Keyboard Control

LEFT and RIGHT

Seek backward/forward 5 seconds. Shift+arrow does a 1 second exact seek (see --hr-seek).

UP and DOWN

Seek forward/backward 1 minute. Shift+arrow does a 5 second exact seek (see --hr-seek).

Ctrl+LEFT and Ctrl+RIGHT

Seek to the previous/next subtitle. Subject to some restrictions and might not always work; see sub-seek command.

Ctrl+Shift+Left and Ctrl+Shift+Right

Adjust subtitle delay so that the next or previous subtitle is displayed now. This is especially useful to sync subtitles to audio.

[ and ]

Decrease/increase current playback speed by 10%.

{ and }

Halve/double current playback speed.

BACKSPACE

Reset playback speed to normal.

Shift+BACKSPACE

Undo the last seek. This works only if the playlist entry was not changed. Hitting it a second time will go back to the original position. See revert-seek command for details.

Shift+Ctrl+BACKSPACE

Mark the current position. This will then be used by Shift+BACKSPACE as revert position (once you seek back, the marker will be reset). You can use this to seek around in the file and then return to the exact position where you left off.

< and >

Go backward/forward in the playlist.

ENTER

Go forward in the playlist.

p / SPACE

Pause (pressing again unpauses).

.

Step forward. Pressing once will pause, every consecutive press will play one frame and then go into pause mode again.

,

Step backward. Pressing once will pause, every consecutive press will play one frame in reverse and then go into pause mode again.

q

Stop playing and quit.

Q

Like q, but store the current playback position. Playing the same file later will resume at the old playback position if possible.

/ and *

Decrease/increase volume.

9 and 0

Decrease/increase volume.

m

Mute sound.

_

Cycle through the available video tracks.

#

Cycle through the available audio tracks.

f

Toggle fullscreen (see also --fs).

ESC

Exit fullscreen mode.

T

Toggle stay-on-top (see also --ontop).

w and W

Decrease/increase pan-and-scan range. The e key does the same as W currently, but use is discouraged.

o (also P)

Show progression bar, elapsed time and total duration on the OSD.

O

Toggle OSD states between normal and playback time/duration.

v

Toggle subtitle visibility.

j and J

Cycle through the available subtitles.

z and Z

Adjust subtitle delay by +/- 0.1 seconds. The x key does the same as Z currently, but use is discouraged.

l

Set/clear A-B loop points. See ab-loop command for details.

L

Toggle infinite looping.

Ctrl + and Ctrl -

Adjust audio delay (A/V sync) by +/- 0.1 seconds.

u

Switch between applying no style overrides to SSA/ASS subtitles, and overriding them almost completely with the normal subtitle style. See --sub-ass-override for more info.

V

Toggle subtitle VSFilter aspect compatibility mode. See --sub-ass-vsfilter-aspect-compat for more info.

r and R

Move subtitles up/down. The t key does the same as R currently, but use is discouraged.

s

Take a screenshot.

S

Take a screenshot, without subtitles. (Whether this works depends on VO driver support.)

Ctrl s

Take a screenshot, as the window shows it (with subtitles, OSD, and scaled video).

PGUP and PGDWN

Seek to the beginning of the previous/next chapter. In most cases, "previous" will actually go to the beginning of the current chapter; see --chapter-seek-threshold.

Shift+PGUP and Shift+PGDWN

Seek backward or forward by 10 minutes. (This used to be mapped to PGUP/PGDWN without Shift.)

d

Activate/deactivate deinterlacer.

A

Cycle aspect ratio override.

Ctrl h

Toggle hardware video decoding on/off.

Alt+LEFT, Alt+RIGHT, Alt+UP, Alt+DOWN

Move the video rectangle (panning).

Alt + and Alt -

Combining Alt with the + or - keys changes video zoom.

Alt+BACKSPACE

Reset the pan/zoom settings.

F8

Show the playlist and the current position in it (useful only if a UI window is used, broken on the terminal).

F9

Show the list of audio and subtitle streams (useful only if a UI window is used, broken on the terminal).

i and I

Show/toggle an overlay displaying statistics about the currently playing file such as codec, framerate, number of dropped frames and so on. See STATS for more information.

del

Cycles visibility between never / auto (mouse-move) / always

`

Show the console. (ESC closes it again. See CONSOLE.)

(The following keys are valid only when using a video output that supports the corresponding adjustment.)

1 and 2

Adjust contrast.

3 and 4

Adjust brightness.

5 and 6

Adjust gamma.

7 and 8

Adjust saturation.

Alt+0 (and command+0 on OSX)

Resize video window to half its original size.

Alt+1 (and command+1 on OSX)

Resize video window to its original size.

Alt+2 (and command+2 on OSX)

Resize video window to double its original size.

command + f (OSX only)

Toggle fullscreen (see also --fs).

(The following keys are valid if you have a keyboard with multimedia keys.)

PAUSE

Pause.

STOP

Stop playing and quit.

PREVIOUS and NEXT

Seek backward/forward 1 minute.

If you miss some older key bindings, look at etc/restore-old-bindings.conf in the mpv git repository.

Mouse Control

Left double click

Toggle fullscreen on/off.

Right click

Toggle pause on/off.

Forward/Back button

Skip to next/previous entry in playlist.

Wheel up/down

Seek forward/backward 10 seconds.

Wheel left/right

Decrease/increase volume.

Legacy option syntax

The --option=value syntax is not strictly enforced, and the alternative legacy syntax -option value and -option=value will also work. This is mostly for compatibility with MPlayer. Using these should be avoided. Their semantics can change any time in the future.

For example, the alternative syntax will consider an argument following the option a filename. mpv -fs no will attempt to play a file named no, because --fs is a flag option that requires no parameter. If an option changes and its parameter becomes optional, then a command line using the alternative syntax will break.

Until mpv 0.31.0, there was no difference whether an option started with -- or a single -. Newer mpv releases strictly expect that you pass the option value after a =. For example, before mpv --log-file f.txt would write a log to f.txt, but now this command line fails, as --log-file expects an option value, and f.txt is simply considered a normal file to be played (as in mpv f.txt).

The future plan is that -option value will not work anymore, and options with a single - behave the same as -- options.

Escaping spaces and other special characters

Keep in mind that the shell will partially parse and mangle the arguments you pass to mpv. For example, you might need to quote or escape options and filenames:

mpv "filename with spaces.mkv" --title="window title"

It gets more complicated if the suboption parser is involved. The suboption parser puts several options into a single string, and passes them to a component at once, instead of using multiple options on the level of the command line.

The suboption parser can quote strings with " and [...]. Additionally, there is a special form of quoting with %n% described below.

For example, assume the hypothetical foo filter can take multiple options:

mpv test.mkv --vf=foo:option1=value1:option2:option3=value3,bar

This passes option1 and option3 to the foo filter, with option2 as flag (implicitly option2=yes), and adds a bar filter after that. If an option contains spaces or characters like , or :, you need to quote them:

mpv '--vf=foo:option1="option value with spaces",bar'

Shells may actually strip some quotes from the string passed to the commandline, so the example quotes the string twice, ensuring that mpv receives the " quotes.

The [...] form of quotes wraps everything between [ and ]. It's useful with shells that don't interpret these characters in the middle of an argument (like bash). These quotes are balanced (since mpv 0.9.0): the [ and ] nest, and the quote terminates on the last ] that has no matching [ within the string. (For example, [a[b]c] results in a[b]c.)

The fixed-length quoting syntax is intended for use with external scripts and programs.

It is started with % and has the following format:

%n%string_of_length_n

Suboptions passed to the client API are also subject to escaping. Using mpv_set_option_string() is exactly like passing --name=data to the command line (but without shell processing of the string). Some options support passing values in a more structured way instead of flat strings, and can avoid the suboption parsing mess. For example, --vf supports MPV_FORMAT_NODE, which lets you pass suboptions as a nested data structure of maps and arrays.

Paths

Some care must be taken when passing arbitrary paths and filenames to mpv. For example, paths starting with - will be interpreted as options. Likewise, if a path contains the sequence ://, the string before that might be interpreted as protocol prefix, even though :// can be part of a legal UNIX path. To avoid problems with arbitrary paths, you should be sure that absolute paths passed to mpv start with /, and prefix relative paths with ./.

Using the file:// pseudo-protocol is discouraged, because it involves strange URL unescaping rules.

The name - itself is interpreted as stdin, and will cause mpv to disable console controls. (Which makes it suitable for playing data piped to stdin.)

The special argument -- can be used to stop mpv from interpreting the following arguments as options.

When using the client API, you should strictly avoid using mpv_command_string for invoking the loadfile command, and instead prefer e.g. mpv_command to avoid the need for filename escaping.

For paths passed to suboptions, the situation is further complicated by the need to escape special characters. To work this around, the path can be additionally wrapped in the fixed-length syntax, e.g. %n%string_of_length_n (see above).

Some mpv options interpret paths starting with ~. Currently, the prefix ~~/ expands to the mpv configuration directory (usually ~/.config/mpv/). ~/ expands to the user's home directory. (The trailing / is always required.) There are the following paths as well:

Per-File Options

When playing multiple files, any option given on the command line usually affects all files. Example:

mpv --a file1.mkv --b file2.mkv --c

(This is different from MPlayer and mplayer2.)

Also, if any option is changed at runtime (via input commands), they are not reset when a new file is played.

Sometimes, it is useful to change options per-file. This can be achieved by adding the special per-file markers --{ and --}. (Note that you must escape these on some shells.) Example:

mpv --a file1.mkv --b --\{ --c file2.mkv --d file3.mkv --e --\} file4.mkv --f

Additionally, any file-local option changed at runtime is reset when the current file stops playing. If option --c is changed during playback of file2.mkv, it is reset when advancing to file3.mkv. This only affects file-local options. The option --a is never reset here.

List Options

Some options which store lists of option values can have action suffixes. For example, the --display-tags option takes a ,-separated list of tags, but the option also allows you to append a single tag with --display-tags-append, and the tag name can for example contain a literal , without the need for escaping.

Location and Syntax

You can put all of the options in configuration files which will be read every time mpv is run. The system-wide configuration file 'mpv.conf' is in your configuration directory (e.g. /etc/mpv or /usr/local/etc/mpv), the user-specific one is ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf. For details and platform specifics (in particular Windows paths) see the FILES section.

User-specific options override system-wide options and options given on the command line override either. The syntax of the configuration files is option=value. Everything after a # is considered a comment. Options that work without values can be enabled by setting them to yes and disabled by setting them to no. Even suboptions can be specified in this way.

# Use GPU-accelerated video output by default.
vo=gpu
# Use quotes for text that can contain spaces:
status-msg="Time: ${time-pos}"

Escaping spaces and special characters

This is done like with command line options. The shell is not involved here, but option values still need to be quoted as a whole if it contains certain characters like spaces. A config entry can be quoted with ", as well as with the fixed-length syntax (%n%) mentioned before. This is like passing the exact contents of the quoted string as command line option. C-style escapes are currently _not_ interpreted on this level, although some options do this manually. (This is a mess and should probably be changed at some point.)

Putting Command Line Options into the Configuration File

Almost all command line options can be put into the configuration file. Here is a small guide:

File-specific Configuration Files

You can also write file-specific configuration files. If you wish to have a configuration file for a file called 'video.avi', create a file named 'video.avi.conf' with the file-specific options in it and put it in ~/.config/mpv/. You can also put the configuration file in the same directory as the file to be played. Both require you to set the --use-filedir-conf option (either on the command line or in your global config file). If a file-specific configuration file is found in the same directory, no file-specific configuration is loaded from ~/.config/mpv. In addition, the --use-filedir-conf option enables directory-specific configuration files. For this, mpv first tries to load a mpv.conf from the same directory as the file played and then tries to load any file-specific configuration.

Profiles

To ease working with different configurations, profiles can be defined in the configuration files. A profile starts with its name in square brackets, e.g. [my-profile]. All following options will be part of the profile. A description (shown by --profile=help) can be defined with the profile-desc option. To end the profile, start another one or use the profile name default to continue with normal options.

You can list profiles with --profile=help, and show the contents of a profile with --show-profile=<name> (replace <name> with the profile name). You can apply profiles on start with the --profile=<name> option, or at runtime with the apply-profile <name> command.

# normal top-level option
fullscreen=yes

# a profile that can be enabled with --profile=big-cache
[big-cache]
cache=yes
demuxer-max-bytes=123400KiB
demuxer-readahead-secs=20

[slow]
profile-desc="some profile name"
# reference a builtin profile
profile=gpu-hq

[fast]
vo=vdpau

# using a profile again extends it
[slow]
framedrop=no
# you can also include other profiles
profile=big-cache

Auto profiles

Some profiles are loaded automatically. The following example demonstrates this:

[extension.mkv]
profile-desc="profile for .mkv files"
vf=flip

The profile name follows the schema type.name, where type can be protocol for the input/output protocol in use (see --list-protocols), and extension for the extension of the path of the currently played file (not the file format).

This feature is very limited, and there are no other auto profiles.

Track Selection

--alang=<languagecode[,languagecode,...]>

Specify a priority list of audio languages to use. Different container formats employ different language codes. DVDs use ISO 639-1 two-letter language codes, Matroska, MPEG-TS and NUT use ISO 639-2 three-letter language codes, while OGM uses a free-form identifier. See also --aid.

This is a string list option. See List Options for details.

Examples

• mpv dvd://1 --alang=hu,en chooses the Hungarian language track on a DVD and falls back on English if Hungarian is not available.
• mpv --alang=jpn example.mkv plays a Matroska file with Japanese audio.

--slang=<languagecode[,languagecode,...]>

Specify a priority list of subtitle languages to use. Different container formats employ different language codes. DVDs use ISO 639-1 two letter language codes, Matroska uses ISO 639-2 three letter language codes while OGM uses a free-form identifier. See also --sid.

This is a string list option. See List Options for details.

Examples

• mpv dvd://1 --slang=hu,en chooses the Hungarian subtitle track on a DVD and falls back on English if Hungarian is not available.
• mpv --slang=jpn example.mkv plays a Matroska file with Japanese subtitles.

--vlang=<...>

Equivalent to --alang and --slang, for video tracks.

This is a string list option. See List Options for details.

--aid=<ID|auto|no>

Select audio track. auto selects the default, no disables audio. See also --alang. mpv normally prints available audio tracks on the terminal when starting playback of a file.

--audio is an alias for --aid.

--aid=no or --audio=no or --no-audio disables audio playback. (The latter variant does not work with the client API.)

--sid=<ID|auto|no>

Display the subtitle stream specified by <ID>. auto selects the default, no disables subtitles.

--sub is an alias for --sid.

--sid=no or --sub=no or --no-sub disables subtitle decoding. (The latter variant does not work with the client API.)

--vid=<ID|auto|no>

Select video channel. auto selects the default, no disables video.

--video is an alias for --vid.

--vid=no or --video=no or --no-video disables video playback. (The latter variant does not work with the client API.)

If video is disabled, mpv will try to download the audio only if media is streamed with youtube-dl, because it saves bandwidth. This is done by setting the ytdl_format to "bestaudio/best" in the ytdl_hook.lua script.

--edition=<ID|auto>

(Matroska files only) Specify the edition (set of chapters) to use, where 0 is the first. If set to auto (the default), mpv will choose the first edition declared as a default, or if there is no default, the first edition defined.

--track-auto-selection=<yes|no>

Enable the default track auto-selection (default: yes). Enabling this will make the player select streams according to --aid, --alang, and others. If it is disabled, no tracks are selected. In addition, the player will not exit if no tracks are selected, and wait instead (this wait mode is similar to pausing, but the pause option is not set).

This is useful with --lavfi-complex: you can start playback in this mode, and then set select tracks at runtime by setting the filter graph. Note that if --lavfi-complex is set before playback is started, the referenced tracks are always selected.

Playback Control

--start=<relative time>

Seek to given time position.

The general format for times is [+|-][[hh:]mm:]ss[.ms]. If the time is prefixed with -, the time is considered relative from the end of the file (as signaled by the demuxer/the file). A + is usually ignored (but see below).

The following alternative time specifications are recognized:

pp% seeks to percent position pp (0-100).

#c seeks to chapter number c. (Chapters start from 1.)

none resets any previously set option (useful for libmpv).

If --rebase-start-time=no is given, then prefixing times with + makes the time relative to the start of the file. A timestamp without prefix is considered an absolute time, i.e. should seek to a frame with a timestamp as the file contains it. As a bug, but also a hidden feature, putting 1 or more spaces before the + or - always interprets the time as absolute, which can be used to seek to negative timestamps (useful for debugging at most).

Examples

--start=+56, --start=00:56

Seeks to the start time + 56 seconds.

--start=-56, --start=-00:56

Seeks to the end time - 56 seconds.

--start=01:10:00

Seeks to 1 hour 10 min.

--start=50%

Seeks to the middle of the file.

--start=30 --end=40

Seeks to 30 seconds, plays 10 seconds, and exits.

--start=-3:20 --length=10

Seeks to 3 minutes and 20 seconds before the end of the file, plays 10 seconds, and exits.

--start='#2' --end='#4'

Plays chapters 2 and 3, and exits.

--end=<relative time>

Stop at given time. Use --length if the time should be relative to --start. See --start for valid option values and examples.

--length=<relative time>

Stop after a given time relative to the start time. See --start for valid option values and examples.

If both --end and --length are provided, playback will stop when it reaches either of the two endpoints.

Obscurity note: this does not work correctly if --rebase-start-time=no, and the specified time is not an "absolute" time, as defined in the --start option description.

--rebase-start-time=<yes|no>

Whether to move the file start time to 00:00:00 (default: yes). This is less awkward for files which start at a random timestamp, such as transport streams. On the other hand, if there are timestamp resets, the resulting behavior can be rather weird. For this reason, and in case you are actually interested in the real timestamps, this behavior can be disabled with no.

--speed=<0.01-100>

Slow down or speed up playback by the factor given as parameter.

If --audio-pitch-correction (on by default) is used, playing with a speed higher than normal automatically inserts the scaletempo audio filter.

--pause

Start the player in paused state.

--shuffle

Play files in random order.

--playlist-start=<auto|index>

Set which file on the internal playlist to start playback with. The index is an integer, with 0 meaning the first file. The value auto means that the selection of the entry to play is left to the playback resume mechanism (default). If an entry with the given index doesn't exist, the behavior is unspecified and might change in future mpv versions. The same applies if the playlist contains further playlists (don't expect any reasonable behavior). Passing a playlist file to mpv should work with this option, though. E.g. mpv playlist.m3u --playlist-start=123 will work as expected, as long as playlist.m3u does not link to further playlists.

The value no is a deprecated alias for auto.

--playlist=<filename>

Play files according to a playlist file (Supports some common formats. If no format is detected, it will be treated as list of files, separated by newline characters. Note that XML playlist formats are not supported.)

You can play playlists directly and without this option, however, this option disables any security mechanisms that might be in place. You may also need this option to load plaintext files as playlist.

Warning

The way mpv uses playlist files via --playlist is not safe against maliciously constructed files. Such files may trigger harmful actions. This has been the case for all mpv and MPlayer versions, but unfortunately this fact was not well documented earlier, and some people have even misguidedly recommended use of --playlist with untrusted sources. Do NOT use --playlist with random internet sources or files you do not trust!

Playlist can contain entries using other protocols, such as local files, or (most severely), special protocols like avdevice://, which are inherently unsafe.

--chapter-merge-threshold=<number>

Threshold for merging almost consecutive ordered chapter parts in milliseconds (default: 100). Some Matroska files with ordered chapters have inaccurate chapter end timestamps, causing a small gap between the end of one chapter and the start of the next one when they should match. If the end of one playback part is less than the given threshold away from the start of the next one then keep playing video normally over the chapter change instead of doing a seek.

--chapter-seek-threshold=<seconds>

Distance in seconds from the beginning of a chapter within which a backward chapter seek will go to the previous chapter (default: 5.0). Past this threshold, a backward chapter seek will go to the beginning of the current chapter instead. A negative value means always go back to the previous chapter.

--hr-seek=<no|absolute|yes>

Select when to use precise seeks that are not limited to keyframes. Such seeks require decoding video from the previous keyframe up to the target position and so can take some time depending on decoding performance. For some video formats, precise seeks are disabled. This option selects the default choice to use for seeks; it is possible to explicitly override that default in the definition of key bindings and in input commands.

no:	Never use precise seeks.
absolute:	Use precise seeks if the seek is to an absolute position in the file, such as a chapter seek, but not for relative seeks like the default behavior of arrow keys (default).
yes:	Use precise seeks whenever possible.
always:	Same as yes (for compatibility).

--hr-seek-demuxer-offset=<seconds>

This option exists to work around failures to do precise seeks (as in --hr-seek) caused by bugs or limitations in the demuxers for some file formats. Some demuxers fail to seek to a keyframe before the given target position, going to a later position instead. The value of this option is subtracted from the time stamp given to the demuxer. Thus, if you set this option to 1.5 and try to do a precise seek to 60 seconds, the demuxer is told to seek to time 58.5, which hopefully reduces the chance that it erroneously goes to some time later than 60 seconds. The downside of setting this option is that precise seeks become slower, as video between the earlier demuxer position and the real target may be unnecessarily decoded.

--hr-seek-framedrop=<yes|no>

Allow the video decoder to drop frames during seek, if these frames are before the seek target. If this is enabled, precise seeking can be faster, but if you're using video filters which modify timestamps or add new frames, it can lead to precise seeking skipping the target frame. This e.g. can break frame backstepping when deinterlacing is enabled.

Default: yes

--index=<mode>

Controls how to seek in files. Note that if the index is missing from a file, it will be built on the fly by default, so you don't need to change this. But it might help with some broken files.

default:	use an index if the file has one, or build it if missing
recreate:	don't read or use the file's index

Note

This option only works if the underlying media supports seeking (i.e. not with stdin, pipe, etc).

--load-unsafe-playlists

Load URLs from playlists which are considered unsafe (default: no). This includes special protocols and anything that doesn't refer to normal files. Local files and HTTP links on the other hand are always considered safe.

In addition, if a playlist is loaded while this is set, the added playlist entries are not marked as originating from network or potentially unsafe location. (Instead, the behavior is as if the playlist entries were provided directly to mpv command line or loadfile command.)

Note that --playlist always loads all entries, so you use that instead if you really have the need for this functionality.

--access-references=<yes|no>

Follow any references in the file being opened (default: yes). Disabling this is helpful if the file is automatically scanned (e.g. thumbnail generation). If the thumbnail scanner for example encounters a playlist file, which contains network URLs, and the scanner should not open these, enabling this option will prevent it. This option also disables ordered chapters, mov reference files, opening of archives, and a number of other features.

On older FFmpeg versions, this will not work in some cases. Some FFmpeg demuxers might not respect this option.

This option does not prevent opening of paired subtitle files and such. Use --autoload-files=no to prevent this.

This option does not always work if you open non-files (for example using dvd://directory would open a whole bunch of files in the given directory). Prefixing the filename with ./ if it doesn't start with a / will avoid this.

--loop-playlist=<N|inf|force|no>, --loop-playlist

Loops playback N times. A value of 1 plays it one time (default), 2 two times, etc. inf means forever. no is the same as 1 and disables looping. If several files are specified on command line, the entire playlist is looped. --loop-playlist is the same as --loop-playlist=inf.

The force mode is like inf, but does not skip playlist entries which have been marked as failing. This means the player might waste CPU time trying to loop a file that doesn't exist. But it might be useful for playing webradios under very bad network conditions.

--loop-file=<N|inf|no>, --loop=<N|inf|no>

Loop a single file N times. inf means forever, no means normal playback. For compatibility, --loop-file and --loop-file=yes are also accepted, and are the same as --loop-file=inf.

The difference to --loop-playlist is that this doesn't loop the playlist, just the file itself. If the playlist contains only a single file, the difference between the two option is that this option performs a seek on loop, instead of reloading the file.

--loop is an alias for this option.

--ab-loop-a=<time>, --ab-loop-b=<time>

Set loop points. If playback passes the b timestamp, it will seek to the a timestamp. Seeking past the b point doesn't loop (this is intentional).

If a is after b, the behavior is as if the points were given in the right order, and the player will seek to b after crossing through a. This is different from old behavior, where looping was disabled (and as a bug, looped back to a on the end of the file).

If either options are set to no (or unset), looping is disabled. This is different from old behavior, where an unset a implied the start of the file, and an unset b the end of the file.

The loop-points can be adjusted at runtime with the corresponding properties. See also ab-loop command.

--ordered-chapters, --no-ordered-chapters

Enabled by default. Disable support for Matroska ordered chapters. mpv will not load or search for video segments from other files, and will also ignore any chapter order specified for the main file.

--ordered-chapters-files=<playlist-file>

Loads the given file as playlist, and tries to use the files contained in it as reference files when opening a Matroska file that uses ordered chapters. This overrides the normal mechanism for loading referenced files by scanning the same directory the main file is located in.

Useful for loading ordered chapter files that are not located on the local filesystem, or if the referenced files are in different directories.

Note: a playlist can be as simple as a text file containing filenames separated by newlines.

--chapters-file=<filename>

Load chapters from this file, instead of using the chapter metadata found in the main file.

This accepts a media file (like mkv) or even a pseudo-format like ffmetadata and uses its chapters to replace the current file's chapters. This doesn't work with OGM or XML chapters directly.

--sstep=<sec>

Skip <sec> seconds after every frame.

Note

Without --hr-seek, skipping will snap to keyframes.

--stop-playback-on-init-failure=<yes|no>

Stop playback if either audio or video fails to initialize (default: no). With no, playback will continue in video-only or audio-only mode if one of them fails. This doesn't affect playback of audio-only or video-only files.

