mpa

• Overview
• System requirements
• Changelog
• Compilation
• FFmpeg vs. Libav
• FFmpeg ABI compatibility
• Release cycle
• Bug reports
• Contributing
• Relation to MPlayer and mplayer2
• License
• Contact

Overview

mpa is a audio player based on MPV and MPlayer/mplayer2, and small and lightweight for the purpose of audio players in embedded devices.

mpa can be used to act as an audio player for Smart Assistant devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home.

Releases can be found on the release list.

System requirements

• A not too ancient Linux, Windows 7 or later, or OSX 10.8 or later.

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 the repository. The ./bootstrap.py script 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
• Audio output development headers (libasound/ALSA, pulseaudio)
• FFmpeg libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libavfilter and either libswresample or libavresample)
• zlib

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)
• For native DASH playback, FFmpeg needs to be built with --enable-libxml2 (although there are security implications).
• For good nvidia support on Linux, make sure nv-codec-headers is installed and can be found by configure.
• Libav support is broken. (See section below.)

Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normal Linux distributions. For ease of compiling the latest git master of everything, you may wish to use the separately available build wrapper ([mpv-build][mpv-build]) which 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 FFmpeg. Libav support is currently broken, because they did not add certain FFmpeg API changes which mpv relies on.

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.

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 MPV and MPlayer/mplayer2

mpa is a fork of mpv, but video and subtitle related codes are removed.

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

LGPLv2.1 "or later" by default. See details.

Contact

Most activity happens on github issue tracker.

• GitHub issue tracker: issue tracker (report bugs here)

To contact the mpa team in private write to hisona.developer@gmail.com. Use only if discretion is required.