a bug, how to reproduce, and the correct behaviour (according to their own docs), and they’ve just sat there unacknowledged for years.

IINA’s issue count is twice as big as mpv’s, despite being a UI covering a single OS. Personally I don’t think it’s worth it over vanilla mpv, which I’ve recommended even to non-technical users who like it.

Admittedly I have not, but I did search for and find similar issues on their github before making this comment, and I do plan to investigate this more one day and possibly make a proper issue. There are indeed a lot of "X tool is broken because of Y" statements of varying credibility floating around in the multimedia community where it's unclear if they were actually ever reported upstream or even double-checked recently (people still claim that VLC uses nearest-neighbour chroma scaling, for example, but that's no longer true (except for screenshots, it's still a problem there)), and that is something I'm trying to work against by investigating and reporting this when I can. But since I don't use IINA myself and since, as another commenter pointed out, IINA bug reports don't seem to get a lot of responses on average, it hasn't been the highest priority for me.

iPhone-recorded Dolby Vision videos uses an additional metadata called "Ambient Viewing Environment", and I don't think any third-party player supports it at the moment.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3145-h...

I fully understand your frustration, as this is what I felt about many other projects.

But surprisingly it was only IINA that got my problem fixed when I reported it with how to reproduce and correct behaviour. Hence why I asked if he had filed any bug report.