--play-dir=<forward|+|backward|->

Control the playback direction (default: forward). Setting backward will attempt to play the file in reverse direction, with decreasing playback time. If this is set on playback starts, playback will start from the end of the file. If this is changed at during playback, a hr-seek will be issued to change the direction.

+ and - are aliases for forward and backward.

The rest of this option description pertains to the backward mode.

Note

Backward playback is extremely fragile. It may not always work, is much slower than forward playback, and breaks certain other features. How well it works depends mainly on the file being played. Generally, it will show good results (or results at all) only if the stars align.

mpv, as well as most media formats, were designed for forward playback only. Backward playback is bolted on top of mpv, and tries to make a medium effort to make backward playback work. Depending on your use-case, another tool may work much better.

Backward playback is not exactly a 1st class feature. Implementation tradeoffs were made, that are bad for backward playback, but in turn do not cause disadvantages for normal playback. Various possible optimizations are not implemented in order to keep the complexity down. Normally, a media player is highly pipelined (future data is prepared in separate threads, so it is available in realtime when the next stage needs it), but backward playback will essentially stall the pipeline at various random points.

For example, for intra-only codecs are trivially backward playable, and tools built around them may make efficient use of them (consider video editors or camera viewers). mpv won't be efficient in this case, because it uses its generic backward playback algorithm, that on top of it is not very optimized.

If you just want to quickly go backward through the video and just show "keyframes", just use forward playback, and hold down the left cursor key (which on CLI with default config sends many small relative seek commands).

The implementation consists of mostly 3 parts:

• Backward demuxing. This relies on the demuxer cache, so the demuxer cache should (or must, didn't test it) be enabled, and its size will affect performance. If the cache is too small or too large, quadratic runtime behavior may result.
• Backward decoding. The decoder library used (libavcodec) does not support this. It is emulated by feeding bits of data in forward, putting the result in a queue, returning the queue data to the VO in reverse, and then starting over at an earlier position. This can require buffering an extreme amount of decoded data, and also completely breaks pipelining.
• Backward output. This is relatively simple, because the decoder returns the frames in the needed order. However, this may cause various problems because filters see audio and video going backward.

Known problems:

• It's fragile. If anything doesn't work, random non-useful behavior may occur. In simple cases, the player will just play nonsense and artifacts. In other cases, it may get stuck or heat the CPU. (Exceeding memory usage significantly beyond the user-set limits would be a bug, though.)
• Performance and resource usage isn't good. In part this is inherent to backward playback of normal media formats, and in parts due to implementation choices and tradeoffs.
• This is extremely reliant on good demuxer behavior. Although backward demuxing requires no special demuxer support, it is required that the demuxer performs seeks reliably, fulfills some specific requirements about packet metadata, and has deterministic behavior.
• Starting playback exactly from the end may or may not work, depending on seeking behavior and file duration detection.
• Some container formats, audio, and video codecs are not supported due to their behavior. There is no list, and the player usually does not detect them. Certain live streams (including TV captures) may exhibit problems in particular, as well as some lossy audio codecs. h264 intra-refresh is known not to work due to problems with libavcodec. WAV and some other raw audio formats tend to have problems - there are hacks for dealing with them, which may or may not work.
• Backward demuxing of subtitles is not supported. Subtitle display still works for some external text subtitle formats. (These are fully read into memory, and only backward display is needed.) Text subtitles that are cached in the subtitle renderer also have a chance to be displayed correctly.
• Some features dealing with playback of broken or hard to deal with files will not work fully (such as timestamp correction).
• If demuxer low level seeks (i.e. seeking the actual demuxer instead of just within the demuxer cache) are performed by backward playback, the created seek ranges may not join, because not enough overlap is achieved.
• Trying to use this with hardware video decoding will probably exhaust all your GPU memory and then crash a thing or two. Or it will fail because --hwdec-extra-frames will certainly be set too low.
• Stream recording is broken. --stream-record may keep working if you backward play within a cached region only.
• Relative seeks may behave weird. Small seeks backward (towards smaller time, i.e. seek -1) may not really seek properly, and audio will remain muted for a while. Using hr-seek is recommended, which should have none of these problems.
• Some things are just weird. For example, while seek commands manipulate playback time in the expected way (provided they work correctly), the framestep commands are transposed. Backstepping will perform very expensive work to step forward by 1 frame.

Tuning:

• Remove all --vf/--af filters you have set. Disable hardware decoding. Disable idiotic nonsense like SPDIF passthrough.
• Increasing --video-reversal-buffer might help if reversal queue overflow is reported, which may happen in high bitrate video, or video with large GOP. Hardware decoding mostly ignores this, and you need to increase --hwdec-extra-frames instead (until you get playback without logged errors).
• The demuxer cache is essential for backward demuxing. Make sure to set --demuxer-seekable-cache (or just use --cache). The cache size might matter. If it's too small, a queue overflow will be logged, and backward playback cannot continue, or it performs too many low level seeks. If it's too large, implementation tradeoffs may cause general performance issues. Use --demuxer-max-bytes to potentially increase the amount of packets the demuxer layer can queue for reverse demuxing (basically it's the --video-reversal-buffer equivalent for the demuxer layer).
• --demuxer-backward-playback-step also factors into how many seeks may be performed, and whether backward demuxing could break due to queue overflow. If it's set too high, the backstep operation needs to search through more packets all the time, even if the cache is large enough.
• Setting --demuxer-cache-wait may be useful to cache the entire file into the demuxer cache. Set --demuxer-max-bytes to a large size to make sure it can read the entire cache; --demuxer-max-back-bytes should also be set to a large size to prevent that tries to trim the cache.
• If audio artifacts are audible, even though the AO does not underrun, increasing --audio-backward-overlap might help in some cases.

--video-reversal-buffer=<bytesize>, --audio-reversal-buffer=<bytesize>

For backward decoding. Backward decoding decodes forward in steps, and then reverses the decoder output. These options control the approximate maximum amount of bytes that can be buffered. The main use of this is to avoid unbounded resource usage; during normal backward playback, it's not supposed to hit the limit, and if it does, it will drop frames and complain about it.

Use this option if you get reversal queue overflow errors during backward playback. Increase the size until the warning disappears. Usually, the video buffer will overflow first, especially if it's high resolution video.

This does not work correctly if video hardware decoding is used. The video frame size will not include the referenced GPU and driver memory. Some hardware decoders may also be limited by --hwdec-extra-frames.

How large the queue size needs to be depends entirely on the way the media was encoded. Audio typically requires a very small buffer, while video can require excessively large buffers.

(Technically, this allows the last frame to exceed the limit. Also, this does not account for other buffered frames, such as inside the decoder or the video output.)

This does not affect demuxer cache behavior at all.

See --list-options for defaults and value range. <bytesize> options accept suffixes such as KiB and MiB.

--video-backward-overlap=<auto|number>, --audio-backward-overlap=<auto|number>

Number of overlapping keyframe ranges to use for backward decoding (default: auto) ("keyframe" to be understood as in the mpv/ffmpeg specific meaning). Backward decoding works by forward decoding in small steps. Some codecs cannot restart decoding from any packet (even if it's marked as seek point), which becomes noticeable with backward decoding (in theory this is a problem with seeking too, but --hr-seek-demuxer-offset can fix it for seeking). In particular, MDCT based audio codecs are affected.

The solution is to feed a previous packet to the decoder each time, and then discard the output. This option controls how many packets to feed. The auto choice is currently hardcoded to 0 for video, and uses 1 for lossy audio, 0 for lossless audio. For some specific lossy audio codecs, this is set to 2.

--video-backward-overlap can potentially handle intra-refresh video, depending on the exact conditions. You may have to use the --vd-lavc-show-all option as well.

--video-backward-batch=<number>, --audio-backward-batch=<number>

Number of keyframe ranges to decode at once when backward decoding (default: 1 for video, 10 for audio). Another pointless tuning parameter nobody should use. This should affect performance only. In theory, setting a number higher than 1 for audio will reduce overhead due to less frequent backstep operations and less redundant decoding work due to fewer decoded overlap frames (see --audio-backward-overlap). On the other hand, it requires a larger reversal buffer, and could make playback less smooth due to breaking pipelining (e.g. by decoding a lot, and then doing nothing for a while).

It probably never makes sense to set --video-backward-batch. But in theory, it could help with intra-only video codecs by reducing backstep operations.

--demuxer-backward-playback-step=<seconds>

Number of seconds the demuxer should seek back to get new packets during backward playback (default: 60). This is useful for tuning backward playback, see --play-dir for details.

Setting this to a very low value or 0 may make the player think seeking is broken, or may make it perform multiple seeks.

Setting this to a high value may lead to quadratic runtime behavior.

Program Behavior

--help, --h

Show short summary of options.

You can also pass a string to this option, which will list all top-level options which contain the string in the name, e.g. --h=scale for all options that contain the word scale. The special string * lists all top-level options.

-v

Increment verbosity level, one level for each -v found on the command line.

--version, -V

Print version string and exit.

--no-config

Do not load default configuration files. This prevents loading of both the user-level and system-wide mpv.conf and input.conf files. Other configuration files are blocked as well, such as resume playback files.

Note

Files explicitly requested by command line options, like --include or --use-filedir-conf, will still be loaded.

See also: --config-dir.

--list-options

Prints all available options.

--list-properties

Print a list of the available properties.

--list-protocols

Print a list of the supported protocols.

--log-file=<path>

Opens the given path for writing, and print log messages to it. Existing files will be truncated. The log level is at least -v -v, but can be raised via --msg-level (the option cannot lower it below the forced minimum log level).

--config-dir=<path>

Force a different configuration directory. If this is set, the given directory is used to load configuration files, and all other configuration directories are ignored. This means the global mpv configuration directory as well as per-user directories are ignored, and overrides through environment variables (MPV_HOME) are also ignored.

Note that the --no-config option takes precedence over this option.

--save-position-on-quit

Always save the current playback position on quit. When this file is played again later, the player will seek to the old playback position on start. This does not happen if playback of a file is stopped in any other way than quitting. For example, going to the next file in the playlist will not save the position, and start playback at beginning the next time the file is played.

This behavior is disabled by default, but is always available when quitting the player with Shift+Q.

--watch-later-directory=<path>

The directory in which to store the "watch later" temporary files.

The default is a subdirectory named "watch_later" underneath the config directory (usually ~/.config/mpv/).

--dump-stats=<filename>

Write certain statistics to the given file. The file is truncated on opening. The file will contain raw samples, each with a timestamp. To make this file into a readable, the script TOOLS/stats-conv.py can be used (which currently displays it as a graph).

This option is useful for debugging only.

--idle=<no|yes|once>

Makes mpv wait idly instead of quitting when there is no file to play. Mostly useful in input mode, where mpv can be controlled through input commands. (Default: no)

once will only idle at start and let the player close once the first playlist has finished playing back.

--include=<configuration-file>

Specify configuration file to be parsed after the default ones.

--load-scripts=<yes|no>

If set to no, don't auto-load scripts from the scripts configuration subdirectory (usually ~/.config/mpv/scripts/). (Default: yes)

--script=<filename>, --scripts=file1.lua:file2.lua:...

Load a Lua script. The second option allows you to load multiple scripts by separating them with the path separator (: on Unix, ; on Windows).

--scripts is a path list option. See List Options for details.

--script-opts=key1=value1,key2=value2,...

Set options for scripts. A script can query an option by key. If an option is used and what semantics the option value has depends entirely on the loaded scripts. Values not claimed by any scripts are ignored.

This is a key/value list option. See List Options for details.

--merge-files

Pretend that all files passed to mpv are concatenated into a single, big file. This uses timeline/EDL support internally.

--no-resume-playback

Do not restore playback position from the watch_later configuration subdirectory (usually ~/.config/mpv/watch_later/). See quit-watch-later input command.

--resume-playback-check-mtime

Only restore the playback position from the watch_later configuration subdirectory (usually ~/.config/mpv/watch_later/) if the file's modification time is the same as at the time of saving. This may prevent skipping forward in files with the same name which have different content. (Default: no)

--profile=<profile1,profile2,...>

Use the given profile(s), --profile=help displays a list of the defined profiles.

--reset-on-next-file=<all|option1,option2,...>

Normally, mpv will try to keep all settings when playing the next file on the playlist, even if they were changed by the user during playback. (This behavior is the opposite of MPlayer's, which tries to reset all settings when starting next file.)

Default: Do not reset anything.

This can be changed with this option. It accepts a list of options, and mpv will reset the value of these options on playback start to the initial value. The initial value is either the default value, or as set by the config file or command line.

In some cases, this might not work as expected. For example, --volume will only be reset if it is explicitly set in the config file or the command line.

The special name all resets as many options as possible.

This is a string list option. See List Options for details.

Examples

• --reset-on-next-file=pause Reset pause mode when switching to the next file.
• --reset-on-next-file=fullscreen,speed Reset fullscreen and playback speed settings if they were changed during playback.
• --reset-on-next-file=all Try to reset all settings that were changed during playback.

--write-filename-in-watch-later-config

Prepend the watch later config files with the name of the file they refer to. This is simply written as comment on the top of the file.

Warning

This option may expose privacy-sensitive information and is thus disabled by default.

--ignore-path-in-watch-later-config

Ignore path (i.e. use filename only) when using watch later feature. (Default: disabled)

--show-profile=<profile>

Show the description and content of a profile. Lists all profiles if no parameter is provided.

--use-filedir-conf

Look for a file-specific configuration file in the same directory as the file that is being played. See File-specific Configuration Files.

Warning

May be dangerous if playing from untrusted media.

--ytdl, --no-ytdl

Enable the youtube-dl hook-script. It will look at the input URL, and will play the video located on the website. This works with many streaming sites, not just the one that the script is named after. This requires a recent version of youtube-dl to be installed on the system. (Enabled by default.)

If the script can't do anything with an URL, it will do nothing.

The try_ytdl_first script option accepts a boolean 'yes' or 'no', and if 'yes' will try parsing the URL with youtube-dl first, instead of the default where it's only after mpv failed to open it. This mostly depends on whether most of your URLs need youtube-dl parsing.

The exclude script option accepts a |-separated list of URL patterns which mpv should not use with youtube-dl. The patterns are matched after the http(s):// part of the URL.

^ matches the beginning of the URL, $ matches its end, and you should use % before any of the characters ^$()%|,.[]*+-? to match that character.

Examples

• --script-opts=ytdl_hook-exclude='^youtube%.com' will exclude any URL that starts with http://youtube.com or https://youtube.com.
• --script-opts=ytdl_hook-exclude='%.mkv$|%.mp4$' will exclude any URL that ends with .mkv or .mp4.

See more lua patterns here: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#5.4.1

The use_manifests script option makes mpv use the master manifest URL for formats like HLS and DASH, if available, allowing for video/audio selection in runtime. It's disabled ("no") by default for performance reasons.

--ytdl-format=<best|worst|mp4|webm|...>

Video format/quality that is directly passed to youtube-dl. The possible values are specific to the website and the video, for a given url the available formats can be found with the command youtube-dl --list-formats URL. See youtube-dl's documentation for available aliases. (Default: youtube-dl's default, currently bestvideo+bestaudio/best)

--ytdl-raw-options=<key>=<value>[,<key>=<value>[,...]]

Pass arbitrary options to youtube-dl. Parameter and argument should be passed as a key-value pair. Options without argument must include =.

There is no sanity checking so it's possible to break things (i.e. passing invalid parameters to youtube-dl).

A proxy URL can be passed for youtube-dl to use it in parsing the website. This is useful for geo-restricted URLs. After youtube-dl parsing, some URLs also require a proxy for playback, so this can pass that proxy information to mpv. Take note that SOCKS proxies aren't supported and https URLs also bypass the proxy. This is a limitation in FFmpeg.

This is a key/value list option. See List Options for details.

Example

• --ytdl-raw-options=username=user,password=pass
• --ytdl-raw-options=force-ipv6=
• --ytdl-raw-options=proxy=[http://127.0.0.1:3128]
• --ytdl-raw-options-append=proxy=http://127.0.0.1:3128

--load-stats-overlay=<yes|no>

Enable the builtin script that shows useful playback information on a key binding (default: yes). By default, the i key is used (I to make the overlay permanent).

--load-osd-console=<yes|no>

Enable the builtin script that shows a console on a key binding and lets you enter commands (default: yes). By default,. The ´ key is used to show the console, and ESC to hide it again. (This is based on a user script called repl.lua.)

--player-operation-mode=<cplayer|pseudo-gui>

For enabling "pseudo GUI mode", which means that the defaults for some options are changed. This option should not normally be used directly, but only by mpv internally, or mpv-provided scripts, config files, or .desktop files.

Video

--vo=<driver>

Specify the video output backend to be used. See VIDEO OUTPUT DRIVERS for details and descriptions of available drivers.

--vd=<...>

Specify a priority list of video decoders to be used, according to their family and name. See --ad for further details. Both of these options use the same syntax and semantics; the only difference is that they operate on different codec lists.

Note

See --vd=help for a full list of available decoders.

--vf=<filter1[=parameter1:parameter2:...],filter2,...>

Specify a list of video filters to apply to the video stream. See VIDEO FILTERS for details and descriptions of the available filters. The option variants --vf-add, --vf-pre, --vf-del and --vf-clr exist to modify a previously specified list, but you should not need these for typical use.

--untimed

Do not sleep when outputting video frames. Useful for benchmarks when used with --no-audio.

--framedrop=<mode>

Skip displaying some frames to maintain A/V sync on slow systems, or playing high framerate video on video outputs that have an upper framerate limit.

The argument selects the drop methods, and can be one of the following:

<no>

Disable any frame dropping. Not recommended, for testing only.

<vo>

Drop late frames on video output (default). This still decodes and filters all frames, but doesn't render them on the VO. Drops are indicated in the terminal status line as Dropped: field.

In audio sync. mode, this drops frames that are outdated at the time of display. If the decoder is too slow, in theory all frames would have to be dropped (because all frames are too late) - to avoid this, frame dropping stops if the effective framerate is below 10 FPS.

In display-sync. modes (see --video-sync), this affects only how A/V drops or repeats frames. If this mode is disabled, A/V desync will in theory not affect video scheduling anymore (much like the display-resample-desync mode). However, even if disabled, frames will still be skipped (i.e. dropped) according to the ratio between video and display frequencies.

This is the recommended mode, and the default.

<decoder>

Old, decoder-based framedrop mode. (This is the same as --framedrop=yes in mpv 0.5.x and before.) This tells the decoder to skip frames (unless they are needed to decode future frames). May help with slow systems, but can produce unwatchable choppy output, or even freeze the display completely.

This uses a heuristic which may not make sense, and in general cannot achieve good results, because the decoder's frame dropping cannot be controlled in a predictable manner. Not recommended.

Even if you want to use this, prefer decoder+vo for better results.

The --vd-lavc-framedrop option controls what frames to drop.

<decoder+vo>

Enable both modes. Not recommended. Better than just decoder mode.

Note

--vo=vdpau has its own code for the vo framedrop mode. Slight differences to other VOs are possible.

--video-latency-hacks=<yes|no>

Enable some things which tend to reduce video latency by 1 or 2 frames (default: no). Note that this option might be removed without notice once the player's timing code does not inherently need to do these things anymore.

This does:

• Use the demuxer reported FPS for frame dropping. This avoids that the player needs to decode 1 frame in advance, lowering total latency in effect. This also means that if the demuxer reported FPS is wrong, or the video filter chain changes FPS (e.g. deinterlacing), then it could drop too many or not enough frames.
• Disable waiting for the first video frame. Normally the player waits for the first video frame to be fully rendered before starting playback properly. Some VOs will lazily initialize stuff when rendering the first frame, so if this is not done, there is some likeliness that the VO has to drop some frames if rendering the first frame takes longer than needed.

--override-display-fps=<fps>

Set the display FPS used with the --video-sync=display-* modes. By default, a detected value is used. Keep in mind that setting an incorrect value (even if slightly incorrect) can ruin video playback. On multi-monitor systems, there is a chance that the detected value is from the wrong monitor.

Set this option only if you have reason to believe the automatically determined value is wrong.

--display-fps=<fps>

Deprecated alias for --override-display-fps.

--hwdec=<api>

Specify the hardware video decoding API that should be used if possible. Whether hardware decoding is actually done depends on the video codec. If hardware decoding is not possible, mpv will fall back on software decoding.

Hardware decoding is not enabled by default, because it is typically an additional source of errors. It is worth using only if your CPU is too slow to decode a specific video.

Note

Use the Ctrl+h shortcut to toggle hardware decoding at runtime. It toggles this option between auto and no.

Always enabling HW decoding by putting it into the config file is discouraged. If you use the Ubuntu package, delete /etc/mpv/mpv.conf, as the package tries to enable HW decoding by default by setting hwdec=vaapi (which is less than ideal, and may even cause sub-optimal wrappers to be used). Or at least change it to hwdec=auto-safe.

Use one of the auto modes if you want to enable hardware decoding. Explicitly selecting the mode is mostly meant for testing and debugging. It's a bad idea to put explicit selection into the config file if you want thing to just keep working after updates and so on.

Note

Even if enabled, hardware decoding is still only white-listed for some codecs. See --hwdec-codecs to enable hardware decoding in more cases.

Which method to choose?

• If you only want to enable hardware decoding at runtime, don't set the parameter, or put hwdec=no into your mpv.conf (relevant on distros which force-enable it by default, such as on Ubuntu). Use the Ctrl+h default binding to enable it at runtime.
• If you're not sure, but want hardware decoding always enabled by default, put hwdec=auto-safe into your mpv.conf, and acknowledge that this use case is not "really" supported and may cause problems.
• If you want to test available hardware decoding methods, pass --hwdec=auto --hwdec-codecs=all and look at the terminal output.
• If you're a developer, or want to perform elaborate tests, you may need any of the other possible option values.

<api> can be one of the following:

no:	always use software decoding (default)
auto:	forcibly enable any hw decoder found (see below)
yes:	exactly the same as auto
auto-safe:	enable any whitelisted hw decoder (see below)
auto-copy:	enable best hw decoder with copy-back (see below)
vdpau:	requires --vo=gpu with X11, or --vo=vdpau (Linux only)
vdpau-copy:	copies video back into system RAM (Linux with some GPUs only)
vaapi:	requires --vo=gpu or --vo=vaapi (Linux only)
vaapi-copy:	copies video back into system RAM (Linux with some GPUs only)
videotoolbox:	requires --vo=gpu (OS X 10.8 and up), or --vo=libmpv (iOS 9.0 and up)
videotoolbox-copy:
	copies video back into system RAM (OS X 10.8 or iOS 9.0 and up)
dxva2:	requires --vo=gpu with --gpu-context=d3d11, --gpu-context=angle or --gpu-context=dxinterop (Windows only)
dxva2-copy:	copies video back to system RAM (Windows only)
d3d11va:	requires --vo=gpu with --gpu-context=d3d11 or --gpu-context=angle (Windows 8+ only)
d3d11va-copy:	copies video back to system RAM (Windows 8+ only)
mediacodec:	requires --vo=mediacodec_embed (Android only)
mediacodec-copy:
	copies video back to system RAM (Android only)
mmal:	requires --vo=gpu (Raspberry Pi only - default if available)
mmal-copy:	copies video back to system RAM (Raspberry Pi only)
nvdec:	requires --vo=gpu (Any platform CUDA is available)
nvdec-copy:	copies video back to system RAM (Any platform CUDA is available)
cuda:	requires --vo=gpu (Any platform CUDA is available)
cuda-copy:	copies video back to system RAM (Any platform CUDA is available)
crystalhd:	copies video back to system RAM (Any platform supported by hardware)
rkmpp:	requires --vo=gpu (some RockChip devices only)

auto tries to automatically enable hardware decoding using the first available method. This still depends what VO you are using. For example, if you are not using --vo=gpu or --vo=vdpau, vdpau decoding will never be enabled. Also note that if the first found method doesn't actually work, it will always fall back to software decoding, instead of trying the next method (might matter on some Linux systems).

auto-safe is similar to auto, but allows only whitelisted methods that are considered "safe". This is supposed to be a reasonable way to enable hardware decdoding by default in a config file (even though you shouldn't do that anyway; prefer runtime enabling with Ctrl+h). Unlike auto, this will not try to enable unknown or known-to-be-bad methods. In addition, this may disable hardware decoding in other situations when it's known to cause problems, but currently this mechanism is quite primitive. (As an example for something that still causes problems: certain combinations of HEVC and Intel chips on Windows tend to cause mpv to crash, most likely due to driver bugs.)

auto-copy-safe selects the union of methods selected with auto-safe and auto-copy.

auto-copy selects only modes that copy the video data back to system memory after decoding. This selects modes like vaapi-copy (and so on). If none of these work, hardware decoding is disabled. This mode is usually guaranteed to incur no additional quality loss compared to software decoding (assuming modern codecs and an error free video stream), and will allow CPU processing with video filters. This mode works with all video filters and VOs.

Because these copy the decoded video back to system RAM, they're often less efficient than the direct modes, and may not help too much over software decoding.

Note

Most non-copy methods only work with the OpenGL GPU backend. Currently, only the vaapi, nvdec and cuda methods work with Vulkan.

The vaapi mode, if used with --vo=gpu, requires Mesa 11, and most likely works with Intel and AMD GPUs only. It also requires the opengl EGL backend.

nvdec and nvdec-copy are the newest, and recommended method to do hardware decoding on Nvidia GPUs.

cuda and cuda-copy are an older implementation of hardware decoding on Nvidia GPUs that uses Nvidia's bitstream parsers rather than FFmpeg's. This can lead to feature deficiencies, such as incorrect playback of HDR content, and nvdec/nvdec-copy should always be preferred unless you specifically need Nvidia's deinterlacing algorithms. To use this deinterlacing you must pass the option: vd-lavc-o=deint=[weave|bob|adaptive]. Pass weave (or leave the option unset) to not attempt any deinterlacing.

