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

Why would that be disabled by default?

Doesn't work on all systems, I presume. Better to default to something that definitely works everywhere.

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/a3baf94ab9f3b43a8027d...

Would be appropriate to have true/false/auto instead of auto==true though, so auto wouldn't use it unless it confirmed to be working.

Because if you don't have to enable a flag or two in a text config file what's the fun of using Linux after all :)

In addition to what others have said, hardware decoding comes with other drawbacks. There’s occasionally decoding inaccuracies and there’s no support for most video filters (unless you’re using `auto-copy`)

Try watching UHD HDR on intel iGPU without accel, or AV1. MPV also supports vulkan decoders.

If you autodetect hw accel, even the slowest underpowered gpu might get returned, which could result in worstened user experience compared to just using cpu.

It breaks on suspend-to-memory for my system with a nVIDIA GPU. I assume that's a driver problem, though.

Just do a quick automatic benchmark surely?

Hahaha yeah, that's why I don't like it.

Do you know if/why on apple silicon Macs there’s a difference between videotoolbox and videotoolbox-copy ? I thought the SoC memory is shared and that there wouldn’t be a need for copying data from VRAM to RAM.

That's never been an issue on Windows or macOS. Apps only use the GPU if it's new enough

Still, isn't this bizarre? Over the last couple of decades using Windows and macOS across many machines, I've encountered one time I had to mess with settings like this. That's the time I temporarily disabled hw accel in chrome so I could screenshare and watch a show with someone.

Meanwhile on Linux you gotta configure every app one at a time because sane defaults and auto configuration weren't invented here.