wm4
386e8cd16d
There has been no new developments or agreements, but I was uncertain about the copyright status of them. Thus this part of code was marked as being potentially GPL, and was not built in LGPL mode. Now I've taken a close look again, and decided that these can be relicensed using the existing relicensing agreements. OSD level 3 was introduced in commit8d190244, with the author being unreachable. As I decided in commit6ddd95fd, OSD level 3 itself can be kept, but the "osd" command had to go, and the "rendering" of OSD level 3 (the HAVE_GPL code in osd.c) was uncertain. But the code for this was rewritten: instead of duplicating the time/percent formatting code, it was changed to use common code, and some weird extra logic was removed. The code inside of the "if" is exactly the same as the code that formats the OSD status line (covered by LGPL relicensing). The current commands for adding/removing sub/audio tracks more or less originated from commit2f376d1b39, with the author being unreachable. But the original code was very different, mostly due to MPlayer's incredibly messy handling of subtitles in general. Nothing of this remains in the current code. Even the command declarations were rewritten. The commands (as seen from the user side) are rather similar in naming and semantics, but we don't consider this copyrightable. So it doesn't look like anything copyrightable is left. The add/cycle commands were more or less based on step_property, introduced in commit7a71da01d6, with the patch author disagreeing with the LGPL relicensing. But all code original to the patch has been replaced in later mpv changes, and the original code was mostly copied from MP_CMD_SET_PROPERTY anyway. The underlying property interface was completely changed, the error handling was redone, and all of this is very similar to the changes that were done on SET_PROPERTY. The command declarations are completely different in the first place, because the semantic change from step to add/cycle. The commit also seems to have been co-authored by reimar to some degree. He also had the idea to change the original patch from making the command modify a specific property to making it generic. (The error message line, especially with its %g formatting, might contain some level of originality, so change that just to be sure. This commit Copies and adapts the error message for SET_PROPERTY.) Although I'm a bit on the fence with all the above things, it really doesn't look like there's anything substantial that would cause issues. I thus claim that there is no problem with changing the license to LGPL for the above things. It's probably still slightly below the standard that was usually applied in the code relicensing in mpv, but probably still far above to the usual in open source relicensing (and above commercial standards as well, if you look what certain tech giants do).
mpv
- Overview
- Downloads
- Changelog
- Compilation
- FFmpeg vs. Libav
- Release cycle
- Bug reports
- Contributing
- Relation to MPlayer and mplayer2
- Wiki
- FAQ
- Man pages
- Contact
- License
Overview
mpv is a media player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.
Releases can be found on the release list.
System requirements
- A not too ancient Linux, or Windows 7 or later, or OSX 10.8 or later.
- A somewhat capable CPU. Hardware decoding might sometimes help if the CPU
is too slow to decode video realtime, but must be explicitly enabled with
the
--hwdecoption. - A not too crappy GPU. mpv is not intended to be used with bad GPUs. There are
many caveats with drivers or system compositors causing tearing, stutter,
etc. On Windows, you might want to make sure the graphics drivers are
current. In some cases, ancient fallback video output methods can help
(such as
--vo=xvon Linux), but this use is not recommended or supported.
Downloads
For semi-official builds and third-party packages please see mpv.io.
Changelog
There is no complete changelog; however, changes to the player core interface are listed in the interface changelog.
Changes to the C API are documented in the client API changelog.
The release list has a summary of most of the important changes on every release.
Changes to the default key bindings are indicated in restore-old-bindings.conf.
Compilation
Compiling with full features requires development files for several external libraries. Below is a list of some important requirements.
The mpv build system uses waf, but we don't store it in your source tree. The script './bootstrap.py' will download the latest version of waf that was tested with the build system.
For a list of the available build options use ./waf configure --help. If
you think you have support for some feature installed but configure fails to
detect it, the file build/config.log may contain information about the
reasons for the failure.
NOTE: To avoid cluttering the output with unreadable spam, --help only shows
one of the two switches for each option. If the option is autodetected by
default, the --disable-*** switch is printed; if the option is disabled by
default, the --enable-*** switch is printed. Either way, you can use
--enable-*** or --disable-** regardless of what is printed by --help.
To build the software you can use ./waf build: the result of the compilation
will be located in build/mpv. You can use ./waf install to install mpv
to the prefix after it is compiled.