Quality reduction with hardware decoding

In theory, hardware decoding does not reduce video quality (at least for the codecs h264 and HEVC). However, due to restrictions in video output APIs, as well as bugs in the actual hardware decoders, there can be some loss, or even blatantly incorrect results.

In some cases, RGB conversion is forced, which means the RGB conversion is performed by the hardware decoding API, instead of the shaders used by --vo=gpu. This means certain colorspaces may not display correctly, and certain filtering (such as debanding) cannot be applied in an ideal way. This will also usually force the use of low quality chroma scalers instead of the one specified by --cscale. In other cases, hardware decoding can also reduce the bit depth of the decoded image, which can introduce banding or precision loss for 10-bit files.

vdpau always does RGB conversion in hardware, which does not support newer colorspaces like BT.2020 correctly. However, vdpau doesn't support 10 bit or HDR encodings, so these limitations are unlikely to be relevant.

vaapi and d3d11va are safe. Enabling deinterlacing (or simply their respective post-processing filters) will possibly at least reduce color quality by converting the output to a 8 bit format.

dxva2 is not safe. It appears to always use BT.601 for forced RGB conversion, but actual behavior depends on the GPU drivers. Some drivers appear to convert to limited range RGB, which gives a faded appearance. In addition to driver-specific behavior, global system settings might affect this additionally. This can give incorrect results even with completely ordinary video sources.

rpi always uses the hardware overlay renderer, even with --vo=gpu.

cuda should usually be safe, but depending on how a file/stream has been mixed, it has been reported to corrupt the timestamps causing glitched, flashing frames. It can also sometimes cause massive framedrops for unknown reasons. Caution is advised, and nvdec should always be preferred.

crystalhd is not safe. It always converts to 4:2:2 YUV, which may be lossy, depending on how chroma sub-sampling is done during conversion. It also discards the top left pixel of each frame for some reason.

All other methods, in particular the copy-back methods (like dxva2-copy etc.) should hopefully be safe, although they can still cause random decoding issues. At the very least, they shouldn't affect the colors of the image.

In particular, auto-copy will only select "safe" modes (although potentially slower than other methods), but there's still no guarantee the chosen hardware decoder will actually work correctly.

In general, it's very strongly advised to avoid hardware decoding unless absolutely necessary, i.e. if your CPU is insufficient to decode the file in questions. If you run into any weird decoding issues, frame glitches or discoloration, and you have --hwdec turned on, the first thing you should try is disabling it.

--gpu-hwdec-interop=<auto|all|no|name>

This option is for troubleshooting hwdec interop issues. Since it's a debugging option, its semantics may change at any time.

This is useful for the gpu and libmpv VOs for selecting which hwdec interop context to use exactly. Effectively it also can be used to block loading of certain backends.

If set to auto (default), the behavior depends on the VO: for gpu, it does nothing, and the interop context is loaded on demand (when the decoder probes for --hwdec support). For libmpv, which has has no on-demand loading, this is equivalent to all.

The empty string is equivalent to auto.

If set to all, it attempts to load all interop contexts at GL context creation time.

Other than that, a specific backend can be set, and the list of them can be queried with help (mpv CLI only).

Runtime changes to this are ignored (the current option value is used whenever the renderer is created).

The old aliases --opengl-hwdec-interop and --hwdec-preload are barely related to this anymore, but will be somewhat compatible in some cases.

--hwdec-extra-frames=<N>

Number of GPU frames hardware decoding should preallocate (default: see --list-options output). If this is too low, frame allocation may fail during decoding, and video frames might get dropped and/or corrupted. Setting it too high simply wastes GPU memory and has no advantages.

This value is used only for hardware decoding APIs which require preallocating surfaces (known examples include d3d11va and vaapi). For other APIs, frames are allocated as needed. The details depend on the libavcodec implementations of the hardware decoders.

The required number of surfaces depends on dynamic runtime situations. The default is a fixed value that is thought to be sufficient for most uses. But in certain situations, it may not be enough.

--hwdec-image-format=<name>

Set the internal pixel format used by hardware decoding via --hwdec (default no). The special value no selects an implementation specific standard format. Most decoder implementations support only one format, and will fail to initialize if the format is not supported.

Some implementations might support multiple formats. In particular, videotoolbox is known to require uyvy422 for good performance on some older hardware. d3d11va can always use yuv420p, which uses an opaque format, with likely no advantages.

--cuda-decode-device=<auto|0..>

Choose the GPU device used for decoding when using the cuda or nvdec hwdecs with the OpenGL GPU backend, and with the cuda-copy or nvdec-copy hwdecs in all cases.

For the OpenGL GPU backend, the default device used for decoding is the one being used to provide gpu output (and in the vast majority of cases, only one GPU will be present).

For the copy hwdecs, the default device will be the first device enumerated by the CUDA libraries - however that is done.

For the Vulkan GPU backend, decoding must always happen on the display device, and this option has no effect.

--vaapi-device=<device file>

Choose the DRM device for vaapi-copy. This should be the path to a DRM device file. (Default: /dev/dri/renderD128)

--panscan=<0.0-1.0>

Enables pan-and-scan functionality (cropping the sides of e.g. a 16:9 video to make it fit a 4:3 display without black bands). The range controls how much of the image is cropped. May not work with all video output drivers.

This option has no effect if --video-unscaled option is used.

--video-aspect-override=<ratio|no>

Override video aspect ratio, in case aspect information is incorrect or missing in the file being played.

These values have special meaning:

0:	disable aspect ratio handling, pretend the video has square pixels
no:	same as 0
-1:	use the video stream or container aspect (default)

But note that handling of these special values might change in the future.

Examples

• --video-aspect-override=4:3 or --video-aspect-override=1.3333
• --video-aspect-override=16:9 or --video-aspect-override=1.7777
• --no-video-aspect-override or --video-aspect-override=no

--video-aspect-method=<bitstream|container>

This sets the default video aspect determination method (if the aspect is _not_ overridden by the user with --video-aspect-override or others).

container:	Strictly prefer the container aspect ratio. This is apparently the default behavior with VLC, at least with Matroska. Note that if the container has no aspect ratio set, the behavior is the same as with bitstream.
bitstream:	Strictly prefer the bitstream aspect ratio, unless the bitstream aspect ratio is not set. This is apparently the default behavior with XBMC/kodi, at least with Matroska.

The current default for mpv is container.

Normally you should not set this. Try the various choices if you encounter video that has the wrong aspect ratio in mpv, but seems to be correct in other players.

--video-unscaled=<no|yes|downscale-big>

Disable scaling of the video. If the window is larger than the video, black bars are added. Otherwise, the video is cropped, unless the option is set to downscale-big, in which case the video is fit to window. The video still can be influenced by the other --video-... options. This option disables the effect of --panscan.

Note that the scaler algorithm may still be used, even if the video isn't scaled. For example, this can influence chroma conversion. The video will also still be scaled in one dimension if the source uses non-square pixels (e.g. anamorphic widescreen DVDs).

This option is disabled if the --no-keepaspect option is used.

--video-pan-x=<value>, --video-pan-y=<value>

Moves the displayed video rectangle by the given value in the X or Y direction. The unit is in fractions of the size of the scaled video (the full size, even if parts of the video are not visible due to panscan or other options).

For example, displaying a 1280x720 video fullscreen on a 1680x1050 screen with --video-pan-x=-0.1 would move the video 168 pixels to the left (making 128 pixels of the source video invisible).

This option is disabled if the --no-keepaspect option is used.

--video-rotate=<0-359|no>

Rotate the video clockwise, in degrees. Currently supports 90° steps only. If no is given, the video is never rotated, even if the file has rotation metadata. (The rotation value is added to the rotation metadata, which means the value 0 would rotate the video according to the rotation metadata.)

--video-zoom=<value>

Adjust the video display scale factor by the given value. The parameter is given log 2. For example, --video-zoom=0 is unscaled, --video-zoom=1 is twice the size, --video-zoom=-2 is one fourth of the size, and so on.

This option is disabled if the --no-keepaspect option is used.

--video-align-x=<-1-1>, --video-align-y=<-1-1>

Moves the video rectangle within the black borders, which are usually added to pad the video to screen if video and screen aspect ratios are different. --video-align-y=-1 would move the video to the top of the screen (leaving a border only on the bottom), a value of 0 centers it (default), and a value of 1 would put the video at the bottom of the screen.

If video and screen aspect match perfectly, these options do nothing.

This option is disabled if the --no-keepaspect option is used.

--video-margin-ratio-left=<val>, --video-margin-ratio-right=<val>, --video-margin-ratio-top=<val>, --video-margin-ratio-bottom=<val>

Set extra video margins on each border (default: 0). Each value is a ratio of the window size, using a range 0.0-1.0. For example, setting the option --video-margin-ratio-right=0.2 at a window size of 1000 pixels will add a 200 pixels border on the right side of the window.

The video is "boxed" by these margins. The window size is not changed. In particular it does not enlarge the window, and the margins will cause the video to be downscaled by default. This may or may not change in the future.

The margins are applied after 90° video rotation, but before any other video transformations.

This option is disabled if the --no-keepaspect option is used.

Subtitles still may use the margins, depending on --sub-use-margins and similar options.

These options were created for the OSC. Some odd decisions, such as making the margin values a ratio (instead of pixels), were made for the sake of the OSC. It's possible that these options may be replaced by ones that are more generally useful. The behavior of these options may change to fit OSC requirements better, too.

--correct-pts, --no-correct-pts

--no-correct-pts switches mpv to a mode where video timing is determined using a fixed framerate value (either using the --fps option, or using file information). Sometimes, files with very broken timestamps can be played somewhat well in this mode. Note that video filters, subtitle rendering, seeking (including hr-seeks and backstepping), and audio synchronization can be completely broken in this mode.

--fps=<float>

Override video framerate. Useful if the original value is wrong or missing.

Note

Works in --no-correct-pts mode only.

--deinterlace=<yes|no>

Enable or disable interlacing (default: no). Interlaced video shows ugly comb-like artifacts, which are visible on fast movement. Enabling this typically inserts the yadif video filter in order to deinterlace the video, or lets the video output apply deinterlacing if supported.

This behaves exactly like the deinterlace input property (usually mapped to d).

Keep in mind that this will conflict with manually inserted deinterlacing filters, unless you take care. (Since mpv 0.27.0, even the hardware deinterlace filters will conflict. Also since that version, --deinterlace=auto was removed, which used to mean that the default interlacing option of possibly inserted video filters was used.)

Note that this will make video look worse if it's not actually interlaced.

--frames=<number>

Play/convert only first <number> video frames, then quit.

--frames=0 loads the file, but immediately quits before initializing playback. (Might be useful for scripts which just want to determine some file properties.)

For audio-only playback, any value greater than 0 will quit playback immediately after initialization. The value 0 works as with video.

--video-output-levels=<outputlevels>

RGB color levels used with YUV to RGB conversion. Normally, output devices such as PC monitors use full range color levels. However, some TVs and video monitors expect studio RGB levels. Providing full range output to a device expecting studio level input results in crushed blacks and whites, the reverse in dim gray blacks and dim whites.

Not all VOs support this option. Some will silently ignore it.

Available color ranges are:

auto:	automatic selection (equals to full range) (default)
limited:	limited range (16-235 per component), studio levels
full:	full range (0-255 per component), PC levels

Note

It is advisable to use your graphics driver's color range option instead, if available.

--hwdec-codecs=<codec1,codec2,...|all>

Allow hardware decoding for a given list of codecs only. The special value all always allows all codecs.

You can get the list of allowed codecs with mpv --vd=help. Remove the prefix, e.g. instead of lavc:h264 use h264.

By default, this is set to h264,vc1,hevc,vp9. Note that the hardware acceleration special codecs like h264_vdpau are not relevant anymore, and in fact have been removed from Libav in this form.

This is usually only needed with broken GPUs, where a codec is reported as supported, but decoding causes more problems than it solves.

Example

mpv --hwdec=vdpau --vo=vdpau --hwdec-codecs=h264,mpeg2video

Enable vdpau decoding for h264 and mpeg2 only.

--vd-lavc-check-hw-profile=<yes|no>

Check hardware decoder profile (default: yes). If no is set, the highest profile of the hardware decoder is unconditionally selected, and decoding is forced even if the profile of the video is higher than that. The result is most likely broken decoding, but may also help if the detected or reported profiles are somehow incorrect.

--vd-lavc-software-fallback=<yes|no|N>

Fallback to software decoding if the hardware-accelerated decoder fails (default: 3). If this is a number, then fallback will be triggered if N frames fail to decode in a row. 1 is equivalent to yes.

Setting this to a higher number might break the playback start fallback: if a fallback happens, parts of the file will be skipped, approximately by to the number of packets that could not be decoded. Values below an unspecified count will not have this problem, because mpv retains the packets.

--vd-lavc-dr=<yes|no>

Enable direct rendering (default: yes). If this is set to yes, the video will be decoded directly to GPU video memory (or staging buffers). This can speed up video upload, and may help with large resolutions or slow hardware. This works only with the following VOs:

• gpu: requires at least OpenGL 4.4 or Vulkan.

(In particular, this can't be made work with opengl-cb, but the libmpv render API has optional support.)

Using video filters of any kind that write to the image data (or output newly allocated frames) will silently disable the DR code path.

--vd-lavc-bitexact

Only use bit-exact algorithms in all decoding steps (for codec testing).

--vd-lavc-fast (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264 only)

Enable optimizations which do not comply with the format specification and potentially cause problems, like simpler dequantization, simpler motion compensation, assuming use of the default quantization matrix, assuming YUV 4:2:0 and skipping a few checks to detect damaged bitstreams.

--vd-lavc-o=<key>=<value>[,<key>=<value>[,...]]

Pass AVOptions to libavcodec decoder. Note, a patch to make the o= unneeded and pass all unknown options through the AVOption system is welcome. A full list of AVOptions can be found in the FFmpeg manual.

Some options which used to be direct options can be set with this mechanism, like bug, gray, idct, ec, vismv, skip_top (was st), skip_bottom (was sb), debug.

This is a key/value list option. See List Options for details.

Example

--vd-lavc-o=debug=pict

--vd-lavc-show-all=<yes|no>

Show even broken/corrupt frames (default: no). If this option is set to no, libavcodec won't output frames that were either decoded before an initial keyframe was decoded, or frames that are recognized as corrupted.

--vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=<skipvalue> (H.264 only)

Skips the loop filter (AKA deblocking) during H.264 decoding. Since the filtered frame is supposed to be used as reference for decoding dependent frames, this has a worse effect on quality than not doing deblocking on e.g. MPEG-2 video. But at least for high bitrate HDTV, this provides a big speedup with little visible quality loss.

<skipvalue> can be one of the following:

none:	Never skip.
default:	Skip useless processing steps (e.g. 0 size packets in AVI).
nonref:	Skip frames that are not referenced (i.e. not used for decoding other frames, the error cannot "build up").
bidir:	Skip B-Frames.
nonkey:	Skip all frames except keyframes.
all:	Skip all frames.

--vd-lavc-skipidct=<skipvalue> (MPEG-1/2 only)

Skips the IDCT step. This degrades quality a lot in almost all cases (see skiploopfilter for available skip values).

--vd-lavc-skipframe=<skipvalue>

Skips decoding of frames completely. Big speedup, but jerky motion and sometimes bad artifacts (see skiploopfilter for available skip values).

--vd-lavc-framedrop=<skipvalue>

Set framedropping mode used with --framedrop (see skiploopfilter for available skip values).

--vd-lavc-threads=<N>

Number of threads to use for decoding. Whether threading is actually supported depends on codec (default: 0). 0 means autodetect number of cores on the machine and use that, up to the maximum of 16. You can set more than 16 threads manually.

--vd-lavc-assume-old-x264=<yes|no>

Assume the video was encoded by an old, buggy x264 version (default: no). Normally, this is autodetected by libavcodec. But if the bitstream contains no x264 version info (or it was somehow skipped), and the stream was in fact encoded by an old x264 version (build 150 or earlier), and if the stream uses 4:4:4 chroma, then libavcodec will by default show corrupted video. This option sets the libavcodec x264_build option to 150, which means that if the stream contains no version info, or was not encoded by x264 at all, it assumes it was encoded by the old version. Enabling this option is pretty safe if you want your broken files to work, but in theory this can break on streams not encoded by x264, or if a stream encoded by a newer x264 version contains no version info.

--swapchain-depth=<N>

Allow up to N in-flight frames. This essentially controls the frame latency. Increasing the swapchain depth can improve pipelining and prevent missed vsyncs, but increases visible latency. This option only mandates an upper limit, the implementation can use a lower latency than requested internally. A setting of 1 means that the VO will wait for every frame to become visible before starting to render the next frame. (Default: 3)

Audio

--audio-pitch-correction=<yes|no>

If this is enabled (default), playing with a speed different from normal automatically inserts the scaletempo audio filter. For details, see audio filter section.

--audio-device=<name>

Use the given audio device. This consists of the audio output name, e.g. alsa, followed by /, followed by the audio output specific device name. The default value for this option is auto, which tries every audio output in preference order with the default device.

You can list audio devices with --audio-device=help. This outputs the device name in quotes, followed by a description. The device name is what you have to pass to the --audio-device option. The list of audio devices can be retrieved by API by using the audio-device-list property.

While the option normally takes one of the strings as indicated by the methods above, you can also force the device for most AOs by building it manually. For example name/foobar forces the AO name to use the device foobar. However, the --ao option will strictly force a specific AO. To avoid confusion, don't use --ao and --audio-device together.

Example for ALSA

MPlayer and mplayer2 required you to replace any ',' with '.' and any ':' with '=' in the ALSA device name. For example, to use the device named dmix:default, you had to do:

-ao alsa:device=dmix=default

In mpv you could instead use:

--audio-device=alsa/dmix:default

--audio-exclusive=<yes|no>

Enable exclusive output mode. In this mode, the system is usually locked out, and only mpv will be able to output audio.

This only works for some audio outputs, such as wasapi and coreaudio. Other audio outputs silently ignore this options. They either have no concept of exclusive mode, or the mpv side of the implementation is missing.

--audio-fallback-to-null=<yes|no>

If no audio device can be opened, behave as if --ao=null was given. This is useful in combination with --audio-device: instead of causing an error if the selected device does not exist, the client API user (or a Lua script) could let playback continue normally, and check the current-ao and audio-device-list properties to make high-level decisions about how to continue.

--ao=<driver>

Specify the audio output drivers to be used. See AUDIO OUTPUT DRIVERS for details and descriptions of available drivers.

--af=<filter1[=parameter1:parameter2:...],filter2,...>

Specify a list of audio filters to apply to the audio stream. See AUDIO FILTERS for details and descriptions of the available filters. The option variants --af-add, --af-pre, --af-del and --af-clr exist to modify a previously specified list, but you should not need these for typical use.

--audio-spdif=<codecs>

List of codecs for which compressed audio passthrough should be used. This works for both classic S/PDIF and HDMI.

Possible codecs are ac3, dts, dts-hd, eac3, truehd. Multiple codecs can be specified by separating them with ,. dts refers to low bitrate DTS core, while dts-hd refers to DTS MA (receiver and OS support varies). If both dts and dts-hd are specified, it behaves equivalent to specifying dts-hd only.

In earlier mpv versions you could use --ad to force the spdif wrapper. This does not work anymore.

Warning

There is not much reason to use this. HDMI supports uncompressed multichannel PCM, and mpv supports lossless DTS-HD decoding via FFmpeg's new DCA decoder (based on libdcadec).

--ad=<decoder1,decoder2,...[-]>

Specify a priority list of audio decoders to be used, according to their decoder name. When determining which decoder to use, the first decoder that matches the audio format is selected. If that is unavailable, the next decoder is used. Finally, it tries all other decoders that are not explicitly selected or rejected by the option.

- at the end of the list suppresses fallback on other available decoders not on the --ad list. + in front of an entry forces the decoder. Both of these should not normally be used, because they break normal decoder auto-selection! Both of these methods are deprecated.

Examples

--ad=mp3float

Prefer the FFmpeg/Libav mp3float decoder over all other MP3 decoders.

--ad=help

List all available decoders.

Warning

Enabling compressed audio passthrough (AC3 and DTS via SPDIF/HDMI) with this option is not possible. Use --audio-spdif instead.

--volume=<value>

Set the startup volume. 0 means silence, 100 means no volume reduction or amplification. Negative values can be passed for compatibility, but are treated as 0.

Since mpv 0.18.1, this always controls the internal mixer (aka "softvol").

--replaygain=<no|track|album>

Adjust volume gain according to replaygain values stored in the file metadata. With --replaygain=no (the default), perform no adjustment. With --replaygain=track, apply track gain. With --replaygain=album, apply album gain if present and fall back to track gain otherwise.

--replaygain-preamp=<db>

Pre-amplification gain in dB to apply to the selected replaygain gain (default: 0).

--replaygain-clip=<yes|no>

Prevent clipping caused by replaygain by automatically lowering the gain (default). Use --replaygain-clip=no to disable this.

--replaygain-fallback=<db>

Gain in dB to apply if the file has no replay gain tags. This option is always applied if the replaygain logic is somehow inactive. If this is applied, no other replaygain options are applied.

--audio-delay=<sec>

Audio delay in seconds (positive or negative float value). Positive values delay the audio, and negative values delay the video.

--mute=<yes|no|auto>

Set startup audio mute status (default: no).

auto is a deprecated possible value that is equivalent to no.

See also: --volume.

--softvol=<no|yes|auto>

Deprecated/unfunctional. Before mpv 0.18.1, this used to control whether to use the volume controls of the audio output driver or the internal mpv volume filter.

The current behavior is that softvol is always enabled, i.e. as if this option is set to yes. The other behaviors are not available anymore, although auto almost matches current behavior in most cases.

The no behavior is still partially available through the ao-volume and ao-mute properties. But there are no options to reset these.

--audio-demuxer=<[+]name>

Use this audio demuxer type when using --audio-file. Use a '+' before the name to force it; this will skip some checks. Give the demuxer name as printed by --audio-demuxer=help.

--ad-lavc-ac3drc=<level>

Select the Dynamic Range Compression level for AC-3 audio streams. <level> is a float value ranging from 0 to 1, where 0 means no compression (which is the default) and 1 means full compression (make loud passages more silent and vice versa). Values up to 6 are also accepted, but are purely experimental. This option only shows an effect if the AC-3 stream contains the required range compression information.

The standard mandates that DRC is enabled by default, but mpv (and some other players) ignore this for the sake of better audio quality.

--ad-lavc-downmix=<yes|no>

Whether to request audio channel downmixing from the decoder (default: yes). Some decoders, like AC-3, AAC and DTS, can remix audio on decoding. The requested number of output channels is set with the --audio-channels option. Useful for playing surround audio on a stereo system.

--ad-lavc-threads=<0-16>

Number of threads to use for decoding. Whether threading is actually supported depends on codec. As of this writing, it's supported for some lossless codecs only. 0 means autodetect number of cores on the machine and use that, up to the maximum of 16 (default: 1).

--ad-lavc-o=<key>=<value>[,<key>=<value>[,...]]

Pass AVOptions to libavcodec decoder. Note, a patch to make the o= unneeded and pass all unknown options through the AVOption system is welcome. A full list of AVOptions can be found in the FFmpeg manual.

This is a key/value list option. See List Options for details.

--ad-spdif-dtshd=<yes|no>, --dtshd, --no-dtshd

If DTS is passed through, use DTS-HD.

Warning

This and enabling passthrough via --ad are deprecated in favor of using --audio-spdif=dts-hd.

--audio-channels=<auto-safe|auto|layouts>

Control which audio channels are output (e.g. surround vs. stereo). There are the following possibilities:

• --audio-channels=auto-safe

  Use the system's preferred channel layout. If there is none (such as when accessing a hardware device instead of the system mixer), force stereo. Some audio outputs might simply accept any layout and do downmixing on their own.

  This is the default.

• --audio-channels=auto

  Send the audio device whatever it accepts, preferring the audio's original channel layout. Can cause issues with HDMI (see the warning below).

• --audio-channels=layout1,layout2,...

  List of ,-separated channel layouts which should be allowed. Technically, this only adjusts the filter chain output to the best matching layout in the list, and passes the result to the audio API. It's possible that the audio API will select a different channel layout.

  Using this mode is recommended for direct hardware output, especially over HDMI (see HDMI warning below).

• --audio-channels=stereo

  Force a plain stereo downmix. This is a special-case of the previous item. (See paragraphs below for implications.)

If a list of layouts is given, each item can be either an explicit channel layout name (like 5.1), or a channel number. Channel numbers refer to default layouts, e.g. 2 channels refer to stereo, 6 refers to 5.1.

See --audio-channels=help output for defined default layouts. This also lists speaker names, which can be used to express arbitrary channel layouts (e.g. fl-fr-lfe is 2.1).

If the list of channel layouts has only 1 item, the decoder is asked to produce according output. This sometimes triggers decoder-downmix, which might be different from the normal mpv downmix. (Only some decoders support remixing audio, like AC-3, AAC or DTS. You can use --ad-lavc-downmix=no to make the decoder always output its native layout.) One consequence is that --audio-channels=stereo triggers decoder downmix, while auto or auto-safe never will, even if they end up selecting stereo. This happens because the decision whether to use decoder downmix happens long before the audio device is opened.

