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

It sounds stupid but the killer feature for me is possibility to have multiple subtitles visible, all easily configurable with a few keybinds (track, offset, position, size etc). No streaming service provides this, and they actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that.

Especially for things like language learning they are amazing, but services like Amazon show like two (English and the local language) out of the 30 something they have available. And I won't even go into the difference of subtitles and dubbing...

For language learning there are some scripts that allow you to hover words and show translations for them. I haven't used them myself with mpv, but I found that kind of tools to be invaluable on a browser when learning a language with a foreign script.

+1. This is a fantastic feature. I haven't even bothered learning the keybindings (perhaps I should), I just start with --sid1= and --sid2= and it works well enough.

Neither me nor my significant other are native English speakers, but we have different native languages. I'm comfortable enough with English, but like having English subtitles since I have a hard time with some dialects and occasionally just miss a word or two due to noisy audio. My SO likes having subtitles in their native language.

Being able to have multiple subtitles makes it possible for both of us to get the experience we like, at the cost of a little screen real estate. Well worth it.

They are not default keybinds, but like any configuration can be cycled or set at runtime. Actually I don't use the keybindings much directly since my default config usually is fine, but have a remote GUI to configure it when needed.

> actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that.

This may also be due to legal issues / restrictions in the contract they had with that content's right holders or subtitles providers.

They probably don't want to license them globally, because the expected usage is low. But surely this could be taken into account in the contract / negotiation. Anyway I guess I'm just not in the target audience. But that's what MPV is great for, it allows you to tweak it for that 0.1% use-case.

I think it's also partially an issue with video + audio being paired by region.

AFAIK, the video you are being served is always based by the geolocation and what video was licensed for that. E.g. in a French version of a movie, text in the movie may have been localized into french inside the video. Additionaly there might be additional/missing scenes in the localized version to get the desired age ratings in that market.

The audio is then synced to that version of the video. That means that e.g. the French audio produced for the US video is not 1:1 the same audio as the French audio for the German video.

So that takes it beyond a licensing issue, and would mean additional effort to produce compatible audio tracks for content that they may only have streaming rights for temporarily. For content native to the streaming service they usually put that effort in.

Mpv is great with subtitles. Not just being able to switch through subtitle tracks and configure positioning, but also being able to automatically find and play external subtitle files when playing a video. I wrote an article about this: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mpv-subtitles-automatic. Only issue I found is the documentation for what subtitle formats are supported is lacking. You have to look through ffmpeg code to actually find what formats are actuallly supported.

Additionally, https://subdl.com/ with https://github.com/alexanderwink/subdl is a great resource for finding and downloading subtitles from the comand line.

Depending on the aspect ratio of the video and playback viewport, you could move the subtitles into the potential black bar underneath.

If there is no black bar, you could get one of those long narrow LCDs off AliExpress, set up the driver, add it as an X display with the right positioning... and then drag the mpv window across that and the TV. Should work. Those little LCDs are just silly expensive though...