mpv media player

What hackers pick instead

• VLC media playerA free, long-standing cross-platform player that opens almost any media file and just works, though critics cite rendering flaws and poor output when used for conversion.172recommend
• Infuse video playerPlays nearly any video format on Apple TV and works well with Jellyfin libraries. Remote streaming can be weak since it skips server transcoding.78recommend
• KodiFree open-source media player praised for playing local, NAS and streamed video on cheap hardware and deep customization. Critics call the interface dated and add-ons weak.64recommend
• TV ExplorerFree web player for IPTV channels from around the world, with no signups or apps needed. Some users report casting and loading problems on Safari and iOS.37recommend
• StremioFree app that gathers streaming catalogs into one place and plays high-quality video; critics say plugin outages and poor results without a debrid service are common.23recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 125 comments. Each links to the original.

1. The more effective way is to use a command-line video player like mpv that can leverage the hardware decoder

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Raspberry Pi 5 – 16 GB, $350”

2. Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support”

3. mpv + yt-dlp does not have this problem because it serves the users interests rather than the platform's.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Microsoft patents system to freeze games and inject ads during downtimes”

4. When someone shares a YouTube link it goes straight to mpv which streams the video (and just the video)

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Making the Internet Boring”

5. its complete reliance on command line flags and manually written config files makes it a bore.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

6. mpv, which seems to have excellent support for everything you would want a player to do

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “What I self-host”

7. I'm so spoiled by MPV with yt-dlp and mpv_sponsorblock_minimal. It's great.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “How I block all online ads”

8. MPV is not user friendly, but I was very impressed by the gapless playback.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

9. mpv is mighty, reliable, fits into the environment with a frugal interface.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025”

10. For multimedia there are very few use cases not covered by ffmpeg and mpv.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)”

11. mpv has both SDL and KMS output, and both can render to the framebuffer.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Old Computer Challenge”

12. it can also display pixels directly via DRM without a display server

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Jellyfin 12.0”

13. This gives you hardware acceleration without a desktop environment.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “FIM – Linux framebuffer image viewer”

14. if I copy pasted the url into VLC or MPV it would play just fine

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison”

15. mpv, which in itself is really awesome; I like it more than vlc

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “FFmpeg 8.1”

16. Use mpv+yt-dlp if you are under Unix to watch online videos.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Raspberry Pi and mini PC home lab prices hit parity as DRAM costs skyrocket”

17. ever since I use exclusively MPV, both on Windows and Linux

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

18. a Blu-Ray's data remuxed into an mkv you can play with mpv

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights”

19. mpv is also a great piece of software, plays everything!

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team”

20. mpv is really good but a little light on the GUI

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs”

21. I'm not a fan of the GUI or the keybinds

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

22. At least twice mpv has changed default behavior and ruined my day.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim”

23. mpv now requires --hwdec=no, making 720p videos barely playable

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025”

24. frame drops when playing back 60 FPS video in MPV

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Mac external displays for designers and developers, part 2”

25. mpv really lagging while vlc doing it fine

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

26. I was able to play YT videos in the Ubuntu Virtual Machine Manager with hand-built mpv/ffmpeg + yt-dlp setup without dropping too many frames

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years”

27. I'm aware this can be done in other players - like mpv - as well, although there I believe no keybinds are set up for this by default

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

28. Compare this to just downloading anything you want and using mpv with any extension you want that does whatever you want it to do.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits”

29. I've gone the route of just resorting to a "simpler" setup, just a collection of shell scripts to manage mpv

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS”

30. mpv is able to play high resolution HEVC videos backwards at real time by holding the "previous frame" key

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

31. the fact that I can ditch a 1+GB browser tab for 68MB mpv playing in the background is just :chef_kiss:

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “ytr: YouTube Radio for Emacs”

32. Easiest solution is to use other player so that you can watch any MP4 file but with software decoding

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English”

33. The same files played via MPV on a file share, i.e. no transcoding possible, play without issue.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team”

34. I already have the perfect video player (mpv) and I should be able to use that for everything.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over”

35. It allows us to play the videos on the youtube without ads and uses low amount of bandwidth.

    Recommends · Apr 2026

36. I prefer living with a samba share to play it in the exact same mpv player without problems

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team”

37. much much lightweight than VLC. Being using it as default for quite some times now.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

38. Nowadays mpv has first-party builds for macOS, which work very well in my opinion

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

39. It does it in seconds without re-rendering the video by shelling out to ffmpeg.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor”

40. Imagine wasting CPU time with that, instead of watching a mkv file with mpv.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I didn't realize my LG TV was spying on me until I turned off Live Plus”