If the channel layout of the media file (i.e. the decoder) and the AO's channel layout don't match, mpv will attempt to insert a conversion filter. You may need to change the channel layout of the system mixer to achieve your desired output as mpv does not have control over it. Another work-around for this on some AOs is to use --audio-exclusive=yes to circumvent the system mixer entirely.

Warning

Using auto can cause issues when using audio over HDMI. The OS will typically report all channel layouts that _can_ go over HDMI, even if the receiver does not support them. If a receiver gets an unsupported channel layout, random things can happen, such as dropping the additional channels, or adding noise.

You are recommended to set an explicit whitelist of the layouts you want. For example, most A/V receivers connected via HDMI and that can do 7.1 would be served by: --audio-channels=7.1,5.1,stereo

--audio-display=<no|attachment>

Setting this option to attachment (default) will display image attachments (e.g. album cover art) when playing audio files. It will display the first image found, and additional images are available as video tracks.

Setting this option to no disables display of video entirely when playing audio files.

This option has no influence on files with normal video tracks.

--audio-files=<files>

Play audio from an external file while viewing a video.

This is a path list option. See List Options for details.

--audio-file=<file>

CLI/config file only alias for --audio-files-append. Each use of this option will add a new audio track. The details are similar to how --sub-file works.

--audio-format=<format>

Select the sample format used for output from the audio filter layer to the sound card. The values that <format> can adopt are listed below in the description of the format audio filter.

--audio-samplerate=<Hz>

Select the output sample rate to be used (of course sound cards have limits on this). If the sample frequency selected is different from that of the current media, the lavrresample audio filter will be inserted into the audio filter layer to compensate for the difference.

--gapless-audio=<no|yes|weak>

Try to play consecutive audio files with no silence or disruption at the point of file change. Default: weak.

no:	Disable gapless audio.
yes:	The audio device is opened using parameters chosen for the first file played and is then kept open for gapless playback. This means that if the first file for example has a low sample rate, then the following files may get resampled to the same low sample rate, resulting in reduced sound quality. If you play files with different parameters, consider using options such as --audio-samplerate and --audio-format to explicitly select what the shared output format will be.
weak:	Normally, the audio device is kept open (using the format it was first initialized with). If the audio format the decoder output changes, the audio device is closed and reopened. This means that you will normally get gapless audio with files that were encoded using the same settings, but might not be gapless in other cases. The exact conditions under which the audio device is kept open is an implementation detail, and can change from version to version. Currently, the device is kept even if the sample format changes, but the sample formats are convertible. If video is still going on when there is still audio, trying to use gapless is also explicitly given up.

Note

This feature is implemented in a simple manner and relies on audio output device buffering to continue playback while moving from one file to another. If playback of the new file starts slowly, for example because it is played from a remote network location or because you have specified cache settings that require time for the initial cache fill, then the buffered audio may run out before playback of the new file can start.

--initial-audio-sync, --no-initial-audio-sync

When starting a video file or after events such as seeking, mpv will by default modify the audio stream to make it start from the same timestamp as video, by either inserting silence at the start or cutting away the first samples. Disabling this option makes the player behave like older mpv versions did: video and audio are both started immediately even if their start timestamps differ, and then video timing is gradually adjusted if necessary to reach correct synchronization later.

--volume-max=<100.0-1000.0>, --softvol-max=<...>

Set the maximum amplification level in percent (default: 130). A value of 130 will allow you to adjust the volume up to about double the normal level.

--softvol-max is a deprecated alias and should not be used.

--audio-file-auto=<no|exact|fuzzy|all>, --no-audio-file-auto

Load additional audio files matching the video filename. The parameter specifies how external audio files are matched.

no:	Don't automatically load external audio files (default).
exact:	Load the media filename with audio file extension.
fuzzy:	Load all audio files containing media filename.
all:	Load all audio files in the current and --audio-file-paths directories.

--audio-file-paths=<path1:path2:...>

Equivalent to --sub-file-paths option, but for auto-loaded audio files.

This is a path list option. See List Options for details.

--audio-client-name=<name>

The application name the player reports to the audio API. Can be useful if you want to force a different audio profile (e.g. with PulseAudio), or to set your own application name when using libmpv.

--audio-buffer=<seconds>

Set the audio output minimum buffer. The audio device might actually create a larger buffer if it pleases. If the device creates a smaller buffer, additional audio is buffered in an additional software buffer.

Making this larger will make soft-volume and other filters react slower, introduce additional issues on playback speed change, and block the player on audio format changes. A smaller buffer might lead to audio dropouts.

This option should be used for testing only. If a non-default value helps significantly, the mpv developers should be contacted.

Default: 0.2 (200 ms).

--audio-stream-silence=<yes|no>

Cash-grab consumer audio hardware (such as A/V receivers) often ignore initial audio sent over HDMI. This can happen every time audio over HDMI is stopped and resumed. In order to compensate for this, you can enable this option to not to stop and restart audio on seeks, and fill the gaps with silence. Likewise, when pausing playback, audio is not stopped, and silence is played while paused. Note that if no audio track is selected, the audio device will still be closed immediately.

Not all AOs support this.

--audio-wait-open=<secs>

This makes sense for use with --audio-stream-silence=yes. If this option is given, the player will wait for the given amount of seconds after opening the audio device before sending actual audio data to it. Useful if your expensive hardware discards the first 1 or 2 seconds of audio data sent to it. If --audio-stream-silence=yes is not set, this option will likely just waste time.

Subtitles

--sub-demuxer=<[+]name>

Force subtitle demuxer type for --sub-file. Give the demuxer name as printed by --sub-demuxer=help.

--sub-delay=<sec>

Delays subtitles by <sec> seconds. Can be negative.

--sub-files=<file-list>, --sub-file=<filename>

Add a subtitle file to the list of external subtitles.

If you use --sub-file only once, this subtitle file is displayed by default.

If --sub-file is used multiple times, the subtitle to use can be switched at runtime by cycling subtitle tracks. It's possible to show two subtitles at once: use --sid to select the first subtitle index, and --secondary-sid to select the second index. (The index is printed on the terminal output after the --sid= in the list of streams.)

--sub-files is a path list option (see List Options for details), and can take multiple file names separated by : (Unix) or ; (Windows), while --sub-file takes a single filename, but can be used multiple times to add multiple files. Technically, --sub-file is a CLI/config file only alias for --sub-files-append.

--secondary-sid=<ID|auto|no>

Select a secondary subtitle stream. This is similar to --sid. If a secondary subtitle is selected, it will be rendered as toptitle (i.e. on the top of the screen) alongside the normal subtitle, and provides a way to render two subtitles at once.

There are some caveats associated with this feature. For example, bitmap subtitles will always be rendered in their usual position, so selecting a bitmap subtitle as secondary subtitle will result in overlapping subtitles. Secondary subtitles are never shown on the terminal if video is disabled.

Note

Styling and interpretation of any formatting tags is disabled for the secondary subtitle. Internally, the same mechanism as --no-sub-ass is used to strip the styling.

Note

If the main subtitle stream contains formatting tags which display the subtitle at the top of the screen, it will overlap with the secondary subtitle. To prevent this, you could use --no-sub-ass to disable styling in the main subtitle stream.

--sub-scale=<0-100>

Factor for the text subtitle font size (default: 1).

Note

This affects ASS subtitles as well, and may lead to incorrect subtitle rendering. Use with care, or use --sub-font-size instead.

--sub-scale-by-window=<yes|no>

Whether to scale subtitles with the window size (default: yes). If this is disabled, changing the window size won't change the subtitle font size.

Like --sub-scale, this can break ASS subtitles.

--sub-scale-with-window=<yes|no>

Make the subtitle font size relative to the window, instead of the video. This is useful if you always want the same font size, even if the video doesn't cover the window fully, e.g. because screen aspect and window aspect mismatch (and the player adds black bars).

Default: yes.

This option is misnamed. The difference to the confusingly similar sounding option --sub-scale-by-window is that --sub-scale-with-window still scales with the approximate window size, while the other option disables this scaling.

Affects plain text subtitles only (or ASS if --sub-ass-override is set high enough).

--sub-ass-scale-with-window=<yes|no>

Like --sub-scale-with-window, but affects subtitles in ASS format only. Like --sub-scale, this can break ASS subtitles.

Default: no.

--embeddedfonts=<yes|no>

Use fonts embedded in Matroska container files and ASS scripts (default: yes). These fonts can be used for SSA/ASS subtitle rendering.

--sub-pos=<0-100>

Specify the position of subtitles on the screen. The value is the vertical position of the subtitle in % of the screen height.

Note

This affects ASS subtitles as well, and may lead to incorrect subtitle rendering. Use with care, or use --sub-margin-y instead.

--sub-speed=<0.1-10.0>

Multiply the subtitle event timestamps with the given value. Can be used to fix the playback speed for frame-based subtitle formats. Affects text subtitles only.

Example

--sub-speed=25/23.976 plays frame based subtitles which have been loaded assuming a framerate of 23.976 at 25 FPS.

--sub-ass-force-style=<[Style.]Param=Value[,...]>

Override some style or script info parameters.

This is a string list option. See List Options for details.

Examples

• --sub-ass-force-style=FontName=Arial,Default.Bold=1
• --sub-ass-force-style=PlayResY=768

Note

Using this option may lead to incorrect subtitle rendering.

--sub-ass-hinting=<none|light|normal|native>

Set font hinting type. <type> can be:

none:	no hinting (default)
light:	FreeType autohinter, light mode
normal:	FreeType autohinter, normal mode
native:	font native hinter

Warning

Enabling hinting can lead to mispositioned text (in situations it's supposed to match up video background), or reduce the smoothness of animations with some badly authored ASS scripts. It is recommended to not use this option, unless really needed.

--sub-ass-line-spacing=<value>

Set line spacing value for SSA/ASS renderer.

--sub-ass-shaper=<simple|complex>

Set the text layout engine used by libass.

simple:	uses Fribidi only, fast, doesn't render some languages correctly
complex:	uses HarfBuzz, slower, wider language support

complex is the default. If libass hasn't been compiled against HarfBuzz, libass silently reverts to simple.

--sub-ass-styles=<filename>

Load all SSA/ASS styles found in the specified file and use them for rendering text subtitles. The syntax of the file is exactly like the [V4 Styles] / [V4+ Styles] section of SSA/ASS.

Note

Using this option may lead to incorrect subtitle rendering.

--sub-ass-override=<yes|no|force|scale|strip>

Control whether user style overrides should be applied. Note that all of these overrides try to be somewhat smart about figuring out whether or not a subtitle is considered a "sign".

no:	Render subtitles as specified by the subtitle scripts, without overrides.
yes:	Apply all the --sub-ass-* style override options. Changing the default for any of these options can lead to incorrect subtitle rendering (default).
force:	Like yes, but also force all --sub-* options. Can break rendering easily.
scale:	Like yes, but also apply --sub-scale.
strip:	Radically strip all ASS tags and styles from the subtitle. This is equivalent to the old --no-ass / --no-sub-ass options.

This also controls some bitmap subtitle overrides, as well as HTML tags in formats like SRT, despite the name of the option.

--sub-ass-force-margins

Enables placing toptitles and subtitles in black borders when they are available, if the subtitles are in the ASS format.

Default: no.

--sub-use-margins

Enables placing toptitles and subtitles in black borders when they are available, if the subtitles are in a plain text format (or ASS if --sub-ass-override is set high enough).

Default: yes.

Renamed from --sub-ass-use-margins. To place ASS subtitles in the borders too (like the old option did), also add --sub-ass-force-margins.

--sub-ass-vsfilter-aspect-compat=<yes|no>

Stretch SSA/ASS subtitles when playing anamorphic videos for compatibility with traditional VSFilter behavior. This switch has no effect when the video is stored with square pixels.

The renderer historically most commonly used for the SSA/ASS subtitle formats, VSFilter, had questionable behavior that resulted in subtitles being stretched too if the video was stored in anamorphic format that required scaling for display. This behavior is usually undesirable and newer VSFilter versions may behave differently. However, many existing scripts compensate for the stretching by modifying things in the opposite direction. Thus, if such scripts are displayed "correctly", they will not appear as intended. This switch enables emulation of the old VSFilter behavior (undesirable but expected by many existing scripts).

Enabled by default.

--sub-ass-vsfilter-blur-compat=<yes|no>

Scale \blur tags by video resolution instead of script resolution (enabled by default). This is bug in VSFilter, which according to some, can't be fixed anymore in the name of compatibility.

Note that this uses the actual video resolution for calculating the offset scale factor, not what the video filter chain or the video output use.

--sub-ass-vsfilter-color-compat=<basic|full|force-601|no>

Mangle colors like (xy-)vsfilter do (default: basic). Historically, VSFilter was not color space aware. This was no problem as long as the color space used for SD video (BT.601) was used. But when everything switched to HD (BT.709), VSFilter was still converting RGB colors to BT.601, rendered them into the video frame, and handled the frame to the video output, which would use BT.709 for conversion to RGB. The result were mangled subtitle colors. Later on, bad hacks were added on top of the ASS format to control how colors are to be mangled.

basic:	Handle only BT.601->BT.709 mangling, if the subtitles seem to indicate that this is required (default).
full:	Handle the full YCbCr Matrix header with all video color spaces supported by libass and mpv. This might lead to bad breakages in corner cases and is not strictly needed for compatibility (hopefully), which is why this is not default.
force-601:	Force BT.601->BT.709 mangling, regardless of subtitle headers or video color space.
no:	Disable color mangling completely. All colors are RGB.

Choosing anything other than no will make the subtitle color depend on the video color space, and it's for example in theory not possible to reuse a subtitle script with another video file. The --sub-ass-override option doesn't affect how this option is interpreted.

--stretch-dvd-subs=<yes|no>

Stretch DVD subtitles when playing anamorphic videos for better looking fonts on badly mastered DVDs. This switch has no effect when the video is stored with square pixels - which for DVD input cannot be the case though.

Many studios tend to use bitmap fonts designed for square pixels when authoring DVDs, causing the fonts to look stretched on playback on DVD players. This option fixes them, however at the price of possibly misaligning some subtitles (e.g. sign translations).

Disabled by default.

--stretch-image-subs-to-screen=<yes|no>

Stretch DVD and other image subtitles to the screen, ignoring the video margins. This has a similar effect as --sub-use-margins for text subtitles, except that the text itself will be stretched, not only just repositioned. (At least in general it is unavoidable, as an image bitmap can in theory consist of a single bitmap covering the whole screen, and the player won't know where exactly the text parts are located.)

This option does not display subtitles correctly. Use with care.

Disabled by default.

--image-subs-video-resolution=<yes|no>

Override the image subtitle resolution with the video resolution (default: no). Normally, the subtitle canvas is fit into the video canvas (e.g. letterboxed). Setting this option uses the video size as subtitle canvas size. Can be useful to test broken subtitles, which often happen when the video was trancoded, while attempting to keep the old subtitles.

--sub-ass, --no-sub-ass

Render ASS subtitles natively (enabled by default).

Note

This has been deprecated by --sub-ass-override=strip. You also may need --embeddedfonts=no to get the same behavior. Also, using --sub-ass-override=style should give better results without breaking subtitles too much.

If --no-sub-ass is specified, all tags and style declarations are stripped and ignored on display. The subtitle renderer uses the font style as specified by the --sub- options instead.

Note

Using --no-sub-ass may lead to incorrect or completely broken rendering of ASS/SSA subtitles. It can sometimes be useful to forcibly override the styling of ASS subtitles, but should be avoided in general.

--sub-auto=<no|exact|fuzzy|all>, --no-sub-auto

Load additional subtitle files matching the video filename. The parameter specifies how external subtitle files are matched. exact is enabled by default.

no:	Don't automatically load external subtitle files.
exact:	Load the media filename with subtitle file extension (default).
fuzzy:	Load all subs containing media filename.
all:	Load all subs in the current and --sub-file-paths directories.

--sub-codepage=<codepage>

You can use this option to specify the subtitle codepage. uchardet will be used to guess the charset. (If mpv was not compiled with uchardet, then utf-8 is the effective default.)

The default value for this option is auto, which enables autodetection.

The following steps are taken to determine the final codepage, in order:

• if the specific codepage has a +, use that codepage
• if the data looks like UTF-8, assume it is UTF-8
• if --sub-codepage is set to a specific codepage, use that
• run uchardet, and if successful, use that
• otherwise, use UTF-8-BROKEN

Examples

• --sub-codepage=latin2 Use Latin 2 if input is not UTF-8.
• --sub-codepage=+cp1250 Always force recoding to cp1250.

The pseudo codepage UTF-8-BROKEN is used internally. If it's set, subtitles are interpreted as UTF-8 with "Latin 1" as fallback for bytes which are not valid UTF-8 sequences. iconv is never involved in this mode.

This option changed in mpv 0.23.0. Support for the old syntax was fully removed in mpv 0.24.0.

--sub-fix-timing=<yes|no>

Adjust subtitle timing is to remove minor gaps or overlaps between subtitles (if the difference is smaller than 210 ms, the gap or overlap is removed).

--sub-forced-only

Display only forced subtitles for the DVD subtitle stream selected by e.g. --slang.

--sub-fps=<rate>

Specify the framerate of the subtitle file (default: video fps). Affects text subtitles only.

Note

<rate> > video fps speeds the subtitles up for frame-based subtitle files and slows them down for time-based ones.

See also: --sub-speed.

--sub-gauss=<0.0-3.0>

Apply Gaussian blur to image subtitles (default: 0). This can help to make pixelated DVD/Vobsubs look nicer. A value other than 0 also switches to software subtitle scaling. Might be slow.

Note

Never applied to text subtitles.

--sub-gray

Convert image subtitles to grayscale. Can help to make yellow DVD/Vobsubs look nicer.

Note

Never applied to text subtitles.

--sub-paths=<path1:path2:...>

Deprecated, use --sub-file-paths.

--sub-file-paths=<path-list>

Specify extra directories to search for subtitles matching the video. Multiple directories can be separated by ":" (";" on Windows). Paths can be relative or absolute. Relative paths are interpreted relative to video file directory. If the file is a URL, only absolute paths and sub configuration subdirectory will be scanned.

Example

Assuming that /path/to/video/video.avi is played and --sub-file-paths=sub:subtitles is specified, mpv searches for subtitle files in these directories:

• /path/to/video/
• /path/to/video/sub/
• /path/to/video/subtitles/
• the sub configuration subdirectory (usually ~/.config/mpv/sub/)

This is a path list option. See List Options for details.

--sub-visibility, --no-sub-visibility

Can be used to disable display of subtitles, but still select and decode them.

--sub-clear-on-seek

(Obscure, rarely useful.) Can be used to play broken mkv files with duplicate ReadOrder fields. ReadOrder is the first field in a Matroska-style ASS subtitle packets. It should be unique, and libass uses it for fast elimination of duplicates. This option disables caching of subtitles across seeks, so after a seek libass can't eliminate subtitle packets with the same ReadOrder as earlier packets.

--teletext-page=<1-999>

This works for dvb_teletext subtitle streams, and if FFmpeg has been compiled with support for it.

--sub-font=<name>

Specify font to use for subtitles that do not themselves specify a particular font. The default is sans-serif.

Examples

• --sub-font='Bitstream Vera Sans'
• --sub-font='Comic Sans MS'

Note

The --sub-font option (and many other style related --sub- options) are ignored when ASS-subtitles are rendered, unless the --no-sub-ass option is specified.

This used to support fontconfig patterns. Starting with libass 0.13.0, this stopped working.

--sub-font-size=<size>

Specify the sub font size. The unit is the size in scaled pixels at a window height of 720. The actual pixel size is scaled with the window height: if the window height is larger or smaller than 720, the actual size of the text increases or decreases as well.

Default: 55.

--sub-back-color=<color>

See --sub-color. Color used for sub text background. You can use --sub-shadow-offset to change its size relative to the text.

--sub-blur=<0..20.0>

Gaussian blur factor. 0 means no blur applied (default).

--sub-bold=<yes|no>

Format text on bold.

--sub-italic=<yes|no>

Format text on italic.

--sub-border-color=<color>

See --sub-color. Color used for the sub font border.

Note

ignored when --sub-back-color is specified (or more exactly: when that option is not set to completely transparent).

--sub-border-size=<size>

Size of the sub font border in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details). A value of 0 disables borders.

Default: 3.

--sub-color=<color>

Specify the color used for unstyled text subtitles.

The color is specified in the form r/g/b, where each color component is specified as number in the range 0.0 to 1.0. It's also possible to specify the transparency by using r/g/b/a, where the alpha value 0 means fully transparent, and 1.0 means opaque. If the alpha component is not given, the color is 100% opaque.

Passing a single number to the option sets the sub to gray, and the form gray/a lets you specify alpha additionally.

Examples

• --sub-color=1.0/0.0/0.0 set sub to opaque red
• --sub-color=1.0/0.0/0.0/0.75 set sub to opaque red with 75% alpha
• --sub-color=0.5/0.75 set sub to 50% gray with 75% alpha

Alternatively, the color can be specified as a RGB hex triplet in the form #RRGGBB, where each 2-digit group expresses a color value in the range 0 (00) to 255 (FF). For example, #FF0000 is red. This is similar to web colors. Alpha is given with #AARRGGBB.

Examples

• --sub-color='#FF0000' set sub to opaque red
• --sub-color='#C0808080' set sub to 50% gray with 75% alpha

--sub-margin-x=<size>

Left and right screen margin for the subs in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details).

This option specifies the distance of the sub to the left, as well as at which distance from the right border long sub text will be broken.

Default: 25.

--sub-margin-y=<size>

Top and bottom screen margin for the subs in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details).

This option specifies the vertical margins of unstyled text subtitles. If you just want to raise the vertical subtitle position, use --sub-pos.

Default: 22.

--sub-align-x=<left|center|right>

Control to which corner of the screen text subtitles should be aligned to (default: center).

Never applied to ASS subtitles, except in --no-sub-ass mode. Likewise, this does not apply to image subtitles.

--sub-align-y=<top|center|bottom>

Vertical position (default: bottom). Details see --sub-align-x.

--sub-justify=<auto|left|center|right>

Control how multi line subs are justified irrespective of where they are aligned (default: auto which justifies as defined by --sub-align-y). Left justification is recommended to make the subs easier to read as it is easier for the eyes.

--sub-ass-justify=<yes|no>

Applies justification as defined by --sub-justify on ASS subtitles if --sub-ass-override is not set to no. Default: no.

--sub-shadow-color=<color>

See --sub-color. Color used for sub text shadow.

--sub-shadow-offset=<size>

Displacement of the sub text shadow in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details). A value of 0 disables shadows.

Default: 0.

--sub-spacing=<size>

Horizontal sub font spacing in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details). This value is added to the normal letter spacing. Negative values are allowed.

Default: 0.

--sub-filter-sdh=<yes|no>

Applies filter removing subtitle additions for the deaf or hard-of-hearing (SDH). This is intended for English, but may in part work for other languages too. The intention is that it can be always enabled so may not remove all parts added. It removes speaker labels (like MAN:), upper case text in parentheses and any text in brackets.

Default: no.

--sub-filter-sdh-harder=<yes|no>

Do harder SDH filtering (if enabled by --sub-filter-sdh). Will also remove speaker labels and text within parentheses using both lower and upper case letters.

Default: no.

--sub-create-cc-track=<yes|no>

For every video stream, create a closed captions track (default: no). The only purpose is to make the track available for selection at the start of playback, instead of creating it lazily. This applies only to ATSC A53 Part 4 Closed Captions (displayed by mpv as subtitle tracks using the codec eia_608). The CC track is marked "default" and selected according to the normal subtitle track selection rules. You can then use --sid to explicitly select the correct track too.

If the video stream contains no closed captions, or if no video is being decoded, the CC track will remain empty and will not show any text.

--sub-font-provider=<auto|none|fontconfig>

Which libass font provider backend to use (default: auto). auto will attempt to use the native font provider: fontconfig on Linux, CoreText on OSX, DirectWrite on Windows. fontconfig forces fontconfig, if libass was built with support (if not, it behaves like none).

The none font provider effectively disables system fonts. It will still attempt to use embedded fonts (unless --embeddedfonts=no is set; this is the same behavior as with all other font providers), subfont.ttf if provided, and fonts in the fonts sub-directory if provided. (The fallback is more strict than that of other font providers, and if a font name does not match, it may prefer not to render any text that uses the missing font.)

Window

--title=<string>

Set the window title. This is used for the video window, and if possible, also sets the audio stream title.

Properties are expanded. (See Property Expansion.)

Warning

There is a danger of this causing significant CPU usage, depending on the properties used. Changing the window title is often a slow operation, and if the title changes every frame, playback can be ruined.

--screen=<default|0-32>

In multi-monitor configurations (i.e. a single desktop that spans across multiple displays), this option tells mpv which screen to display the video on.

Note (X11)

This option does not work properly with all window managers. In these cases, you can try to use --geometry to position the window explicitly. It's also possible that the window manager provides native features to control which screens application windows should use.

See also --fs-screen.

--fullscreen, --fs

Fullscreen playback.

--fs-screen=<all|current|0-32>

In multi-monitor configurations (i.e. a single desktop that spans across multiple displays), this option tells mpv which screen to go fullscreen to. If current is used mpv will fallback on what the user provided with the screen option.

Note (X11)

This option works properly only with window managers which understand the EWMH _NET_WM_FULLSCREEN_MONITORS hint.

Note (OS X)

all does not work on OS X and will behave like current.

See also --screen.

--keep-open=<yes|no|always>

Do not terminate when playing or seeking beyond the end of the file, and there is not next file to be played (and --loop is not used). Instead, pause the player. When trying to seek beyond end of the file, the player will attempt to seek to the last frame.

Normally, this will act like set pause yes on EOF, unless the --keep-open-pause=no option is set.

