MPV Media Player

People use their computer for different purposes. Some use it for simple office work while others use it for just surfing the internet. You may have also purchased a custom-made computer for yourself for gaming, development or image rendering. But we can all agree that no matter what the primary purpose of our computer is, we often use it to watch videos either the ones we record or the ones we download from the internet. 

All major operating systems come with a media player installed by default so you can use it right away to play your favorite videos. Microsoft Windows comes with Movies & TV application whereas macOS & iOS comes with QuickTime player. While all other operating systems such as Linux & Android come with either one of the famous media players out there such as VLC, Celluloid etc. or their own custom media player designed specifically for that operating system (skin in case of Android). 

However, these media players may have limited functionality. For example, Movies & TV application of Microsoft Windows does not support playing H.265 (HEVC) videos by default. While if you are in Linux, the pre-installed media player may not be able to play even H.264 videos unless you install required codecs. This is why most people don't bother using default media player on their machines and try to look for a better alternative, which can play all their favorite videos without the hassle of installing codecs for each video type. 

Introduction

MPV media player is a free and open-source media player application. This application is based on MPlayer, another open-source video player from the past. The main goal behind this project was to modernize the code of MPlayer 2 which was based on MPlayer. MPV on its own is just a command line based media player with minimal graphical user interface but the interface is quite unique and easy to use by the people. 

Advantages

MPV may look ugly on its own, but it has many features that will make your time watching videos on this media player enjoyable. Some features are as under:

1. MPV is available for almost all major operating systems. Since the code is public, anyone can fork this project and make it work on any operating system out there. Presently, MPV can be installed on Microsoft Windows, macOS, most (if not all) Linux distributions, some (if not all) BSD distributions and Android. 
2. Graphical User Interface of MPV may be minimal but it is serves well. Also, this minimal interface does not come in the way when playing any video. 
3. The support of major video and audio codecs is added by default, so you don't need to install additional codecs to run your videos.
4. MPV delivers high quality video output by working well with OpenGL, Vulkan, D3D11 and it is capable of many playback features loved by the community.
5. GPU video decoding is added by default, and it can be enabled on runtime.

There are many other features such as Lua scripting, audio scaling, support of playing videos on website etc. 

Its Rivals

The main rival of MPV is VLC media player. VLC is another open-source media player available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. However, I would argue that VLC is slow and does not take advantage of GPU acceleration as well as MPV. I was one of those people who liked VLC but got frustrated by its never changing graphical user interface and slow performance. Long time ago, I made a video comparing VLC and MPV. Watch this video below. 

Front-Ends for MPV

MPV on its own is very usable in any operating system. However, there may be some who want greater functionality and customization from their media player. Luckily, MPV can not only be used as standalone media player, but it can also be used in other media players through a library called libmpv. If MPV on its own does not satisfy you then try one of these media players which use MPV as the back--end. 

1. SMPlayer is our favorite free and open-source media player on this list. It is also my go-to media player on any Linux distribution. It can use either MPlayer or MPV in the background to make your video playback enjoyable. This media player is QT based so it will look nice on KDE and any QT/KDE based Linux distribution. However, SMPlayer is a cross-platform application, and it can also be installed on Microsoft Windodws and macOS.
2. IINA is another free and open-source media player, which also uses MPV in the background. IINA also has minimal user interface. But since it's based on cocoa graphical user interface, it will look much better than graphical user interface of MPV. However, due to the same reason, it can only be installed on macOS. 
3. Celluloid (formerly Gnome MPV) is yet another open-source media player which uses GTK for its user interface. Therefore, it looks nice on GTK based desktop environments such as Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE etc. But, it can only be installed on Linux distributions. 

You can also learn about more front-ends of MPV on this Wikipedia page. 

Installation

Installation of MPV is very easy on all supported operating systems. You can download binary package directly from MPV Installation page. Alternatively, you can also install either SMPlayer, IINA or Celluloid from their websites. In case you are using any Linux or BSD distribution, MPV, SMPlayer and Celluloid will most likely be available through default repositories. If not, then their websites can give you more information about how to install these applications on your computer. Since MPV and its front-end applications mentioned above are open-source applications, you can also download their source code source code and compile it yourself.