Example:
./bootstrap.py
./waf configure
./waf
./waf install
Essential dependencies (incomplete list):
- gcc or clang
- X development headers (xlib, xrandr, xext, xscrnsaver, xinerama, libvdpau, libGL, GLX, EGL, xv, ...)
- Audio output development headers (libasound/ALSA, pulseaudio)
- FFmpeg libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libswscale libavfilter and either libswresample or libavresample) from ffmpeg-mpv or Libav
- zlib
- iconv (normally provided by the system libc)
- libass (OSD, OSC, text subtitles)
- Lua (optional, required for the OSC pseudo-GUI and youtube-dl integration)
- libjpeg (optional, used for screenshots only)
- uchardet (optional, for subtitle charset detection)
- vdpau and vaapi libraries for hardware decoding on Linux (optional)
Libass dependencies:
- gcc or clang, yasm on x86 and x86_64
- fribidi, freetype, fontconfig development headers (for libass)
- harfbuzz (optional, required for correct rendering of combining characters, particularly for correct rendering of non-English text on OSX, and Arabic/Indic scripts on any platform)
FFmpeg dependencies:
- gcc or clang, yasm on x86 and x86_64
- OpenSSL or GnuTLS (have to be explicitly enabled when compiling FFmpeg)
- libx264/libmp3lame/libfdk-aac if you want to use encoding (have to be explicitly enabled when compiling FFmpeg)
- Libav also works, but some features will not work. (See section below.)
Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normal Linux distributions. However, FFmpeg is an exception - ffmpeg-mpv or Libav git master is required. For that reason you may want to use the separately available build wrapper (mpv-build) that first compiles FFmpeg libraries and libass, and then compiles the player statically linked against those.
If you want to build a Windows binary, you either have to use MSYS2 and MinGW, or cross-compile from Linux with MinGW. See Windows compilation.
FFmpeg vs. Libav
Generally, mpv should work with the latest release as well as the git version of both FFmpeg and Libav. But FFmpeg is preferred, and some mpv features work with FFmpeg only (subtitle formats in particular).
Preferred FFmpeg version
Only ffmpeg-mpv is supported. Upstream FFmpeg can be forced by passing a certain switch to configure, but compilation or runtime behavior might be broken at times.
If you force upstream FFmpeg, and it doesn't work, please contact upstream FFmpeg for help, instead of mpv. See [FFmpeg contact][http://ffmpeg.org/contact.html#MailingLists] how to contact FFmpeg upstream.
FFmpeg ABI compatibility
mpv does not support linking against FFmpeg versions it was not built with, even if the linked version is supposedly ABI-compatible with the version it was compiled against. Expect malfunctions, crashes, and security issues if you do it anyway.
The reason for not supporting this is because it creates far too much complexity with little to no benefit, coupled with absurd and unusable FFmpeg API artifacts.
Newer mpv versions will refuse to start if runtime and compile time FFmpeg library versions mismatch.
Release cycle
Every other month, an arbitrary git snapshot is made, and is assigned a 0.X.0 version number. No further maintenance is done.
The goal of releases is to make Linux distributions happy. Linux distributions are also expected to apply their own patches in case of bugs and security issues.
Releases other than the latest release are unsupported and unmaintained.
See the release policy document for more information.
Bug reports
Please use the issue tracker provided by GitHub to send us bug reports or feature requests. Follow the template's instructions or the issue will likely be ignored or closed as invalid.
Using the bug tracker as place for simple questions is fine but IRC is recommended (see Contact below).
Contributing
Please read contribute.md.
For small changes you can just send us pull requests through GitHub. For bigger changes come and talk to us on IRC before you start working on them. It will make code review easier for both parties later on.
You can check the wiki or the issue tracker for ideas on what you could contribute with.
Relation to MPlayer and mplayer2
mpv is a fork of MPlayer. Much has changed, and in general, mpv should be considered a completely new program, rather than a MPlayer drop-in replacement.
For details see FAQ entry.
If you are wondering what's different from mplayer2 and MPlayer, an incomplete and largely unmaintained list of changes is located here.
License
GPLv2 "or later" by default, LGPLv2.1 "or later" with --enable-lgpl.
See details.
Contact
Most activity happens on the IRC channel and the github issue tracker.
- GitHub issue tracker: issue tracker (report bugs here)
- User IRC Channel:
#mpvonirc.freenode.net - Developer IRC Channel:
#mpv-develonirc.freenode.net
To contact the mpv team in private write to mpv-team@googlegroups.com. Use
only if discretion is required.