The following arguments can be given:

no:	If the current file ends, go to the next file or terminate. (Default.)
yes:	Don't terminate if the current file is the last playlist entry. Equivalent to --keep-open without arguments.
always:	Like yes, but also applies to files before the last playlist entry. This means playback will never automatically advance to the next file.

Note

This option is not respected when using --frames. Explicitly skipping to the next file if the binding uses force will terminate playback as well.

Also, if errors or unusual circumstances happen, the player can quit anyway.

Since mpv 0.6.0, this doesn't pause if there is a next file in the playlist, or the playlist is looped. Approximately, this will pause when the player would normally exit, but in practice there are corner cases in which this is not the case (e.g. mpv --keep-open file.mkv /dev/null will play file.mkv normally, then fail to open /dev/null, then exit). (In mpv 0.8.0, always was introduced, which restores the old behavior.)

--keep-open-pause=<yes|no>

If set to no, instead of pausing when --keep-open is active, just stop at end of file and continue playing forward when you seek backwards until end where it stops again. Default: yes.

--image-display-duration=<seconds|inf>

If the current file is an image, play the image for the given amount of seconds (default: 1). inf means the file is kept open forever (until the user stops playback manually).

Unlike --keep-open, the player is not paused, but simply continues playback until the time has elapsed. (It should not use any resources during "playback".)

This affects image files, which are defined as having only 1 video frame and no audio. The player may recognize certain non-images as images, for example if --length is used to reduce the length to 1 frame, or if you seek to the last frame.

This option does not affect the framerate used for mf:// or --merge-files. For that, use --mf-fps instead.

Setting --image-display-duration hides the OSC and does not track playback time on the command-line output, and also does not duplicate the image frame when encoding. To force the player into "dumb mode" and actually count out seconds, or to duplicate the image when encoding, you need to use --demuxer=lavf --demuxer-lavf-o=loop=1, and use --length or --frames to stop after a particular time.

--force-window=<yes|no|immediate>

Create a video output window even if there is no video. This can be useful when pretending that mpv is a GUI application. Currently, the window always has the size 640x480, and is subject to --geometry, --autofit, and similar options.

Warning

The window is created only after initialization (to make sure default window placement still works if the video size is different from the --force-window default window size). This can be a problem if initialization doesn't work perfectly, such as when opening URLs with bad network connection, or opening broken video files. The immediate mode can be used to create the window always on program start, but this may cause other issues.

--taskbar-progress, --no-taskbar-progress

(Windows only) Enable/disable playback progress rendering in taskbar (Windows 7 and above).

Enabled by default.

--snap-window

(Windows only) Snap the player window to screen edges.

--ontop

Makes the player window stay on top of other windows.

On Windows, if combined with fullscreen mode, this causes mpv to be treated as exclusive fullscreen window that bypasses the Desktop Window Manager.

--ontop-level=<window|system|level>

(OS X only) Sets the level of an ontop window (default: window).

window:	On top of all other windows.
system:	On top of system elements like Taskbar, Menubar and Dock.
level:	A level as integer.

--border, --no-border

Play video with window border and decorations. Since this is on by default, use --no-border to disable the standard window decorations.

--fit-border, --no-fit-border

(Windows only) Fit the whole window with border and decorations on the screen. Since this is on by default, use --no-fit-border to make mpv try to only fit client area with video on the screen. This behavior only applied to window/video with size exceeding size of the screen.

--on-all-workspaces

(X11 only) Show the video window on all virtual desktops.

--geometry=<[W[xH]][+-x+-y]>, --geometry=<x:y>

Adjust the initial window position or size. W and H set the window size in pixels. x and y set the window position, measured in pixels from the top-left corner of the screen to the top-left corner of the image being displayed. If a percentage sign (%) is given after the argument, it turns the value into a percentage of the screen size in that direction. Positions are specified similar to the standard X11 --geometry option format, in which e.g. +10-50 means "place 10 pixels from the left border and 50 pixels from the lower border" and "--20+-10" means "place 20 pixels beyond the right and 10 pixels beyond the top border".

If an external window is specified using the --wid option, this option is ignored.

The coordinates are relative to the screen given with --screen for the video output drivers that fully support --screen.

Note

Generally only supported by GUI VOs. Ignored for encoding.

Note (X11)

This option does not work properly with all window managers.

Examples

50:40

Places the window at x=50, y=40.

50%:50%

Places the window in the middle of the screen.

100%:100%

Places the window at the bottom right corner of the screen.

50%

Sets the window width to half the screen width. Window height is set so that the window has the video aspect ratio.

50%x50%

Forces the window width and height to half the screen width and height. Will show black borders to compensate for the video aspect ratio (with most VOs and without --no-keepaspect).

50%+10+10

Sets the window to half the screen widths, and positions it 10 pixels below/left of the top left corner of the screen.

See also --autofit and --autofit-larger for fitting the window into a given size without changing aspect ratio.

--autofit=<[W[xH]]>

Set the initial window size to a maximum size specified by WxH, without changing the window's aspect ratio. The size is measured in pixels, or if a number is followed by a percentage sign (%), in percents of the screen size.

This option never changes the aspect ratio of the window. If the aspect ratio mismatches, the window's size is reduced until it fits into the specified size.

Window position is not taken into account, nor is it modified by this option (the window manager still may place the window differently depending on size). Use --geometry to change the window position. Its effects are applied after this option.

See --geometry for details how this is handled with multi-monitor setups.

Use --autofit-larger instead if you just want to limit the maximum size of the window, rather than always forcing a window size.

Use --geometry if you want to force both window width and height to a specific size.

Note

Generally only supported by GUI VOs. Ignored for encoding.

Examples

70%

Make the window width 70% of the screen size, keeping aspect ratio.

1000

Set the window width to 1000 pixels, keeping aspect ratio.

70%x60%

Make the window as large as possible, without being wider than 70% of the screen width, or higher than 60% of the screen height.

--autofit-larger=<[W[xH]]>

This option behaves exactly like --autofit, except the window size is only changed if the window would be larger than the specified size.

Example

90%x80%

If the video is larger than 90% of the screen width or 80% of the screen height, make the window smaller until either its width is 90% of the screen, or its height is 80% of the screen.

--autofit-smaller=<[W[xH]]>

This option behaves exactly like --autofit, except that it sets the minimum size of the window (just as --autofit-larger sets the maximum).

Example

500x500

Make the window at least 500 pixels wide and 500 pixels high (depending on the video aspect ratio, the width or height will be larger than 500 in order to keep the aspect ratio the same).

--window-scale=<factor>

Resize the video window to a multiple (or fraction) of the video size. This option is applied before --autofit and other options are applied (so they override this option).

For example, --window-scale=0.5 would show the window at half the video size.

--window-minimized=<yes|no>

Whether the video window is minimized or not. Setting this will minimize, or unminimze, the video window if the current VO supports it. Note that some VOs may support minimization while not supporting unminimization (eg: Wayland).

Whether this option and --window-maximized work on program start or at runtime, and whether they're (at runtime) updated to reflect the actual window state, heavily depends on the VO and the windowing system. Some VOs simply do not implement them or parts of them, while other VOs may be restricted by the windowing systems (especially Wayland).

--window-maximized=<yes|no>

Whether the video window is maximized or not. Setting this will maximize, or unmaximize, the video window if the current VO supports it. See --window-minimized for further remarks.

--cursor-autohide=<number|no|always>

Make mouse cursor automatically hide after given number of milliseconds. no will disable cursor autohide. always means the cursor will stay hidden.

--cursor-autohide-fs-only

If this option is given, the cursor is always visible in windowed mode. In fullscreen mode, the cursor is shown or hidden according to --cursor-autohide.

--no-fixed-vo, --fixed-vo

--no-fixed-vo enforces closing and reopening the video window for multiple files (one (un)initialization for each file).

--force-rgba-osd-rendering

Change how some video outputs render the OSD and text subtitles. This does not change appearance of the subtitles and only has performance implications. For VOs which support native ASS rendering (like gpu, vdpau, direct3d), this can be slightly faster or slower, depending on GPU drivers and hardware. For other VOs, this just makes rendering slower.

--force-window-position

Forcefully move mpv's video output window to default location whenever there is a change in video parameters, video stream or file. This used to be the default behavior. Currently only affects X11 VOs.

--no-keepaspect, --keepaspect

--no-keepaspect will always stretch the video to window size, and will disable the window manager hints that force the window aspect ratio. (Ignored in fullscreen mode.)

--no-keepaspect-window, --keepaspect-window

--keepaspect-window (the default) will lock the window size to the video aspect. --no-keepaspect-window disables this behavior, and will instead add black bars if window aspect and video aspect mismatch. Whether this actually works depends on the VO backend. (Ignored in fullscreen mode.)

--monitoraspect=<ratio>

Set the aspect ratio of your monitor or TV screen. A value of 0 disables a previous setting (e.g. in the config file). Overrides the --monitorpixelaspect setting if enabled.

See also --monitorpixelaspect and --video-aspect-override.

Examples

• --monitoraspect=4:3 or --monitoraspect=1.3333
• --monitoraspect=16:9 or --monitoraspect=1.7777

--hidpi-window-scale, --no-hidpi-window-scale

(OS X, X11, and Wayland only) Scale the window size according to the backing scale factor (default: yes). On regular HiDPI resolutions the window opens with double the size but appears as having the same size as on none-HiDPI resolutions. This is the default OS X behavior.

--native-fs, --no-native-fs

(OS X only) Uses the native fullscreen mechanism of the OS (default: yes).

--monitorpixelaspect=<ratio>

Set the aspect of a single pixel of your monitor or TV screen (default: 1). A value of 1 means square pixels (correct for (almost?) all LCDs). See also --monitoraspect and --video-aspect-override.

--stop-screensaver, --no-stop-screensaver

Turns off the screensaver (or screen blanker and similar mechanisms) at startup and turns it on again on exit (default: yes). The screensaver is always re-enabled when the player is paused.

This is not supported on all video outputs or platforms. Sometimes it is implemented, but does not work (especially with Linux "desktops").

--wid=<ID>

This tells mpv to attach to an existing window. If a VO is selected that supports this option, it will use that window for video output. mpv will scale the video to the size of this window, and will add black bars to compensate if the aspect ratio of the video is different.

On X11, the ID is interpreted as a Window on X11. Unlike MPlayer/mplayer2, mpv always creates its own window, and sets the wid window as parent. The window will always be resized to cover the parent window fully. The value 0 is interpreted specially, and mpv will draw directly on the root window.

On win32, the ID is interpreted as HWND. Pass it as value cast to intptr_t. mpv will create its own window, and set the wid window as parent, like with X11.

On OSX/Cocoa, the ID is interpreted as NSView*. Pass it as value cast to intptr_t. mpv will create its own sub-view. Because OSX does not support window embedding of foreign processes, this works only with libmpv, and will crash when used from the command line.

On Android, the ID is interpreted as android.view.Surface. Pass it as a value cast to intptr_t. Use with --vo=mediacodec_embed and --hwdec=mediacodec for direct rendering using MediaCodec, or with --vo=gpu --gpu-context=android (with or without --hwdec=mediacodec-copy).

--no-window-dragging

Don't move the window when clicking on it and moving the mouse pointer.

--x11-name

Set the window class name for X11-based video output methods.

--x11-netwm=<yes|no|auto>

(X11 only) Control the use of NetWM protocol features.

This may or may not help with broken window managers. This provides some functionality that was implemented by the now removed --fstype option. Actually, it is not known to the developers to which degree this option was needed, so feedback is welcome.

Specifically, yes will force use of NetWM fullscreen support, even if not advertised by the WM. This can be useful for WMs that are broken on purpose, like XMonad. (XMonad supposedly doesn't advertise fullscreen support, because Flash uses it. Apparently, applications which want to use fullscreen anyway are supposed to either ignore the NetWM support hints, or provide a workaround. Shame on XMonad for deliberately breaking X protocols (as if X isn't bad enough already).

By default, NetWM support is autodetected (auto).

This option might be removed in the future.

--x11-bypass-compositor=<yes|no|fs-only|never>

If set to yes, then ask the compositor to unredirect the mpv window (default: fs-only). This uses the _NET_WM_BYPASS_COMPOSITOR hint.

fs-only asks the window manager to disable the compositor only in fullscreen mode.

no sets _NET_WM_BYPASS_COMPOSITOR to 0, which is the default value as declared by the EWMH specification, i.e. no change is done.

never asks the window manager to never disable the compositor.

Disc Devices

--cdrom-device=<path>

Specify the CD-ROM device (default: /dev/cdrom).

--dvd-device=<path>

Specify the DVD device or .iso filename (default: /dev/dvd). You can also specify a directory that contains files previously copied directly from a DVD (with e.g. vobcopy).

Example

mpv dvd:// --dvd-device=/path/to/dvd/

--bluray-device=<path>

(Blu-ray only) Specify the Blu-ray disc location. Must be a directory with Blu-ray structure.

Example

mpv bd:// --bluray-device=/path/to/bd/

--cdda-...

These options can be used to tune the CD Audio reading feature of mpv.

--cdda-speed=<value>

Set CD spin speed.

--cdda-paranoia=<0-2>

Set paranoia level. Values other than 0 seem to break playback of anything but the first track.

0:	disable checking (default)
1:	overlap checking only
2:	full data correction and verification

--cdda-sector-size=<value>

Set atomic read size.

--cdda-overlap=<value>

Force minimum overlap search during verification to <value> sectors.

--cdda-toc-bias

Assume that the beginning offset of track 1 as reported in the TOC will be addressed as LBA 0. Some discs need this for getting track boundaries correctly.

--cdda-toc-offset=<value>

Add <value> sectors to the values reported when addressing tracks. May be negative.

--cdda-skip=<yes|no>

(Never) accept imperfect data reconstruction.

--cdda-cdtext=<yes|no>

Print CD text. This is disabled by default, because it ruins performance with CD-ROM drives for unknown reasons.

--dvd-speed=<speed>

Try to limit DVD speed (default: 0, no change). DVD base speed is 1385 kB/s, so an 8x drive can read at speeds up to 11080 kB/s. Slower speeds make the drive more quiet. For watching DVDs, 2700 kB/s should be quiet and fast enough. mpv resets the speed to the drive default value on close. Values of at least 100 mean speed in kB/s. Values less than 100 mean multiples of 1385 kB/s, i.e. --dvd-speed=8 selects 11080 kB/s.

Note

You need write access to the DVD device to change the speed.

--dvd-angle=<ID>

Some DVDs contain scenes that can be viewed from multiple angles. This option tells mpv which angle to use (default: 1).

Equalizer

--brightness=<-100-100>

Adjust the brightness of the video signal (default: 0). Not supported by all video output drivers.

--contrast=<-100-100>

Adjust the contrast of the video signal (default: 0). Not supported by all video output drivers.

--saturation=<-100-100>

Adjust the saturation of the video signal (default: 0). You can get grayscale output with this option. Not supported by all video output drivers.

--gamma=<-100-100>

Adjust the gamma of the video signal (default: 0). Not supported by all video output drivers.

--hue=<-100-100>

Adjust the hue of the video signal (default: 0). You can get a colored negative of the image with this option. Not supported by all video output drivers.

Demuxer

--demuxer=<[+]name>

Force demuxer type. Use a '+' before the name to force it; this will skip some checks. Give the demuxer name as printed by --demuxer=help.

--demuxer-lavf-analyzeduration=<value>

Maximum length in seconds to analyze the stream properties.

--demuxer-lavf-probe-info=<yes|no|auto|nostreams>

Whether to probe stream information (default: auto). Technically, this controls whether libavformat's avformat_find_stream_info() function is called. Usually it's safer to call it, but it can also make startup slower.

The auto choice (the default) tries to skip this for a few know-safe whitelisted formats, while calling it for everything else.

The nostreams choice only calls it if and only if the file seems to contain no streams after opening (helpful in cases when calling the function is needed to detect streams at all, such as with FLV files).

--demuxer-lavf-probescore=<1-100>

Minimum required libavformat probe score. Lower values will require less data to be loaded (makes streams start faster), but makes file format detection less reliable. Can be used to force auto-detected libavformat demuxers, even if libavformat considers the detection not reliable enough. (Default: 26.)

--demuxer-lavf-allow-mimetype=<yes|no>

Allow deriving the format from the HTTP MIME type (default: yes). Set this to no in case playing things from HTTP mysteriously fails, even though the same files work from local disk.

This is default in order to reduce latency when opening HTTP streams.

--demuxer-lavf-format=<name>

Force a specific libavformat demuxer.

--demuxer-lavf-hacks=<yes|no>

By default, some formats will be handled differently from other formats by explicitly checking for them. Most of these compensate for weird or imperfect behavior from libavformat demuxers. Passing no disables these. For debugging and testing only.

--demuxer-lavf-o=<key>=<value>[,<key>=<value>[,...]]

Pass AVOptions to libavformat demuxer.

Note, a patch to make the o= unneeded and pass all unknown options through the AVOption system is welcome. A full list of AVOptions can be found in the FFmpeg manual. Note that some options may conflict with mpv options.

This is a key/value list option. See List Options for details.

Example

--demuxer-lavf-o=fflags=+ignidx

--demuxer-lavf-probesize=<value>

Maximum amount of data to probe during the detection phase. In the case of MPEG-TS this value identifies the maximum number of TS packets to scan.

--demuxer-lavf-buffersize=<value>

Size of the stream read buffer allocated for libavformat in bytes (default: 32768). Lowering the size could lower latency. Note that libavformat might reallocate the buffer internally, or not fully use all of it.

--demuxer-lavf-linearize-timestamps=<yes|no|auto>

Attempt to linearize timestamp resets in demuxed streams (default: auto). This was tested only for single audio streams. It's unknown whether it works correctly for video (but likely won't). Note that the implementation is slightly incorrect either way, and will introduce a discontinuity by about 1 codec frame size.

The auto mode enables this for OGG audio stream. This covers the common and annoying case of OGG web radio streams. Some of these will reset timestamps to 0 every time a new song begins. This breaks the mpv seekable cache, which can't deal with timestamp resets. Note that FFmpeg/libavformat's seeking API can't deal with this either; it's likely that if this option breaks this even more, while if it's disabled, you can at least seek within the first song in the stream. Well, you won't get anything useful either way if the seek is outside of mpv's cache.

--demuxer-lavf-propagate-opts=<yes|no>

Propagate FFmpeg-level options to recursively opened connections (default: yes). This is needed because FFmpeg will apply these settings to nested AVIO contexts automatically. On the other hand, this could break in certain situations - it's the FFmpeg API, you just can't win.

This affects in particular the --timeout option and anything passed with --demuxer-lavf-o.

If this option is deemed unnecessary at some point in the future, it will be removed without notice.

--demuxer-mkv-subtitle-preroll=<yes|index|no>, --mkv-subtitle-preroll

Try harder to show embedded soft subtitles when seeking somewhere. Normally, it can happen that the subtitle at the seek target is not shown due to how some container file formats are designed. The subtitles appear only if seeking before or exactly to the position a subtitle first appears. To make this worse, subtitles are often timed to appear a very small amount before the associated video frame, so that seeking to the video frame typically does not demux the subtitle at that position.

Enabling this option makes the demuxer start reading data a bit before the seek target, so that subtitles appear correctly. Note that this makes seeking slower, and is not guaranteed to always work. It only works if the subtitle is close enough to the seek target.

Works with the internal Matroska demuxer only. Always enabled for absolute and hr-seeks, and this option changes behavior with relative or imprecise seeks only.

You can use the --demuxer-mkv-subtitle-preroll-secs option to specify how much data the demuxer should pre-read at most in order to find subtitle packets that may overlap. Setting this to 0 will effectively disable this preroll mechanism. Setting a very large value can make seeking very slow, and an extremely large value would completely reread the entire file from start to seek target on every seek - seeking can become slower towards the end of the file. The details are messy, and the value is actually rounded down to the cluster with the previous video keyframe.

Some files, especially files muxed with newer mkvmerge versions, have information embedded that can be used to determine what subtitle packets overlap with a seek target. In these cases, mpv will reduce the amount of data read to a minimum. (Although it will still read all data between the cluster that contains the first wanted subtitle packet, and the seek target.) If the index choice (which is the default) is specified, then prerolling will be done only if this information is actually available. If this method is used, the maximum amount of data to skip can be additionally controlled by --demuxer-mkv-subtitle-preroll-secs-index (it still uses the value of the option without -index if that is higher).

See also --hr-seek-demuxer-offset option. This option can achieve a similar effect, but only if hr-seek is active. It works with any demuxer, but makes seeking much slower, as it has to decode audio and video data instead of just skipping over it.

--mkv-subtitle-preroll is a deprecated alias.

--demuxer-mkv-subtitle-preroll-secs=<value>

See --demuxer-mkv-subtitle-preroll.

--demuxer-mkv-subtitle-preroll-secs-index=<value>

See --demuxer-mkv-subtitle-preroll.

--demuxer-mkv-probe-video-duration=<yes|no|full>

When opening the file, seek to the end of it, and check what timestamp the last video packet has, and report that as file duration. This is strictly for compatibility with Haali only. In this mode, it's possible that opening will be slower (especially when playing over http), or that behavior with broken files is much worse. So don't use this option.

The yes mode merely uses the index and reads a small number of blocks from the end of the file. The full mode actually traverses the entire file and can make a reliable estimate even without an index present (such as partial files).

--demuxer-rawaudio-channels=<value>

Number of channels (or channel layout) if --demuxer=rawaudio is used (default: stereo).

--demuxer-rawaudio-format=<value>

Sample format for --demuxer=rawaudio (default: s16le). Use --demuxer-rawaudio-format=help to get a list of all formats.

--demuxer-rawaudio-rate=<value>

Sample rate for --demuxer=rawaudio (default: 44 kHz).

--demuxer-rawvideo-fps=<value>

Rate in frames per second for --demuxer=rawvideo (default: 25.0).

--demuxer-rawvideo-w=<value>, --demuxer-rawvideo-h=<value>

Image dimension in pixels for --demuxer=rawvideo.

Example

Play a raw YUV sample:

mpv sample-720x576.yuv --demuxer=rawvideo \
--demuxer-rawvideo-w=720 --demuxer-rawvideo-h=576

--demuxer-rawvideo-format=<value>

Color space (fourcc) in hex or string for --demuxer=rawvideo (default: YV12).

--demuxer-rawvideo-mp-format=<value>

Color space by internal video format for --demuxer=rawvideo. Use --demuxer-rawvideo-mp-format=help for a list of possible formats.

--demuxer-rawvideo-codec=<value>

Set the video codec instead of selecting the rawvideo codec when using --demuxer=rawvideo. This uses the same values as codec names in --vd (but it does not accept decoder names).

--demuxer-rawvideo-size=<value>

Frame size in bytes when using --demuxer=rawvideo.

--demuxer-cue-codepage=<codepage>

Specify the CUE sheet codepage. (See --sub-codepage for details.)

--demuxer-max-bytes=<bytesize>

This controls how much the demuxer is allowed to buffer ahead. The demuxer will normally try to read ahead as much as necessary, or as much is requested with --demuxer-readahead-secs. The option can be used to restrict the maximum readahead. This limits excessive readahead in case of broken files or desynced playback. The demuxer will stop reading additional packets as soon as one of the limits is reached. (The limits still can be slightly overstepped due to technical reasons.)

Set these limits higher if you get a packet queue overflow warning, and you think normal playback would be possible with a larger packet queue.

See --list-options for defaults and value range. <bytesize> options accept suffixes such as KiB and MiB.

--demuxer-max-back-bytes=<bytesize>

This controls how much past data the demuxer is allowed to preserve. This is useful only if the --demuxer-seekable-cache option is enabled. Unlike the forward cache, there is no control how many seconds are actually cached - it will simply use as much memory this option allows. Setting this option to 0 will strictly disable any back buffer, but this will lead to the situation that the forward seek range starts after the current playback position (as it removes past packets that are seek points).

If the end of the file is reached, the remaining unused forward buffer space is "donated" to the backbuffer (unless the backbuffer size is set to 0). This still limits the total cache usage to the sum of the forward and backward cache, and effectively makes better use of the total allowed memory budget. (The opposite does not happen: free backward buffer is never "donated" to the forward buffer.)

Keep in mind that other buffers in the player (like decoders) will cause the demuxer to cache "future" frames in the back buffer, which can skew the impression about how much data the backbuffer contains.

See --list-options for defaults and value range.

--demuxer-seekable-cache=<yes|no|auto>

This controls whether seeking can use the demuxer cache (default: auto). If enabled, short seek offsets will not trigger a low level demuxer seek (which means for example that slow network round trips or FFmpeg seek bugs can be avoided). If a seek cannot happen within the cached range, a low level seek will be triggered. Seeking outside of the cache will start a new cached range, but can discard the old cache range if the demuxer exhibits certain unsupported behavior.

Keep in mind that some events can flush the cache or force a low level seek anyway, such as switching tracks, or attempting to seek before the start or after the end of the file.

The special value auto means yes in the same situation as --cache-secs is used (i.e. when the stream appears to be a network stream or the stream cache is enabled).

--demuxer-thread=<yes|no>

Run the demuxer in a separate thread, and let it prefetch a certain amount of packets (default: yes). Having this enabled leads to smoother playback, enables features like prefetching, and prevents that stuck network freezes the player. On the other hand, it can add overhead, or the background prefetching can hog CPU resources.

Disabling this option is not recommended. Use it for debugging only.

--demuxer-termination-timeout=<seconds>

Number of seconds the player should wait to shutdown the demuxer (default: 0.1). The player will wait up to this much time before it closes the stream layer forcefully. Forceful closing usually means the network I/O is given no chance to close its connections gracefully (of course the OS can still close TCP connections properly), and might result in annoying messages being logged, and in some cases, confused remote servers.

