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

That strikes me as such a strange statement, I’ve always considered it to be among the most impressive OSS projects out there. It tackles enormous complexity, works everywhere, and has a trove of a million hidden features. For example, I use it to headless play streams from CLI.

If you enter video-related enthusiast scenes, such as fansubbed anime releases, mpv is recommended over anything else across the board. There are releases that break in VLC, and mpv is usually first to support new features. It also has particularly good defaults in terms of good and accurate playback, so where you might see some people say "install mpc-hc and these scripts and change these settings", with mpv it's just "use mpv". mpv is extremely configurable on top of great defaults also. Setting default audio and sub languages in order of your preference (such as enm before eng and en if you prefer honorifics tracks) is a common tweak.

I thought VLC was awesome while growing up, and at the time it probably was compared to Windows Media Player and such. I remember a common bit of praise was that it supported more types of video files. I haven't really run into anything mpv won't play (I even use it when an image I saved ends up as .html for some reason and then use the info screen to determine the real extension it should be so I can rename it), but also I'm guessing we've standardized more on codecs and containers these days which doesn't hurt.

VLC makes video choppy on my low-end Debian machine. MPV plays them perfectly.

> works everywhere

No, it doesn’t. I had problems with it, which was tackled by basically every other players easily (e.g. seeking or simply playing anything).

VLC is only praised in "normie" places. It is hated in places like anime forums, 4chan, etc.

> has a trove of a million hidden features

No software person would find this praiseworthy. A million features = two million bugs, and indeed it shows.

> I even use it when an image I saved ends up as .html for some reason and then use the info screen to determine the real extension it should be so I can rename it

If you’re on Linux on macOS, you’ll have access to the `file` command-line tool which can do it effectively. In a couple of lines of shell scripting you can even have it auto-change the extension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_(command)

I had someone try to tell me this or some similar alternative method once, but for this particular use-case my method seemed faster. Usually I'm viewing the dir with the file in ranger, hit r (shortcut for :open_with ), type mpv, enter, I in mpv for info, q to quit, a in ranger to rename the file with old name pretyped in. It's a pretty smooth workflow. Assuming I start from the same place in ranger I have to press colon and type `shell -w file %s` and hit enter which may or may not be faster but I think is more keystrokes. I could bind it to a key in ranger if I found an open one and then that might be better. It's sometimes weeks between instances of the mis-saved images or else I might've tried harder to optimize this. The shell script idea is neat.

TIL I'm a normie. And I thought I was a hotshot tech guy.

Speak for yourself. I would much rather have a buggy feature than no feature at all.

> The shell script idea is neat.

Could be something as simple as:

  file_path="${1}"
  mime="$(file --mime-type --brief "${file_path}")"
  ext="${mime#image/}"
  mv "${file_path}" "${file_path%.*}.${ext}"

That does no checks (e.g. is the file an image) and may not work on something on something like a video, but it’ll do for common image types such as png, jpeg, webp, heic, gif…

Personally I use a shell script to do it automatically for me... with "file":

    #!/bin/bash
    # Usage: fix-extensions <media file(s)>
    # Renames the files to consistent file extensions based on content

    for file in "$@"; do
        [ -f "$file" ] || continue
        dir=$(dirname "$file")
        name=$(basename "$file")
        prefix="${name%.*}"
        ext="${name##*.}"

        magic=$(file -b "$file")
        newext=""
        case "$magic" in
        *"Apple QuickTime movie"*)        newext=mov;;
        "ISO Media, Apple iTunes Video"*) newext=mp4;;
        "ISO Media, MP4"*)                newext=mp4;;
        "ISO Media, MPEG-4 (.MP4)"*)      newext=mp4;;
        "Macromedia Flash data"*)         newext=swf;;
        "Macromedia Flash Video")         newext=flv;;
        "Matroska data")                  newext=mkv;;
        "Microsoft ASF"*)                 newext=wmv;;
        "MPEG sequence"*)                 newext=mpeg;;
        "Ogg data, OGM video"*)           newext=ogm;;
        "RealMedia file")                 newext=rm;;
        "RIFF "*" data, AVI,"*)           newext=avi;;
        "WebM")                           newext=webm;;
        esac

        if [ -z "$newext" ]; then
            echo >&2 "$file: not renaming, unknown extension for type '$magic'"
        elif [ "$ext" != "$newext" ]; then
            mv -v "$file" "$dir/$prefix.$newext"
        fi
    done

As someone who went MPC-HC + MadVR + ReClock -> mpv years ago (well, I also switched to Gentoo, to be fair). This is completely right.

BUT mpv still isn't perfect. The script in https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/8463 is really needed to handle some stuff (mainly clandestine anime) and the libplacebo/gpu-next transition wasn't exactly the smoothest (my config still has hotfixes for https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/10716 and https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/14474).

Nitpicking aside, it really is the new gold standard these days, and for good reasons.

Maybe not hated but yeah I think the memes about the first memes I've seen about artifacts/stuttering in VLC are basically as old as VLC itself. And new ones keep getting made