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

Mac users can get a very nice front end to mpv with https://iina.io

Bonus trivia: Plex Media Player uses mpv as the video player

That is... not a glowing endorsement. I've had more bugs and player failures from Plex than any other media software I've ever used.

Streaming or player errors? Plex has basically never failed to play any video I've ever given it, but a bad connection can totally ruin streaming. I wish they would implement pause and allow to buffer.

IINA has various issues that mpv does not have, in particular with color space conversions (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41278331 for a few more details)

Adding onto this is Outplayer, which similarly uses MPV for its backend, for iOS & iPadOS.

plex uses terribly old build of mpv with questionable config

In my experience Plex has a serious problem with determining whether or not it's capable of playing a file back directly without converting. I regularly have to switch it to "convert automatically" to make a file play.

What can be directly played and not directly played are just lists of formats that Plex bakes into the app, and not really anything to do with mpv, right?

https://github.com/ambroisemaupate/plex-profiles/blob/master...

MPV is slowly becoming the major embedable media player on the PC side. It's in a bunch of stuff and that's great.