This timeout is usually only applied when loading has finished properly. If loading is aborted by the user, or in some corner cases like removing external tracks sourced from network during playback, forceful closing is always used.

--demuxer-readahead-secs=<seconds>

If --demuxer-thread is enabled, this controls how much the demuxer should buffer ahead in seconds (default: 1). As long as no packet has a timestamp difference higher than the readahead amount relative to the last packet returned to the decoder, the demuxer keeps reading.

Note that the --cache-secs option will override this value if a cache is enabled, and the value is larger.

(This value tends to be fuzzy, because many file formats don't store linear timestamps.)

--prefetch-playlist=<yes|no>

Prefetch next playlist entry while playback of the current entry is ending (default: no). This merely opens the URL of the next playlist entry as soon as the current URL is fully read.

This does not work with URLs resolved by the youtube-dl wrapper, and it won't.

This does not affect HLS (.m3u8 URLs) - HLS prefetching depends on the demuxer cache settings and is on by default.

This can give subtly wrong results if per-file options are used, or if options are changed in the time window between prefetching start and next file played.

This can occasionally make wrong prefetching decisions. For example, it can't predict whether you go backwards in the playlist, and assumes you won't edit the playlist.

Highly experimental.

--force-seekable=<yes|no>

If the player thinks that the media is not seekable (e.g. playing from a pipe, or it's an http stream with a server that doesn't support range requests), seeking will be disabled. This option can forcibly enable it. For seeks within the cache, there's a good chance of success.

--demuxer-cache-wait=<yes|no>

Before starting playback, read data until either the end of the file was reached, or the demuxer cache has reached maximum capacity. Only once this is done, playback starts. This intentionally happens before the initial seek triggered with --start. This does not change any runtime behavior after the initial caching. This option is useless if the file cannot be cached completely.

--rar-list-all-volumes=<yes|no>

When opening multi-volume rar files, open all volumes to create a full list of contained files (default: no). If disabled, only the archive entries whose headers are located within the first volume are listed (and thus played when opening a .rar file with mpv). Doing so speeds up opening, and the typical idiotic use-case of playing uncompressed multi-volume rar files that contain a single media file is made faster.

Opening is still slow, because for unknown, idiotic, and unnecessary reasons libarchive opens all volumes anyway when playing the main file, even though mpv iterated no archive entries yet.

Input

--native-keyrepeat

Use system settings for keyrepeat delay and rate, instead of --input-ar-delay and --input-ar-rate. (Whether this applies depends on the VO backend and how it handles keyboard input. Does not apply to terminal input.)

--input-ar-delay

Delay in milliseconds before we start to autorepeat a key (0 to disable).

--input-ar-rate

Number of key presses to generate per second on autorepeat.

--input-conf=<filename>

Specify input configuration file other than the default location in the mpv configuration directory (usually ~/.config/mpv/input.conf).

--no-input-default-bindings

Disable mpv default (built-in) key bindings.

--input-cmdlist

Prints all commands that can be bound to keys.

--input-doubleclick-time=<milliseconds>

Time in milliseconds to recognize two consecutive button presses as a double-click (default: 300).

--input-keylist

Prints all keys that can be bound to commands.

--input-key-fifo-size=<2-65000>

Specify the size of the FIFO that buffers key events (default: 7). If it is too small, some events may be lost. The main disadvantage of setting it to a very large value is that if you hold down a key triggering some particularly slow command then the player may be unresponsive while it processes all the queued commands.

--input-test

Input test mode. Instead of executing commands on key presses, mpv will show the keys and the bound commands on the OSD. Has to be used with a dummy video, and the normal ways to quit the player will not work (key bindings that normally quit will be shown on OSD only, just like any other binding). See INPUT.CONF.

--input-file=<filename>

Deprecated. Use --input-ipc-server.

Read commands from the given file. Mostly useful with a FIFO. Since mpv 0.7.0 also understands JSON commands (see JSON IPC), but you can't get replies or events. Use --input-ipc-server for something bi-directional. On MS Windows, JSON commands are not available.

This can also specify a direct file descriptor with fd://N (UNIX only). In this case, JSON replies will be written if the FD is writable.

Note

When the given file is a FIFO mpv opens both ends, so you can do several echo "seek 10" > mp_pipe and the pipe will stay valid.

--input-terminal, --no-input-terminal

--no-input-terminal prevents the player from reading key events from standard input. Useful when reading data from standard input. This is automatically enabled when - is found on the command line. There are situations where you have to set it manually, e.g. if you open /dev/stdin (or the equivalent on your system), use stdin in a playlist or intend to read from stdin later on via the loadfile or loadlist input commands.

--input-ipc-server=<filename>

Enable the IPC support and create the listening socket at the given path.

On Linux and Unix, the given path is a regular filesystem path. On Windows, named pipes are used, so the path refers to the pipe namespace (\\.\pipe\<name>). If the \\.\pipe\ prefix is missing, mpv will add it automatically before creating the pipe, so --input-ipc-server=/tmp/mpv-socket and --input-ipc-server=\\.\pipe\tmp\mpv-socket are equivalent for IPC on Windows.

See JSON IPC for details.

--input-gamepad=<yes|no>

Enable/disable SDL2 Gamepad support. Disabled by default.

--input-cursor, --no-input-cursor

Permit mpv to receive pointer events reported by the video output driver. Necessary to use the OSC, or to select the buttons in DVD menus. Support depends on the VO in use.

--input-media-keys=<yes|no>

(OS X and Windows only) Enable/disable media keys support. Enabled by default (except for libmpv).

--input-right-alt-gr, --no-input-right-alt-gr

(Cocoa and Windows only) Use the right Alt key as Alt Gr to produce special characters. If disabled, count the right Alt as an Alt modifier key. Enabled by default.

--input-vo-keyboard=<yes|no>

Disable all keyboard input on for VOs which can't participate in proper keyboard input dispatching. May not affect all VOs. Generally useful for embedding only.

On X11, a sub-window with input enabled grabs all keyboard input as long as it is 1. a child of a focused window, and 2. the mouse is inside of the sub-window. It can steal away all keyboard input from the application embedding the mpv window, and on the other hand, the mpv window will receive no input if the mouse is outside of the mpv window, even though mpv has focus. Modern toolkits work around this weird X11 behavior, but naively embedding foreign windows breaks it.

The only way to handle this reasonably is using the XEmbed protocol, which was designed to solve these problems. GTK provides GtkSocket, which supports XEmbed. Qt doesn't seem to provide anything working in newer versions.

If the embedder supports XEmbed, input should work with default settings and with this option disabled. Note that input-default-bindings is disabled by default in libmpv as well - it should be enabled if you want the mpv default key bindings.

(This option was renamed from --input-x11-keyboard.)

OSD

--osc, --no-osc

Whether to load the on-screen-controller (default: yes).

--no-osd-bar, --osd-bar

Disable display of the OSD bar.

You can configure this on a per-command basis in input.conf using osd- prefixes, see Input Command Prefixes. If you want to disable the OSD completely, use --osd-level=0.

--osd-on-seek=<no,bar,msg,msg-bar>

Set what is displayed on the OSD during seeks. The default is bar.

You can configure this on a per-command basis in input.conf using osd- prefixes, see Input Command Prefixes.

--osd-duration=<time>

Set the duration of the OSD messages in ms (default: 1000).

--osd-font=<name>

Specify font to use for OSD. The default is sans-serif.

Examples

• --osd-font='Bitstream Vera Sans'
• --osd-font='Comic Sans MS'

--osd-font-size=<size>

Specify the OSD font size. See --sub-font-size for details.

Default: 55.

--osd-msg1=<string>

Show this string as message on OSD with OSD level 1 (visible by default). The message will be visible by default, and as long as no other message covers it, and the OSD level isn't changed (see --osd-level). Expands properties; see Property Expansion.

--osd-msg2=<string>

Similar to --osd-msg1, but for OSD level 2. If this is an empty string (default), then the playback time is shown.

--osd-msg3=<string>

Similar to --osd-msg1, but for OSD level 3. If this is an empty string (default), then the playback time, duration, and some more information is shown.

This is used for the show-progress command (by default mapped to P), and when seeking if enabled with --osd-on-seek or by osd- prefixes in input.conf (see Input Command Prefixes).

--osd-status-msg is a legacy equivalent (but with a minor difference).

--osd-status-msg=<string>

Show a custom string during playback instead of the standard status text. This overrides the status text used for --osd-level=3, when using the show-progress command (by default mapped to P), and when seeking if enabled with --osd-on-seek or osd- prefixes in input.conf (see Input Command Prefixes). Expands properties. See Property Expansion.

This option has been replaced with --osd-msg3. The only difference is that this option implicitly includes ${osd-sym-cc}. This option is ignored if --osd-msg3 is not empty.

--osd-playing-msg=<string>

Show a message on OSD when playback starts. The string is expanded for properties, e.g. --osd-playing-msg='file: ${filename}' will show the message file: followed by a space and the currently played filename.

See Property Expansion.

--osd-bar-align-x=<-1-1>

Position of the OSD bar. -1 is far left, 0 is centered, 1 is far right. Fractional values (like 0.5) are allowed.

--osd-bar-align-y=<-1-1>

Position of the OSD bar. -1 is top, 0 is centered, 1 is bottom. Fractional values (like 0.5) are allowed.

--osd-bar-w=<1-100>

Width of the OSD bar, in percentage of the screen width (default: 75). A value of 50 means the bar is half the screen wide.

--osd-bar-h=<0.1-50>

Height of the OSD bar, in percentage of the screen height (default: 3.125).

--osd-back-color=<color>

See --osd-color. Color used for OSD text background.

--osd-blur=<0..20.0>

Gaussian blur factor. 0 means no blur applied (default).

--osd-bold=<yes|no>

Format text on bold.

--osd-italic=<yes|no>

Format text on italic.

--osd-border-color=<color>

See --osd-color. Color used for the OSD font border.

Note

ignored when --osd-back-color is specified (or more exactly: when that option is not set to completely transparent).

--osd-border-size=<size>

Size of the OSD font border in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details). A value of 0 disables borders.

Default: 3.

--osd-color=<color>

Specify the color used for OSD. See --sub-color for details.

--osd-fractions

Show OSD times with fractions of seconds (in millisecond precision). Useful to see the exact timestamp of a video frame.

--osd-level=<0-3>

Specifies which mode the OSD should start in.

0:	OSD completely disabled (subtitles only)
1:	enabled (shows up only on user interaction)
2:	enabled + current time visible by default
3:	enabled + --osd-status-msg (current time and status by default)

--osd-margin-x=<size>

Left and right screen margin for the OSD in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details).

This option specifies the distance of the OSD to the left, as well as at which distance from the right border long OSD text will be broken.

Default: 25.

--osd-margin-y=<size>

Top and bottom screen margin for the OSD in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details).

This option specifies the vertical margins of the OSD.

Default: 22.

--osd-align-x=<left|center|right>

Control to which corner of the screen OSD should be aligned to (default: left).

--osd-align-y=<top|center|bottom>

Vertical position (default: top). Details see --osd-align-x.

--osd-scale=<factor>

OSD font size multiplier, multiplied with --osd-font-size value.

--osd-scale-by-window=<yes|no>

Whether to scale the OSD with the window size (default: yes). If this is disabled, --osd-font-size and other OSD options that use scaled pixels are always in actual pixels. The effect is that changing the window size won't change the OSD font size.

--osd-shadow-color=<color>

See --sub-color. Color used for OSD shadow.

--osd-shadow-offset=<size>

Displacement of the OSD shadow in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details). A value of 0 disables shadows.

Default: 0.

--osd-spacing=<size>

Horizontal OSD/sub font spacing in scaled pixels (see --sub-font-size for details). This value is added to the normal letter spacing. Negative values are allowed.

Default: 0.

--video-osd=<yes|no>

Enabled OSD rendering on the video window (default: yes). This can be used in situations where terminal OSD is preferred. If you just want to disable all OSD rendering, use --osd-level=0.

It does not affect subtitles or overlays created by scripts (in particular, the OSC needs to be disabled with --no-osc).

This option is somewhat experimental and could be replaced by another mechanism in the future.

--osd-font-provider=<...>

See --sub-font-provider for details and accepted values. Note that unlike subtitles, OSD never uses embedded fonts from media files.

Screenshot

--screenshot-format=<type>

Set the image file type used for saving screenshots.

Available choices:

png:	PNG
jpg:	JPEG (default)
jpeg:	JPEG (alias for jpg)
webp:	WebP

--screenshot-tag-colorspace=<yes|no>

Tag screenshots with the appropriate colorspace.

Note that not all formats are supported.

Default: no.

--screenshot-high-bit-depth=<yes|no>

If possible, write screenshots with a bit depth similar to the source video (default: yes). This is interesting in particular for PNG, as this sometimes triggers writing 16 bit PNGs with huge file sizes. This will also include an unused alpha channel in the resulting files if 16 bit is used.

--screenshot-template=<template>

Specify the filename template used to save screenshots. The template specifies the filename without file extension, and can contain format specifiers, which will be substituted when taking a screenshot. By default, the template is mpv-shot%n, which results in filenames like mpv-shot0012.png for example.

The template can start with a relative or absolute path, in order to specify a directory location where screenshots should be saved.

If the final screenshot filename points to an already existing file, the file will not be overwritten. The screenshot will either not be saved, or if the template contains %n, saved using different, newly generated filename.

Allowed format specifiers:

%[#][0X]n

A sequence number, padded with zeros to length X (default: 04). E.g. passing the format %04n will yield 0012 on the 12th screenshot. The number is incremented every time a screenshot is taken or if the file already exists. The length X must be in the range 0-9. With the optional # sign, mpv will use the lowest available number. For example, if you take three screenshots--0001, 0002, 0003--and delete the first two, the next two screenshots will not be 0004 and 0005, but 0001 and 0002 again.

%f

Filename of the currently played video.

%F

Same as %f, but strip the file extension, including the dot.

%x

Directory path of the currently played video. If the video is not on the filesystem (but e.g. http://), this expand to an empty string.

%X{fallback}

Same as %x, but if the video file is not on the filesystem, return the fallback string inside the {...}.

%p

Current playback time, in the same format as used in the OSD. The result is a string of the form "HH:MM:SS". For example, if the video is at the time position 5 minutes and 34 seconds, %p will be replaced with "00:05:34".

%P

Similar to %p, but extended with the playback time in milliseconds. It is formatted as "HH:MM:SS.mmm", with "mmm" being the millisecond part of the playback time.

Note

This is a simple way for getting unique per-frame timestamps. (Frame numbers would be more intuitive, but are not easily implementable because container formats usually use time stamps for identifying frames.)

%wX

Specify the current playback time using the format string X. %p is like %wH:%wM:%wS, and %P is like %wH:%wM:%wS.%wT.

Valid format specifiers:

%wH

hour (padded with 0 to two digits)

%wh

hour (not padded)

%wM

minutes (00-59)

%wm

total minutes (includes hours, unlike %wM)

%wS

seconds (00-59)

%ws

total seconds (includes hours and minutes)

%wf

like %ws, but as float

%wT

milliseconds (000-999)

%tX

Specify the current local date/time using the format X. This format specifier uses the UNIX strftime() function internally, and inserts the result of passing "%X" to strftime. For example, %tm will insert the number of the current month as number. You have to use multiple %tX specifiers to build a full date/time string.

%{prop[:fallback text]}

Insert the value of the input property 'prop'. E.g. %{filename} is the same as %f. If the property does not exist or is not available, an error text is inserted, unless a fallback is specified.

%%

Replaced with the % character itself.

--screenshot-directory=<path>

Store screenshots in this directory. This path is joined with the filename generated by --screenshot-template. If the template filename is already absolute, the directory is ignored.

If the directory does not exist, it is created on the first screenshot. If it is not a directory, an error is generated when trying to write a screenshot.

This option is not set by default, and thus will write screenshots to the directory from which mpv was started. In pseudo-gui mode (see PSEUDO GUI MODE), this is set to the desktop.

--screenshot-jpeg-quality=<0-100>

Set the JPEG quality level. Higher means better quality. The default is 90.

--screenshot-jpeg-source-chroma=<yes|no>

Write JPEG files with the same chroma subsampling as the video (default: yes). If disabled, the libjpeg default is used.

--screenshot-png-compression=<0-9>

Set the PNG compression level. Higher means better compression. This will affect the file size of the written screenshot file and the time it takes to write a screenshot. Too high compression might occupy enough CPU time to interrupt playback. The default is 7.

--screenshot-png-filter=<0-5>

Set the filter applied prior to PNG compression. 0 is none, 1 is "sub", 2 is "up", 3 is "average", 4 is "Paeth", and 5 is "mixed". This affects the level of compression that can be achieved. For most images, "mixed" achieves the best compression ratio, hence it is the default.

--screenshot-webp-lossless=<yes|no>

Write lossless WebP files. --screenshot-webp-quality is ignored if this is set. The default is no.

--screenshot-webp-quality=<0-100>

Set the WebP quality level. Higher means better quality. The default is 75.

--screenshot-webp-compression=<0-6>

Set the WebP compression level. Higher means better compression, but takes more CPU time. Note that this also affects the screenshot quality when used with lossy WebP files. The default is 4.

Software Scaler

--sws-scaler=<name>

Specify the software scaler algorithm to be used with --vf=scale. This also affects video output drivers which lack hardware acceleration, e.g. x11. See also --vf=scale.

To get a list of available scalers, run --sws-scaler=help.

Default: bicubic.

--sws-lgb=<0-100>

Software scaler Gaussian blur filter (luma). See --sws-scaler.

--sws-cgb=<0-100>

Software scaler Gaussian blur filter (chroma). See --sws-scaler.

--sws-ls=<-100-100>

Software scaler sharpen filter (luma). See --sws-scaler.

--sws-cs=<-100-100>

Software scaler sharpen filter (chroma). See --sws-scaler.

--sws-chs=<h>

Software scaler chroma horizontal shifting. See --sws-scaler.

--sws-cvs=<v>

Software scaler chroma vertical shifting. See --sws-scaler.

--sws-bitexact=<yes|no>

Unknown functionality (default: no). Consult libswscale source code. The primary purpose of this, as far as libswscale API goes), is to produce exactly the same output for the same input on all platforms (output has the same "bits" everywhere, thus "bitexact"). Typically disables optimizations.

--sws-fast=<yes|no>

Allow optimizations that help with performance, but reduce quality (default: no).

VOs like drm and x11 will benefit a lot from using --sws-fast. You may need to set other options, like --sws-scaler. The builtin sws-fast profile sets this option and some others to gain performance for reduced quality.

--sws-allow-zimg=<yes|no>

Allow using zimg (if the component using the internal swscale wrapper explicitly allows so). In this case, zimg may be used, if the internal zimg wrapper supports the input and output formats. It will silently fall back to libswscale if one of these conditions does not apply.

If zimg is used, the other --sws- options are ignored, and the --zimg- options are used instead.

If the internal component using the swscale wrapper hooks up logging correctly, a verbose priority log message will indicate whether zimg is being used.

Most things which need software conversion can make use of this.

--zimg-scaler=<point|bilinear|bicubic|spline16|spline36|lanczos>

Zimg luma scaler to use (default: lanczos).

--zimg-scaler-param-a=<default|float>, --zimg-scaler-param-b=<default|float>

Set scaler parameters. By default, these are set to the special string default, which maps to a scaler-specific default value. Ignored if the scaler is not tunable.

lanczos

--zimg-scaler-param-a is the number of taps.

bicubic

a and b are the bicubic b and c parameters.

--zimg-scaler-chroma=...

Same as --zimg-scaler, for for chroma interpolation (default: bilinear).

--zimg-scaler-chroma-param-a, --zimg-scaler-chroma-param-b

Same as --zimg-scaler-param-a / --zimg-scaler-param-b, for chroma.

--zimg-dither=<no|ordered|random|error-diffusion>

Dithering (default: random).

--zimg-fast=<yes|no>

Allow optimizations that help with performance, but reduce quality (default: yes). Currently, this may simplify gamma conversion operations.

Audio Resampler

This controls the default options of any resampling done by mpv (but not within libavfilter, within the system audio API resampler, or any other places).

It also sets the defaults for the lavrresample audio filter.

--audio-resample-filter-size=<length>

Length of the filter with respect to the lower sampling rate. (default: 16)

--audio-resample-phase-shift=<count>

Log2 of the number of polyphase entries. (..., 10->1024, 11->2048, 12->4096, ...) (default: 10->1024)

--audio-resample-cutoff=<cutoff>

Cutoff frequency (0.0-1.0), default set depending upon filter length.

--audio-resample-linear=<yes|no>

If set then filters will be linearly interpolated between polyphase entries. (default: no)

--audio-normalize-downmix=<yes|no>

Enable/disable normalization if surround audio is downmixed to stereo (default: no). If this is disabled, downmix can cause clipping. If it's enabled, the output might be too quiet. It depends on the source audio.

Technically, this changes the normalize suboption of the lavrresample audio filter, which performs the downmixing.

If downmix happens outside of mpv for some reason, or in the decoder (decoder downmixing), or in the audio output (system mixer), this has no effect.

--audio-resample-max-output-size=<length>

Limit maximum size of audio frames filtered at once, in ms (default: 40). The output size size is limited in order to make resample speed changes react faster. This is necessary especially if decoders or filters output very large frame sizes (like some lossless codecs or some DRC filters). This option does not affect the resampling algorithm in any way.

For testing/debugging only. Can be removed or changed any time.

--audio-swresample-o=<string>

Set AVOptions on the SwrContext or AVAudioResampleContext. These should be documented by FFmpeg or Libav.

This is a key/value list option. See List Options for details.

Terminal

--quiet

Make console output less verbose; in particular, prevents the status line (i.e. AV: 3.4 (00:00:03.37) / 5320.6 ...) from being displayed. Particularly useful on slow terminals or broken ones which do not properly handle carriage return (i.e. \r).

See also: --really-quiet and --msg-level.

--really-quiet

Display even less output and status messages than with --quiet.

--no-terminal, --terminal

Disable any use of the terminal and stdin/stdout/stderr. This completely silences any message output.

Unlike --really-quiet, this disables input and terminal initialization as well.

--no-msg-color

Disable colorful console output on terminals.

--msg-level=<module1=level1,module2=level2,...>

Control verbosity directly for each module. The all module changes the verbosity of all the modules. The verbosity changes from this option are applied in order from left to right, and each item can override a previous one.

Run mpv with --msg-level=all=trace to see all messages mpv outputs. You can use the module names printed in the output (prefixed to each line in [...]) to limit the output to interesting modules.

This also affects --log-file, and in certain cases libmpv API logging.

Note

Some messages are printed before the command line is parsed and are therefore not affected by --msg-level. To control these messages, you have to use the MPV_VERBOSE environment variable; see ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES for details.

Available levels:

no:	complete silence
fatal:	fatal messages only
error:	error messages
warn:	warning messages
info:	informational messages
status:	status messages (default)
v:	verbose messages
debug:	debug messages
trace:	very noisy debug messages

Example

mpv --msg-level=ao/sndio=no

Completely silences the output of ao_sndio, which uses the log prefix [ao/sndio].

mpv --msg-level=all=warn,ao/alsa=error

Only show warnings or worse, and let the ao_alsa output show errors only.

--term-osd=<auto|no|force>

Control whether OSD messages are shown on the console when no video output is available (default: auto).

auto:	use terminal OSD if no video output active
no:	disable terminal OSD
force:	use terminal OSD even if video output active

The auto mode also enables terminal OSD if --video-osd=no was set.

--term-osd-bar, --no-term-osd-bar

Enable printing a progress bar under the status line on the terminal. (Disabled by default.)

--term-osd-bar-chars=<string>

Customize the --term-osd-bar feature. The string is expected to consist of 5 characters (start, left space, position indicator, right space, end). You can use Unicode characters, but note that double- width characters will not be treated correctly.

Default: [-+-].

--term-playing-msg=<string>

Print out a string after starting playback. The string is expanded for properties, e.g. --term-playing-msg='file: ${filename}' will print the string file: followed by a space and the currently played filename.

See Property Expansion.

--term-status-msg=<string>

Print out a custom string during playback instead of the standard status line. Expands properties. See Property Expansion.

--msg-module

Prepend module name to each console message.

--msg-time

Prepend timing information to each console message.

Cache

--cache=<yes|no|auto>

Decide whether to use network cache settings (default: auto).

If enabled, use up to --cache-secs for the cache size (but still limited to --demuxer-max-bytes). --demuxer-seekable-cache=auto behaves as if it was set to yes. If disabled, --cache-pause and related are implicitly disabled.

The auto choice enables this depending on whether the stream is thought to involve network accesses or other slow media (this is an imperfect heuristic).

Before mpv 0.30.0, this used to accept a number, which specified the size of the cache in kilobytes. Use e.g. --cache --demuxer-max-bytes=123k instead.

--no-cache

Turn off input stream caching. See --cache.

--cache-secs=<seconds>

How many seconds of audio/video to prefetch if the cache is active. This overrides the --demuxer-readahead-secs option if and only if the cache is enabled and the value is larger. The default value is set to something very high, so the actually achieved readahead will usually be limited by the value of the --demuxer-max-bytes option. Setting this option is usually only useful for limiting readahead.

--cache-on-disk=<yes|no>

Write packet data to a temporary file, instead of keeping them in memory. This makes sense only with --cache. If the normal cache is disabled, this option is ignored.

You need to set --cache-dir to use this.

The cache file is append-only. Even if the player appears to prune data, the file space freed by it is not reused. The cache file is deleted when playback is closed.

