Item — HN Reader

Happy VLC user here, but might give this a try, I want to find a better UX with the player controls, like a way to pin the controls bar when full screen (it disappears after some seconds), a 10s forward/backwards control, bigger buttons, less bloated settings, less features that I don't use like radio and other stuff.

But one thing that confused me seeing that homepage is that it shows a player UI screenshot, but it says " mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line", isn't just for the command line right? I assume you can install it as an app and it has an UI like VLC. (I'm on the phone rn will check it on my PC later).

2 comments

mpv has a UI for things like seeking forward and backward, displaying info, etc. But you typically start it like:

  % mpv file.mp4

That's what they mean.

It doesn't really have things such as "File → Open" like VLC has. At least not out of the box, but it's scriptable with Lua and there are scripts and even entire "alternative frontends" that can do this.

It can also be remote controlled via a socket; I built an audio player like this; works pretty well.

In general, if you want a "Windows-like" or "macOS-like" experience then VLC is pretty good. If you want a more "unix-beardy" experience then mpv is pretty good.

Ahhh.... sounds like tweaking vim/nvim (which is one of my daily tools).

Sure the possibility to tweak the UI is limitless, but at least there are minimum usable UI, like gvim (Windows, Linux) or macvim (macOS) which are easy to install.

It does have a drag-and-drop window if you start it with `mpv --profile=pseudo-gui` (I think the same as its .desktop file)

> It doesn't really have things such as "File → Open" like VLC has.

Huh, it does for me (in the menu bar) on macOS! I guess that's platform-specific then?

Thanks for your response. Understand. So MPV may not be for me, I don't know how to use a command line app, I remember have to use to fix an Ubuntu issue and the UX was painful to me.

You don't need to use the command line.

If you set it as your default video player it will work as you expect.

If you don't want to set it as your default video player you can probably do something like "Right Click -> Open with..." and choose MPV.

There are graphical frontends like Celluloid.

https://celluloid-player.github.io/

mpv tries to be pretty minimalist (and does this well), you could try a frontend (Celluloid, Haruna, etc.). And for the commandline, when you install the mpv package, depending on the distro, the package creates a default shortcut/desktop file, so you can open videos on your WM without hitches, on the menu bar. You can associate the shortcut to mime/file types and set as default player too. You can create yourself a desktop file too if necessary on your profile (eg: $HOME/.local/share/applications/mpv.desktop) with this file/content [1]

[1]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/etc/mpv.deskto...

you can just drag-n-drop a file on top of the window and it'll promptly get played