Note that packet metadata is still kept in memory. --demuxer-max-bytes and related options are applied to metadata only. The size of this metadata varies, but 50 MB per hour of media is typical. The cache statistics will report this metadats size, instead of the size of the cache file. If the metadata hits the size limits, the metadata is pruned (but not the cache file).

When the media is closed, the cache file is deleted. A cache file is generally worthless after the media is closed, and it's hard to retrieve any media data from it (it's not supported by design).

If the option is enabled at runtime, the cache file is created, but old data will remain in the memory cache. If the option is disabled at runtime, old data remains in the disk cache, and the cache file is not closed until the media is closed. If the option is disabled and enabled again, it will continue to use the cache file that was opened first.

--cache-dir=<path>

Directory where to create temporary files (default: none).

Currently, this is used for --cache-on-disk only.

--cache-pause=<yes|no>

Whether the player should automatically pause when the cache runs out of data and stalls decoding/playback (default: yes). If enabled, it will pause and unpause once more data is available, aka "buffering".

--cache-pause-wait=<seconds>

Number of seconds the packet cache should have buffered before starting playback again if "buffering" was entered (default: 1). This can be used to control how long the player rebuffers if --cache-pause is enabled, and the demuxer underruns. If the given time is higher than the maximum set with --cache-secs or --demuxer-readahead-secs, or prefetching ends before that for some other reason (like file end or maximum configured cache size reached), playback resumes earlier.

--cache-pause-initial=<yes|no>

Enter "buffering" mode before starting playback (default: no). This can be used to ensure playback starts smoothly, in exchange for waiting some time to prefetch network data (as controlled by --cache-pause-wait). For example, some common behavior is that playback starts, but network caches immediately underrun when trying to decode more data as playback progresses.

Another thing that can happen is that the network prefetching is so CPU demanding (due to demuxing in the background) that playback drops frames at first. In these cases, it helps enabling this option, and setting --cache-secs and --cache-pause-wait to roughly the same value.

This option also triggers when playback is restarted after seeking.

--cache-unlink-files=<immediate|whendone|no>

Whether or when to unlink cache files (default: immediate). This affects cache files which are inherently temporary, and which make no sense to remain on disk after the player terminates. This is a debugging option.

immediate

Unlink cache file after they were created. The cache files won't be visible anymore, even though they're in use. This ensures they are guaranteed to be removed from disk when the player terminates, even if it crashes.

whendone

Delete cache files after they are closed.

no

Don't delete cache files. They will consume disk space without having a use.

Currently, this is used for --cache-on-disk only.

--stream-buffer-size=<bytesize>

Size of the low level stream byte buffer (default: 128KB). This is used as buffer between demuxer and low level I/O (e.g. sockets). Generally, this can be very small, and the main purpose is similar to the internal buffer FILE in the C standard library will have.

Half of the buffer is always used for guaranteed seek back, which is important for unseekable input.

There are known cases where this can help performance to set a large buffer:

1. mp4 files. libavformat may trigger many small seeks in both directions, depending on how the file was muxed.
2. Certain network filesystems, which do not have a cache, and where small reads can be inefficient.

In other cases, setting this to a large value can reduce performance.

Usually, read accesses are at half the buffer size, but it may happen that accesses are done alternating with smaller and larger sizes (this is due to the internal ring buffer wrap-around).

See --list-options for defaults and value range. <bytesize> options accept suffixes such as KiB and MiB.

Network

--user-agent=<string>

Use <string> as user agent for HTTP streaming.

--cookies, --no-cookies

Support cookies when making HTTP requests. Disabled by default.

--cookies-file=<filename>

Read HTTP cookies from <filename>. The file is assumed to be in Netscape format.

--http-header-fields=<field1,field2>

Set custom HTTP fields when accessing HTTP stream.

This is a string list option. See List Options for details.

Example

mpv --http-header-fields='Field1: value1','Field2: value2' \
http://localhost:1234

Will generate HTTP request:

GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: localhost:1234
User-Agent: MPlayer
Icy-MetaData: 1
Field1: value1
Field2: value2
Connection: close

--http-proxy=<proxy>

URL of the HTTP/HTTPS proxy. If this is set, the http_proxy environment is ignored. The no_proxy environment variable is still respected. This option is silently ignored if it does not start with http://. Proxies are not used for https URLs. Setting this option does not try to make the ytdl script use the proxy.

--tls-ca-file=<filename>

Certificate authority database file for use with TLS. (Silently fails with older FFmpeg or Libav versions.)

--tls-verify

Verify peer certificates when using TLS (e.g. with https://...). (Silently fails with older FFmpeg or Libav versions.)

--tls-cert-file

A file containing a certificate to use in the handshake with the peer.

--tls-key-file

A file containing the private key for the certificate.

--referrer=<string>

Specify a referrer path or URL for HTTP requests.

--network-timeout=<seconds>

Specify the network timeout in seconds (default: 60 seconds). This affects at least HTTP. The special value 0 uses the FFmpeg/Libav defaults. If a protocol is used which does not support timeouts, this option is silently ignored.

Warning

This breaks the RTSP protocol, because of inconsistent FFmpeg API regarding its internal timeout option. Not only does the RTSP timeout option accept different units (seconds instead of microseconds, causing mpv to pass it huge values), it will also overflow FFmpeg internal calculations. The worst is that merely setting the option will put RTSP into listening mode, which breaks any client uses. At time of this writing, the fix was not made effective yet. For this reason, this option is ignored (or should be ignored) on RTSP URLs. You can still set the timeout option directly with --demuxer-lavf-o.

--rtsp-transport=<lavf|udp|tcp|http>

Select RTSP transport method (default: tcp). This selects the underlying network transport when playing rtsp://... URLs. The value lavf leaves the decision to libavformat.

--hls-bitrate=<no|min|max|<rate>>

If HLS streams are played, this option controls what streams are selected by default. The option allows the following parameters:

no:	Don't do anything special. Typically, this will simply pick the first audio/video streams it can find.
min:	Pick the streams with the lowest bitrate.
max:	Same, but highest bitrate. (Default.)

Additionally, if the option is a number, the stream with the highest rate equal or below the option value is selected.

The bitrate as used is sent by the server, and there's no guarantee it's actually meaningful.

DVB

--dvbin-prog=<string>

This defines the program to tune to. Usually, you may specify this by using a stream URI like "dvb://ZDF HD", but you can tune to a different channel by writing to this property at runtime. Also see dvbin-channel-switch-offset for more useful channel switching functionality.

--dvbin-card=<0-15>

Specifies using card number 0-15 (default: 0).

--dvbin-file=<filename>

Instructs mpv to read the channels list from <filename>. The default is in the mpv configuration directory (usually ~/.config/mpv) with the filename channels.conf.{sat,ter,cbl,atsc} (based on your card type) or channels.conf as a last resort. For DVB-S/2 cards, a VDR 1.7.x format channel list is recommended as it allows tuning to DVB-S2 channels, enabling subtitles and decoding the PMT (which largely improves the demuxing). Classic mplayer format channel lists are still supported (without these improvements), and for other card types, only limited VDR format channel list support is implemented (patches welcome). For channels with dynamic PID switching or incomplete channels.conf, --dvbin-full-transponder or the magic PID 8192 are recommended.

--dvbin-timeout=<1-30>

Maximum number of seconds to wait when trying to tune a frequency before giving up (default: 30).

--dvbin-full-transponder=<yes|no>

Apply no filters on program PIDs, only tune to frequency and pass full transponder to demuxer. The player frontend selects the streams from the full TS in this case, so the program which is shown initially may not match the chosen channel. Switching between the programs is possible by cycling the program property. This is useful to record multiple programs on a single transponder, or to work around issues in the channels.conf. It is also recommended to use this for channels which switch PIDs on-the-fly, e.g. for regional news.

Default: no

--dvbin-channel-switch-offset=<integer>

This value is not meant for setting via configuration, but used in channel switching. An input.conf can cycle this value up and down to perform channel switching. This number effectively gives the offset to the initially tuned to channel in the channel list.

An example input.conf could contain: H cycle dvbin-channel-switch-offset up, K cycle dvbin-channel-switch-offset down

ALSA audio output options

--alsa-device=<device>

Deprecated, use --audio-device (requires alsa/ prefix).

--alsa-resample=yes

Enable ALSA resampling plugin. (This is disabled by default, because some drivers report incorrect audio delay in some cases.)

--alsa-mixer-device=<device>

Set the mixer device used with ao-volume (default: default).

--alsa-mixer-name=<name>

Set the name of the mixer element (default: Master). This is for example PCM or Master.

--alsa-mixer-index=<number>

Set the index of the mixer channel (default: 0). Consider the output of "amixer scontrols", then the index is the number that follows the name of the element.

--alsa-non-interleaved

Allow output of non-interleaved formats (if the audio decoder uses this format). Currently disabled by default, because some popular ALSA plugins are utterly broken with non-interleaved formats.

--alsa-ignore-chmap

Don't read or set the channel map of the ALSA device - only request the required number of channels, and then pass the audio as-is to it. This option most likely should not be used. It can be useful for debugging, or for static setups with a specially engineered ALSA configuration (in this case you should always force the same layout with --audio-channels, or it will work only for files which use the layout implicit to your ALSA device).

--alsa-buffer-time=<microseconds>

Set the requested buffer time in microseconds. A value of 0 skips requesting anything from the ALSA API. This and the --alsa-periods option uses the ALSA near functions to set the requested parameters. If doing so results in an empty configuration set, setting these parameters is skipped.

Both options control the buffer size. A low buffer size can lead to higher CPU usage and audio dropouts, while a high buffer size can lead to higher latency in volume changes and other filtering.

--alsa-periods=<number>

Number of periods requested from the ALSA API. See --alsa-buffer-time for further remarks.

GPU renderer options

The following video options are currently all specific to --vo=gpu and --vo=libmpv only, which are the only VOs that implement them.

--scale=<filter>

The filter function to use when upscaling video.

bilinear

Bilinear hardware texture filtering (fastest, very low quality). This is the default for compatibility reasons.

spline36

Mid quality and speed. This is the default when using gpu-hq.

lanczos

Lanczos scaling. Provides mid quality and speed. Generally worse than spline36, but it results in a slightly sharper image which is good for some content types. The number of taps can be controlled with scale-radius, but is best left unchanged.

(This filter is an alias for sinc-windowed sinc)

ewa_lanczos

Elliptic weighted average Lanczos scaling. Also known as Jinc. Relatively slow, but very good quality. The radius can be controlled with scale-radius. Increasing the radius makes the filter sharper but adds more ringing.

(This filter is an alias for jinc-windowed jinc)

ewa_lanczossharp

A slightly sharpened version of ewa_lanczos, preconfigured to use an ideal radius and parameter. If your hardware can run it, this is probably what you should use by default.

mitchell

Mitchell-Netravali. The B and C parameters can be set with --scale-param1 and --scale-param2. This filter is very good at downscaling (see --dscale).

oversample

A version of nearest neighbour that (naively) oversamples pixels, so that pixels overlapping edges get linearly interpolated instead of rounded. This essentially removes the small imperfections and judder artifacts caused by nearest-neighbour interpolation, in exchange for adding some blur. This filter is good at temporal interpolation, and also known as "smoothmotion" (see --tscale).

linear

A --tscale filter.

There are some more filters, but most are not as useful. For a complete list, pass help as value, e.g.:

mpv --scale=help

--cscale=<filter>

As --scale, but for interpolating chroma information. If the image is not subsampled, this option is ignored entirely.

--dscale=<filter>

Like --scale, but apply these filters on downscaling instead. If this option is unset, the filter implied by --scale will be applied.

--tscale=<filter>

The filter used for interpolating the temporal axis (frames). This is only used if --interpolation is enabled. The only valid choices for --tscale are separable convolution filters (use --tscale=help to get a list). The default is mitchell.

Common --tscale choices include oversample, linear, catmull_rom, mitchell, gaussian, or bicubic. These are listed in increasing order of smoothness/blurriness, with bicubic being the smoothest/blurriest and oversample being the sharpest/least smooth.

--scale-param1=<value>, --scale-param2=<value>, --cscale-param1=<value>, --cscale-param2=<value>, --dscale-param1=<value>, --dscale-param2=<value>, --tscale-param1=<value>, --tscale-param2=<value>

Set filter parameters. By default, these are set to the special string default, which maps to a scaler-specific default value. Ignored if the filter is not tunable. Currently, this affects the following filter parameters:

bcspline

Spline parameters (B and C). Defaults to 0.5 for both.

gaussian

Scale parameter (t). Increasing this makes the result blurrier. Defaults to 1.

oversample

Minimum distance to an edge before interpolation is used. Setting this to 0 will always interpolate edges, whereas setting it to 0.5 will never interpolate, thus behaving as if the regular nearest neighbour algorithm was used. Defaults to 0.0.

--scale-blur=<value>, --scale-wblur=<value>, --cscale-blur=<value>, --cscale-wblur=<value>, --dscale-blur=<value>, --dscale-wblur=<value>, --tscale-blur=<value>, --tscale-wblur=<value>

Kernel/window scaling factor (also known as a blur factor). Decreasing this makes the result sharper, increasing it makes it blurrier (default 0). If set to 0, the kernel's preferred blur factor is used. Note that setting this too low (eg. 0.5) leads to bad results. It's generally recommended to stick to values between 0.8 and 1.2.

--scale-clamp=<0.0-1.0>, --cscale-clamp, --dscale-clamp, --tscale-clamp

Specifies a weight bias to multiply into negative coefficients. Specifying --scale-clamp=1 has the effect of removing negative weights completely, thus effectively clamping the value range to [0-1]. Values between 0.0 and 1.0 can be specified to apply only a moderate diminishment of negative weights. This is especially useful for --tscale, where it reduces excessive ringing artifacts in the temporal domain (which typically manifest themselves as short flashes or fringes of black, mostly around moving edges) in exchange for potentially adding more blur. The default for --tscale-clamp is 1.0, the others default to 0.0.

--scale-cutoff=<value>, --cscale-cutoff=<value>, --dscale-cutoff=<value>

Cut off the filter kernel prematurely once the value range drops below this threshold. Doing so allows more aggressive pruning of skippable coefficients by disregarding parts of the LUT which are effectively zeroed out by the window function. Only affects polar (EWA) filters. The default is 0.001 for each, which is perceptually transparent but provides a 10%-20% speedup, depending on the exact radius and filter kernel chosen.

--scale-taper=<value>, --scale-wtaper=<value>, --dscale-taper=<value>, --dscale-wtaper=<value>, --cscale-taper=<value>, --cscale-wtaper=<value>, --tscale-taper=<value>, --tscale-wtaper=<value>

Kernel/window taper factor. Increasing this flattens the filter function. Value range is 0 to 1. A value of 0 (the default) means no flattening, a value of 1 makes the filter completely flat (equivalent to a box function). Values in between mean that some portion will be flat and the actual filter function will be squeezed into the space in between.

--scale-radius=<value>, --cscale-radius=<value>, --dscale-radius=<value>, --tscale-radius=<value>

Set radius for tunable filters, must be a float number between 0.5 and 16.0. Defaults to the filter's preferred radius if not specified. Doesn't work for every scaler and VO combination.

Note that depending on filter implementation details and video scaling ratio, the radius that actually being used might be different (most likely being increased a bit).

--scale-antiring=<value>, --cscale-antiring=<value>, --dscale-antiring=<value>, --tscale-antiring=<value>

Set the antiringing strength. This tries to eliminate ringing, but can introduce other artifacts in the process. Must be a float number between 0.0 and 1.0. The default value of 0.0 disables antiringing entirely.

Note that this doesn't affect the special filters bilinear and bicubic_fast, nor does it affect any polar (EWA) scalers.

--scale-window=<window>, --cscale-window=<window>, --dscale-window=<window>, --tscale-window=<window>

(Advanced users only) Choose a custom windowing function for the kernel. Defaults to the filter's preferred window if unset. Use --scale-window=help to get a list of supported windowing functions.

--scale-wparam=<window>, --cscale-wparam=<window>, --cscale-wparam=<window>, --tscale-wparam=<window>

(Advanced users only) Configure the parameter for the window function given by --scale-window etc. By default, these are set to the special string default, which maps to a window-specific default value. Ignored if the window is not tunable. Currently, this affects the following window parameters:

kaiser

Window parameter (alpha). Defaults to 6.33.

blackman

Window parameter (alpha). Defaults to 0.16.

gaussian

Scale parameter (t). Increasing this makes the window wider. Defaults to 1.

--scaler-lut-size=<4..10>

Set the size of the lookup texture for scaler kernels (default: 6). The actual size of the texture is 2^N for an option value of N. So the lookup texture with the default setting uses 64 samples.

All weights are linearly interpolated from those samples, so increasing the size of lookup table might improve the accuracy of scaler.

--scaler-resizes-only

Disable the scaler if the video image is not resized. In that case, bilinear is used instead of whatever is set with --scale. Bilinear will reproduce the source image perfectly if no scaling is performed. Enabled by default. Note that this option never affects --cscale.

--correct-downscaling

When using convolution based filters, extend the filter size when downscaling. Increases quality, but reduces performance while downscaling.

This will perform slightly sub-optimally for anamorphic video (but still better than without it) since it will extend the size to match only the milder of the scale factors between the axes.

--linear-downscaling

Scale in linear light when downscaling. It should only be used with a --fbo-format that has at least 16 bit precision. This option has no effect on HDR content.

--linear-upscaling

Scale in linear light when upscaling. Like --linear-downscaling, it should only be used with a --fbo-format that has at least 16 bits precisions. This is not usually recommended except for testing/specific purposes. Users are advised to either enable --sigmoid-upscaling or keep both options disabled (i.e. scaling in gamma light).

--sigmoid-upscaling

When upscaling, use a sigmoidal color transform to avoid emphasizing ringing artifacts. This is incompatible with and replaces --linear-upscaling. (Note that sigmoidization also requires linearization, so the LINEAR rendering step fires in both cases)

--sigmoid-center

The center of the sigmoid curve used for --sigmoid-upscaling, must be a float between 0.0 and 1.0. Defaults to 0.75 if not specified.

--sigmoid-slope

The slope of the sigmoid curve used for --sigmoid-upscaling, must be a float between 1.0 and 20.0. Defaults to 6.5 if not specified.

--interpolation

Reduce stuttering caused by mismatches in the video fps and display refresh rate (also known as judder).

Warning

This requires setting the --video-sync option to one of the display- modes, or it will be silently disabled. This was not required before mpv 0.14.0.

This essentially attempts to interpolate the missing frames by convoluting the video along the temporal axis. The filter used can be controlled using the --tscale setting.

--interpolation-threshold=<0..1,-1>

Threshold below which frame ratio interpolation gets disabled (default: 0.0001). This is calculated as abs(disphz/vfps - 1) < threshold, where vfps is the speed-adjusted video FPS, and disphz the display refresh rate. (The speed-adjusted video FPS is roughly equal to the normal video FPS, but with slowdown and speedup applied. This matters if you use --video-sync=display-resample to make video run synchronously to the display FPS, or if you change the speed property.)

The default is intended to almost always enable interpolation if the playback rate is even slightly different from the display refresh rate. But note that if you use e.g. --video-sync=display-vdrop, small deviations in the rate can disable interpolation and introduce a discontinuity every other minute.

Set this to -1 to disable this logic.

--opengl-pbo

Enable use of PBOs. On some drivers this can be faster, especially if the source video size is huge (e.g. so called "4K" video). On other drivers it might be slower or cause latency issues.

--dither-depth=<N|no|auto>

Set dither target depth to N. Default: no.

no

Disable any dithering done by mpv.

auto

Automatic selection. If output bit depth cannot be detected, 8 bits per component are assumed.

8

Dither to 8 bit output.

Note that the depth of the connected video display device cannot be detected. Often, LCD panels will do dithering on their own, which conflicts with this option and leads to ugly output.

--dither-size-fruit=<2-8>

Set the size of the dither matrix (default: 6). The actual size of the matrix is (2^N) x (2^N) for an option value of N, so a value of 6 gives a size of 64x64. The matrix is generated at startup time, and a large matrix can take rather long to compute (seconds).

Used in --dither=fruit mode only.

--dither=<fruit|ordered|error-diffusion|no>

Select dithering algorithm (default: fruit). (Normally, the --dither-depth option controls whether dithering is enabled.)

The error-diffusion option requires compute shader support. It also requires large amount of shared memory to run, the size of which depends on both the kernel (see --error-diffusion option below) and the height of video window. It will fallback to fruit dithering if there is no enough shared memory to run the shader.

--temporal-dither

Enable temporal dithering. (Only active if dithering is enabled in general.) This changes between 8 different dithering patterns on each frame by changing the orientation of the tiled dithering matrix. Unfortunately, this can lead to flicker on LCD displays, since these have a high reaction time.

--temporal-dither-period=<1-128>

Determines how often the dithering pattern is updated when --temporal-dither is in use. 1 (the default) will update on every video frame, 2 on every other frame, etc.

--error-diffusion=<kernel>

The error diffusion kernel to use when --dither=error-diffusion is set.

simple

Propagate error to only two adjacent pixels. Fastest but low quality.

sierra-lite

Fast with reasonable quality. This is the default.

floyd-steinberg

Most notable error diffusion kernel.

atkinson

Looks different from other kernels because only fraction of errors will be propagated during dithering. A typical use case of this kernel is saving dithered screenshot (in window mode). This kernel produces slightly smaller file, with still reasonable dithering quality.

There are other kernels (use --error-diffusion=help to list) but most of them are much slower and demanding even larger amount of shared memory. Among these kernels, burkes achieves a good balance between performance and quality, and probably is the one you want to try first.

--gpu-debug

Enables GPU debugging. What this means depends on the API type. For OpenGL, it calls glGetError(), and requests a debug context. For Vulkan, it enables validation layers.

--opengl-swapinterval=<n>

Interval in displayed frames between two buffer swaps. 1 is equivalent to enable VSYNC, 0 to disable VSYNC. Defaults to 1 if not specified.

Note that this depends on proper OpenGL vsync support. On some platforms and drivers, this only works reliably when in fullscreen mode. It may also require driver-specific hacks if using multiple monitors, to ensure mpv syncs to the right one. Compositing window managers can also lead to bad results, as can missing or incorrect display FPS information (see --override-display-fps).

--vulkan-swap-mode=<mode>

Controls the presentation mode of the vulkan swapchain. This is similar to the --opengl-swapinterval option.

auto

Use the preferred swapchain mode for the vulkan context. (Default)

fifo

Non-tearing, vsync blocked. Similar to "VSync on".

fifo-relaxed

Tearing, vsync blocked. Late frames will tear instead of stuttering.

mailbox

Non-tearing, not vsync blocked. Similar to "triple buffering".

immediate

Tearing, not vsync blocked. Similar to "VSync off".

--vulkan-queue-count=<1..8>

Controls the number of VkQueues used for rendering (limited by how many your device supports). In theory, using more queues could enable some parallelism between frames (when using a --swapchain-depth higher than 1), but it can also slow things down on hardware where there's no true parallelism between queues. (Default: 1)

--vulkan-async-transfer

Enables the use of async transfer queues on supported vulkan devices. Using them allows transfer operations like texture uploads and blits to happen concurrently with the actual rendering, thus improving overall throughput and power consumption. Enabled by default, and should be relatively safe.

--vulkan-async-compute

Enables the use of async compute queues on supported vulkan devices. Using this, in theory, allows out-of-order scheduling of compute shaders with graphics shaders, thus enabling the hardware to do more effective work while waiting for pipeline bubbles and memory operations. Not beneficial on all GPUs. It's worth noting that if async compute is enabled, and the device supports more compute queues than graphics queues (bound by the restrictions set by --vulkan-queue-count), mpv will internally try and prefer the use of compute shaders over fragment shaders wherever possible. Enabled by default, although Nvidia users may want to disable it.

--d3d11-warp=<yes|no|auto>

Use WARP (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) with the D3D11 GPU backend (default: auto). This is a high performance software renderer. By default, it is only used when the system has no hardware adapters that support D3D11. While the extended GPU features will work with WARP, they can be very slow.

--d3d11-feature-level=<12_1|12_0|11_1|11_0|10_1|10_0|9_3|9_2|9_1>

Select a specific feature level when using the D3D11 GPU backend. By default, the highest available feature level is used. This option can be used to select a lower feature level, which is mainly useful for debugging. Most extended GPU features will not work at 9_x feature levels.

--d3d11-flip=<yes|no>

Enable flip-model presentation, which avoids unnecessarily copying the backbuffer by sharing surfaces with the DWM (default: yes). This may cause performance issues with older drivers. If flip-model presentation is not supported (for example, on Windows 7 without the platform update), mpv will automatically fall back to the older bitblt presentation model.

--d3d11-sync-interval=<0..4>

Schedule each frame to be presented for this number of VBlank intervals. (default: 1) Setting to 1 will enable VSync, setting to 0 will disable it.

--d3d11-adapter=<adapter name|help>

Select a specific D3D11 adapter to utilize for D3D11 rendering. Will pick the default adapter if unset. Alternatives are listed when the name "help" is given.

Checks for matches based on the start of the string, case insensitive. Thus, if the description of the adapter starts with the vendor name, that can be utilized as the selection parameter.

Hardware decoders utilizing the D3D11 rendering abstraction's helper functionality to receive a device, such as D3D11VA or DXVA2's DXGI mode, will be affected by this choice.

--d3d11-output-format=<auto|rgba8|bgra8|rgb10_a2|rgba16f>

Select a specific D3D11 output format to utilize for D3D11 rendering. "auto" is the default, which will pick either rgba8 or rgb10_a2 depending on the configured desktop bit depth. rgba16f and bgra8 are left out of the autodetection logic, and are available for manual testing.

Note

Desktop bit depth querying is only available from an API available from Windows 10. Thus on older systems it will only automatically utilize the rgba8 output format.

--d3d11-output-csp=<auto|srgb|linear|pq|bt.2020>

Select a specific D3D11 output color space to utilize for D3D11 rendering. "auto" is the default, which will select the color space of the desktop on which the swap chain is located.

Values other than "srgb" and "pq" have had issues in testing, so they are mostly available for manual testing.

Note

Swap chain color space configuration is only available from an API available from Windows 10. Thus on older systems it will not work.

--d3d11va-zero-copy=<yes|no>

By default, when using hardware decoding with --gpu-api=d3d11, the video image will be copied (GPU-to-GPU) from the decoder surface to a shader resource. Set this option to avoid that copy by sampling directly from the decoder image. This may increase performance and reduce power usage, but can cause the image to be sampled incorrectly on the bottom and right edges due to padding, and may invoke driver bugs, since Direct3D 11 technically does not allow sampling from a decoder surface (though most drivers support it.)

Currently only relevant for --gpu-api=d3d11.

--wayland-frame-wait-offset=<-500..3000>

Control the amount of offset (in microseconds) to add to wayland's frame wait (default 1000). The wayland context assumes that if frame callback or presentation feedback isn't received within a certain amount of time then the video is being rendered offscreen. The time it waits is equal to how long it takes your monitor to display a frame (i.e. 1/refresh rate) plus the offset. In general, staying close to your monitor's refresh rate is preferred, but with a small offset in case a frame takes a little long to display.

--wayland-disable-vsync=<yes|no>

Disable vsync for the wayland contexts (default: no). Useful for benchmarking the wayland context when combined with video-sync=display-desync, --no-audio, and --untimed=yes. Only works with --gpu-context=wayland and --gpu-context=waylandvk.

--spirv-compiler=<compiler>

Controls which compiler is used to translate GLSL to SPIR-V. This is (currently) only relevant for --gpu-api=vulkan and --gpu-api=d3d11. The possible choices are currently only:

auto

Use the first available compiler. (Default)

shaderc

Use libshaderc, which is an API wrapper around glslang. This is generally the most preferred, if available.

Note

This option is deprecated, since there is only one reasonable value. It may be removed in the future.

--glsl-shader=<file>, --glsl-shaders=<file-list>

Custom GLSL hooks. These are a flexible way to add custom fragment shaders, which can be injected at almost arbitrary points in the rendering pipeline, and access all previous intermediate textures.

Each use of the --glsl-shader option will add another file to the internal list of shaders, while --glsl-shaders takes a list of files, and overwrites the internal list with it. The latter is a path list option (see List Options for details).

Warning

The syntax is not stable yet and may change any time.

The general syntax of a user shader looks like this:

//!METADATA ARGS...
//!METADATA ARGS...

vec4 hook() {
   ...
   return something;
}

//!METADATA ARGS...
//!METADATA ARGS...

...

Each section of metadata, along with the non-metadata lines after it, defines a single block. There are currently two types of blocks, HOOKs and TEXTUREs.

A TEXTURE block can set the following options:

TEXTURE <name> (required)

The name of this texture. Hooks can then bind the texture under this name using BIND. This must be the first option of the texture block.

SIZE <width> [<height>] [<depth>] (required)

The dimensions of the texture. The height and depth are optional. The type of texture (1D, 2D or 3D) depends on the number of components specified.

FORMAT <name> (required)

The texture format for the samples. Supported texture formats are listed in debug logging when the gpu VO is initialized (look for Texture formats:). Usually, this follows OpenGL naming conventions. For example, rgb16 provides 3 channels with normalized 16 bit components. One oddity are float formats: for example, rgba16f has 16 bit internal precision, but the texture data is provided as 32 bit floats, and the driver converts the data on texture upload.

Although format names follow a common naming convention, not all of them are available on all hardware, drivers, GL versions, and so on.

FILTER <LINEAR|NEAREST>

The min/magnification filter used when sampling from this texture.

BORDER <CLAMP|REPEAT|MIRROR>

The border wrapping mode used when sampling from this texture.

Following the metadata is a string of bytes in hexadecimal notation that define the raw texture data, corresponding to the format specified by FORMAT, on a single line with no extra whitespace.

A HOOK block can set the following options:

HOOK <name> (required)

The texture which to hook into. May occur multiple times within a metadata block, up to a predetermined limit. See below for a list of hookable textures.

DESC <title>

User-friendly description of the pass. This is the name used when representing this shader in the list of passes for property vo-passes.

BIND <name>

Loads a texture (either coming from mpv or from a TEXTURE block) and makes it available to the pass. When binding textures from mpv, this will also set up macros to facilitate accessing it properly. See below for a list. By default, no textures are bound. The special name HOOKED can be used to refer to the texture that triggered this pass.

SAVE <name>

Gives the name of the texture to save the result of this pass into. By default, this is set to the special name HOOKED which has the effect of overwriting the hooked texture.

WIDTH <szexpr>, HEIGHT <szexpr>

Specifies the size of the resulting texture for this pass. szexpr refers to an expression in RPN (reverse polish notation), using the operators + - * / > < !, floating point literals, and references to sizes of existing texture (such as MAIN.width or CHROMA.height), OUTPUT, or NATIVE_CROPPED (size of an input texture cropped after pan-and-scan, video-align-x/y, video-pan-x/y, etc. and possibly prescaled). By default, these are set to HOOKED.w and HOOKED.h, espectively.

WHEN <szexpr>

Specifies a condition that needs to be true (non-zero) for the shader stage to be evaluated. If it fails, it will silently be omitted. (Note that a shader stage like this which has a dependency on an optional hook point can still cause that hook point to be saved, which has some minor overhead)

OFFSET <ox oy | ALIGN>

Indicates a pixel shift (offset) introduced by this pass. These pixel offsets will be accumulated and corrected during the next scaling pass (cscale or scale). The default values are 0 0 which correspond to no shift. Note that offsets are ignored when not overwriting the hooked texture.

A special value of ALIGN will attempt to fix existing offset of HOOKED by align it with reference. It requires HOOKED to be resizable (see below). It works transparently with fragment shader. For compute shader, the predefined texmap macro is required to handle coordinate mapping.

COMPONENTS <n>

Specifies how many components of this pass's output are relevant and should be stored in the texture, up to 4 (rgba). By default, this value is equal to the number of components in HOOKED.

COMPUTE <bw> <bh> [<tw> <th>]

Specifies that this shader should be treated as a compute shader, with the block size bw and bh. The compute shader will be dispatched with however many blocks are necessary to completely tile over the output. Within each block, there will bw tw*th threads, forming a single work group. In other words: tw and th specify the work group size, which can be different from the block size. So for example, a compute shader with bw, bh = 32 and tw, th = 8 running on a 500x500 texture would dispatch 16x16 blocks (rounded up), each with 8x8 threads.

Compute shaders in mpv are treated a bit different from fragment shaders. Instead of defining a vec4 hook that produces an output sample, you directly define void hook which writes to a fixed writeonly image unit named out_image (this is bound by mpv) using imageStore. To help translate texture coordinates in the absence of vertices, mpv provides a special function NAME_map(id) to map from the texel space of the output image to the texture coordinates for all bound textures. In particular, NAME_pos is equivalent to NAME_map(gl_GlobalInvocationID), although using this only really makes sense if (tw,th) == (bw,bh).

Each bound mpv texture (via BIND) will make available the following definitions to that shader pass, where NAME is the name of the bound texture:

vec4 NAME_tex(vec2 pos)

The sampling function to use to access the texture at a certain spot (in texture coordinate space, range [0,1]). This takes care of any necessary normalization conversions.

vec4 NAME_texOff(vec2 offset)

Sample the texture at a certain offset in pixels. This works like NAME_tex but additionally takes care of necessary rotations, so that sampling at e.g. vec2(-1,0) is always one pixel to the left.

vec2 NAME_pos

The local texture coordinate of that texture, range [0,1].

vec2 NAME_size

The (rotated) size in pixels of the texture.

mat2 NAME_rot

The rotation matrix associated with this texture. (Rotates pixel space to texture coordinates)

vec2 NAME_pt

The (unrotated) size of a single pixel, range [0,1].

float NAME_mul

The coefficient that needs to be multiplied into the texture contents in order to normalize it to the range [0,1].

sampler NAME_raw

The raw bound texture itself. The use of this should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

Normally, users should use either NAME_tex or NAME_texOff to read from the texture. For some shaders however , it can be better for performance to do custom sampling from NAME_raw, in which case care needs to be taken to respect NAME_mul and NAME_rot.

In addition to these parameters, the following uniforms are also globally available:

float random

A random number in the range [0-1], different per frame.

int frame

A simple count of frames rendered, increases by one per frame and never resets (regardless of seeks).

vec2 input_size

The size in pixels of the input image (possibly cropped and prescaled).

vec2 target_size

The size in pixels of the visible part of the scaled (and possibly cropped) image.

vec2 tex_offset

Texture offset introduced by user shaders or options like panscan, video-align-x/y, video-pan-x/y.

Internally, vo_gpu may generate any number of the following textures. Whenever a texture is rendered and saved by vo_gpu, all of the passes that have hooked into it will run, in the order they were added by the user. This is a list of the legal hook points:

RGB, LUMA, CHROMA, ALPHA, XYZ (resizable)

Source planes (raw). Which of these fire depends on the image format of the source.

CHROMA_SCALED, ALPHA_SCALED (fixed)

Source planes (upscaled). These only fire on subsampled content.

NATIVE (resizable)

The combined image, in the source colorspace, before conversion to RGB.

MAINPRESUB (resizable)

The image, after conversion to RGB, but before --blend-subtitles=video is applied.

MAIN (resizable)

The main image, after conversion to RGB but before upscaling.

LINEAR (fixed)

Linear light image, before scaling. This only fires when --linear-upscaling, --linear-downscaling or --sigmoid-upscaling is in effect.

SIGMOID (fixed)

Sigmoidized light, before scaling. This only fires when --sigmoid-upscaling is in effect.

PREKERNEL (fixed)

The image immediately before the scaler kernel runs.

POSTKERNEL (fixed)

The image immediately after the scaler kernel runs.

SCALED (fixed)

The final upscaled image, before color management.

OUTPUT (fixed)

The final output image, after color management but before dithering and drawing to screen.

Only the textures labelled with resizable may be transformed by the pass. When overwriting a texture marked fixed, the WIDTH, HEIGHT and OFFSET must be left at their default values.

--glsl-shader=<file>

CLI/config file only alias for --glsl-shaders-append.

--deband

Enable the debanding algorithm. This greatly reduces the amount of visible banding, blocking and other quantization artifacts, at the expense of very slightly blurring some of the finest details. In practice, it's virtually always an improvement - the only reason to disable it would be for performance.

--deband-iterations=<1..16>

The number of debanding steps to perform per sample. Each step reduces a bit more banding, but takes time to compute. Note that the strength of each step falls off very quickly, so high numbers (>4) are practically useless. (Default 1)

--deband-threshold=<0..4096>

The debanding filter's cut-off threshold. Higher numbers increase the debanding strength dramatically but progressively diminish image details. (Default 64)

--deband-range=<1..64>

The debanding filter's initial radius. The radius increases linearly for each iteration. A higher radius will find more gradients, but a lower radius will smooth more aggressively. (Default 16)

If you increase the --deband-iterations, you should probably decrease this to compensate.

--deband-grain=<0..4096>

Add some extra noise to the image. This significantly helps cover up remaining quantization artifacts. Higher numbers add more noise. (Default 48)

--sharpen=<value>

If set to a value other than 0, enable an unsharp masking filter. Positive values will sharpen the image (but add more ringing and aliasing). Negative values will blur the image. If your GPU is powerful enough, consider alternatives like the ewa_lanczossharp scale filter, or the --scale-blur option.

--opengl-glfinish

Call glFinish() before swapping buffers (default: disabled). Slower, but might improve results when doing framedropping. Can completely ruin performance. The details depend entirely on the OpenGL driver.

--opengl-waitvsync

Call glXWaitVideoSyncSGI after each buffer swap (default: disabled). This may or may not help with video timing accuracy and frame drop. It's possible that this makes video output slower, or has no effect at all.

X11/GLX only.

--opengl-dwmflush=<no|windowed|yes|auto>

Calls DwmFlush after swapping buffers on Windows (default: auto). It also sets SwapInterval(0) to ignore the OpenGL timing. Values are: no (disabled), windowed (only in windowed mode), yes (also in full screen).

The value auto will try to determine whether the compositor is active, and calls DwmFlush only if it seems to be.

This may help to get more consistent frame intervals, especially with high-fps clips - which might also reduce dropped frames. Typically, a value of windowed should be enough, since full screen may bypass the DWM.

Windows only.

--angle-d3d11-feature-level=<11_0|10_1|10_0|9_3>

Selects a specific feature level when using the ANGLE backend with D3D11. By default, the highest available feature level is used. This option can be used to select a lower feature level, which is mainly useful for debugging. Note that OpenGL ES 3.0 is only supported at feature level 10_1 or higher. Most extended OpenGL features will not work at lower feature levels (similar to --gpu-dumb-mode).

Windows with ANGLE only.

--angle-d3d11-warp=<yes|no|auto>

Use WARP (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) when using the ANGLE backend with D3D11 (default: auto). This is a high performance software renderer. By default, it is used when the Direct3D hardware does not support Direct3D 11 feature level 9_3. While the extended OpenGL features will work with WARP, they can be very slow.

Windows with ANGLE only.

--angle-egl-windowing=<yes|no|auto>

Use ANGLE's built in EGL windowing functions to create a swap chain (default: auto). If this is set to no and the D3D11 renderer is in use, ANGLE's built in swap chain will not be used and a custom swap chain that is optimized for video rendering will be created instead. If set to auto, a custom swap chain will be used for D3D11 and the built in swap chain will be used for D3D9. This option is mainly for debugging purposes, in case the custom swap chain has poor performance or does not work.

If set to yes, the --angle-max-frame-latency, --angle-swapchain-length and --angle-flip options will have no effect.

Windows with ANGLE only.

--angle-flip=<yes|no>

Enable flip-model presentation, which avoids unnecessarily copying the backbuffer by sharing surfaces with the DWM (default: yes). This may cause performance issues with older drivers. If flip-model presentation is not supported (for example, on Windows 7 without the platform update), mpv will automatically fall back to the older bitblt presentation model.

If set to no, the --angle-swapchain-length option will have no effect.

Windows with ANGLE only.

--angle-renderer=<d3d9|d3d11|auto>

Forces a specific renderer when using the ANGLE backend (default: auto). In auto mode this will pick D3D11 for systems that support Direct3D 11 feature level 9_3 or higher, and D3D9 otherwise. This option is mainly for debugging purposes. Normally there is no reason to force a specific renderer, though --angle-renderer=d3d9 may give slightly better performance on old hardware. Note that the D3D9 renderer only supports OpenGL ES 2.0, so most extended OpenGL features will not work if this renderer is selected (similar to --gpu-dumb-mode).

Windows with ANGLE only.

--cocoa-force-dedicated-gpu=<yes|no>

Deactivates the automatic graphics switching and forces the dedicated GPU. (default: no)

OS X only.

--cocoa-cb-sw-renderer=<yes|no|auto>

Use the Apple Software Renderer when using cocoa-cb (default: auto). If set to no the software renderer is never used and instead fails when a the usual pixel format could not be created, yes will always only use the software renderer, and auto only falls back to the software renderer when the usual pixel format couldn't be created.

OS X only.

--cocoa-cb-10bit-context=<yes|no>

Creates a 10bit capable pixel format for the context creation (default: yes). Instead of 8bit integer framebuffer a 16bit half-float framebuffer is requested.

OS X only.

--macos-title-bar-appearance=<appearance>

Sets the appearance of the title bar (default: auto). Not all combinations of appearances and --macos-title-bar-material materials make sense or are unique. Appearances that are not supported by you current macOS version fall back to the default value. macOS and cocoa-cb only

<appearance> can be one of the following:

auto:	Detects the system settings and sets the title bar appearance appropriately. On macOS 10.14 it also detects run time changes.
aqua:	The standard macOS Light appearance.
darkAqua:	The standard macOS Dark appearance. (macOS 10.14+)
vibrantLight:	Light vibrancy appearance with.
vibrantDark:	Dark vibrancy appearance with.
aquaHighContrast:
	Light Accessibility appearance. (macOS 10.14+)
darkAquaHighContrast:
	Dark Accessibility appearance. (macOS 10.14+)
vibrantLightHighContrast:
	Light vibrancy Accessibility appearance. (macOS 10.14+)
vibrantDarkHighContrast:
	Dark vibrancy Accessibility appearance. (macOS 10.14+)

--macos-title-bar-material=<material>

Sets the material of the title bar (default: titlebar). All deprecated materials should not be used on macOS 10.14+ because their functionality is not guaranteed. Not all combinations of materials and --macos-title-bar-appearance appearances make sense or are unique. Materials that are not supported by you current macOS version fall back to the default value. macOS and cocoa-cb only

<material> can be one of the following:

titlebar:	The standard macOS titel bar material.
selection:	The standard macOS selection material.
menu:	The standard macOS menu material. (macOS 10.11+)
popover:	The standard macOS popover material. (macOS 10.11+)
sidebar:	The standard macOS sidebar material. (macOS 10.11+)
headerView:	The standard macOS header view material. (macOS 10.14+)
sheet:	The standard macOS sheet material. (macOS 10.14+)
windowBackground:
	The standard macOS window background material. (macOS 10.14+)
hudWindow:	The standard macOS hudWindow material. (macOS 10.14+)
fullScreen:	The standard macOS full screen material. (macOS 10.14+)
toolTip:	The standard macOS tool tip material. (macOS 10.14+)
contentBackground:
	The standard macOS content background material. (macOS 10.14+)
underWindowBackground:
	The standard macOS under window background material. (macOS 10.14+)
underPageBackground:
	The standard macOS under page background material. (deprecated in macOS 10.14+)
dark:	The standard macOS dark material. (deprecated in macOS 10.14+)
light:	The standard macOS light material. (macOS 10.14+)
mediumLight:	The standard macOS mediumLight material. (macOS 10.11+, deprecated in macOS 10.14+)
ultraDark:	The standard macOS ultraDark material. (macOS 10.11+ deprecated in macOS 10.14+)

--macos-title-bar-color=<color>

Sets the color of the title bar (default: completely transparent). Is influenced by --macos-title-bar-appearance and --macos-title-bar-material. See --sub-color for color syntax.

--macos-fs-animation-duration=<default|0-1000>

Sets the fullscreen resize animation duration in ms (default: default). The default value is slightly less than the system's animation duration (500ms) to prevent some problems when the end of an async animation happens at the same time as the end of the system wide fullscreen animation. Setting anything higher than 500ms will only prematurely cancel the resize animation after the system wide animation ended. The upper limit is still set at 1000ms since it's possible that Apple or the user changes the system defaults. Anything higher than 1000ms though seems too long and shouldn't be set anyway. OS X and cocoa-cb only

--android-surface-size=<WxH>

Set dimensions of the rendering surface used by the Android gpu context. Needs to be set by the embedding application if the dimensions change during runtime (i.e. if the device is rotated), via the surfaceChanged callback.

Android with --gpu-context=android only.

--gpu-sw

Continue even if a software renderer is detected.

--gpu-context=<sys>

The value auto (the default) selects the GPU context. You can also pass help to get a complete list of compiled in backends (sorted by autoprobe order).

auto

auto-select (default)

cocoa

Cocoa/OS X (deprecated, use --vo=libmpv instead)

win

Win32/WGL

winvk

VK_KHR_win32_surface

angle

Direct3D11 through the OpenGL ES translation layer ANGLE. This supports almost everything the win backend does (if the ANGLE build is new enough).

dxinterop (experimental)

Win32, using WGL for rendering and Direct3D 9Ex for presentation. Works on Nvidia and AMD. Newer Intel chips with the latest drivers may also work.

d3d11

Win32, with native Direct3D 11 rendering.

x11

X11/GLX

x11vk

VK_KHR_xlib_surface

wayland

Wayland/EGL

waylandvk

VK_KHR_wayland_surface

drm

DRM/EGL

x11egl

X11/EGL

android

Android/EGL. Requires --wid be set to an android.view.Surface.

--gpu-api=<type>

Controls which type of graphics APIs will be accepted:

auto

Use any available API (default)

opengl

Allow only OpenGL (requires OpenGL 2.1+ or GLES 2.0+)

vulkan

Allow only Vulkan (requires a valid/working --spirv-compiler)

d3d11

Allow only --gpu-context=d3d11

--opengl-es=<mode>

Controls which type of OpenGL context will be accepted:

auto

Allow all types of OpenGL (default)

yes

Only allow GLES

no

Only allow desktop/core GL

--opengl-restrict=<version>

Restricts all OpenGL versions above a certain version. Versions are encoded in hundreds, i.e. OpenGL 4.5 -> 450. As an example, --opengl-restrict=300 would restrict OpenGL 3.0 and higher, effectively only allowing 2.x contexts. Note that this only imposes a limit on context creation APIs, the actual OpenGL context may still have a higher OpenGL version. (Default: 0)

--fbo-format=<fmt>

Selects the internal format of textures used for FBOs. The format can influence performance and quality of the video output. fmt can be one of: rgb8, rgb10, rgb10_a2, rgb16, rgb16f, rgb32f, rgba12, rgba16, rgba16f, rgba16hf, rgba32f.

Default: auto, which first attempts to utilize 16bit float (rgba16f, rgba16hf), and falls back to rgba16 if those are not available. Finally, attempts to utilize rgb10_a2 or rgba8 if all of the previous formats are not available.

--gamma-factor=<0.1..2.0>

Set an additional raw gamma factor (default: 1.0). If gamma is adjusted in other ways (like with the --gamma option or key bindings and the gamma property), the value is multiplied with the other gamma value.

Recommended values based on the environmental brightness:

1.0

Pitch black or dimly lit room (default)

1.1

Moderately lit room, home

1.2

Brightly illuminated room, office

NOTE: This is based around the assumptions of typical movie content, which contains an implicit end-to-end of about 0.8 from scene to display. For bright environments it can be useful to cancel that out.

--gamma-auto

Automatically corrects the gamma value depending on ambient lighting conditions (adding a gamma boost for bright rooms).

With ambient illuminance of 16 lux, mpv will pick the 1.0 gamma value (no boost), and slightly increase the boost up until 1.2 for 256 lux.

NOTE: Only implemented on OS X.

--target-prim=<value>

Specifies the primaries of the display. Video colors will be adapted to this colorspace when ICC color management is not being used. Valid values are:

auto

Disable any adaptation, except for atypical color spaces. Specifically, wide/unusual gamuts get automatically adapted to BT.709, while standard gamut (i.e. BT.601 and BT.709) content is not touched. (default)

bt.470m

ITU-R BT.470 M

bt.601-525

ITU-R BT.601 (525-line SD systems, eg. NTSC), SMPTE 170M/240M

bt.601-625

ITU-R BT.601 (625-line SD systems, eg. PAL/SECAM), ITU-R BT.470 B/G

bt.709

ITU-R BT.709 (HD), IEC 61966-2-4 (sRGB), SMPTE RP177 Annex B

bt.2020

ITU-R BT.2020 (UHD)

apple

Apple RGB

adobe

Adobe RGB (1998)

prophoto

ProPhoto RGB (ROMM)

cie1931

CIE 1931 RGB (not to be confused with CIE XYZ)

dci-p3

DCI-P3 (Digital Cinema Colorspace), SMPTE RP431-2

v-gamut

Panasonic V-Gamut (VARICAM) primaries

s-gamut

Sony S-Gamut (S-Log) primaries

--target-trc=<value>

Specifies the transfer characteristics (gamma) of the display. Video colors will be adjusted to this curve when ICC color management is not being used. Valid values are:

auto

Disable any adaptation, except for atypical transfers. Specifically, HDR or linear light source material gets automatically converted to gamma 2.2, while SDR content is not touched. (default)

bt.1886

ITU-R BT.1886 curve (assuming infinite contrast)

srgb

IEC 61966-2-4 (sRGB)

linear

Linear light output

gamma1.8

Pure power curve (gamma 1.8), also used for Apple RGB

gamma2.0

Pure power curve (gamma 2.0)

gamma2.2

Pure power curve (gamma 2.2)

gamma2.4

Pure power curve (gamma 2.4)

gamma2.6

Pure power curve (gamma 2.6)

gamma2.8

Pure power curve (gamma 2.8), also used for BT.470-BG

prophoto

ProPhoto RGB (ROMM)

pq

ITU-R BT.2100 PQ (Perceptual quantizer) curve, aka SMPTE ST2084

hlg

ITU-R BT.2100 HLG (Hybrid Log-gamma) curve, aka ARIB STD-B67

v-log

Panasonic V-Log (VARICAM) curve

s-log1

Sony S-Log1 curve

s-log2

Sony S-Log2 curve

Note

When using HDR output formats, mpv will encode to the specified curve but it will not set any HDMI flags or other signalling that might be required for the target device to correctly display the HDR signal. The user should independently guarantee this before using these signal formats for display.

--target-peak=<auto|nits>

Specifies the measured peak brightness of the output display, in cd/m^2 (AKA nits). The interpretation of this brightness depends on the configured --target-trc. In all cases, it imposes a limit on the signal values that will be sent to the display. If the source exceeds this brightness level, a tone mapping filter will be inserted. For HLG, it has the additional effect of parametrizing the inverse OOTF, in order to get colorimetrically consistent results with the mastering display. For SDR, or when using an ICC (profile (--icc-profile), setting this to a value above 100 essentially causes the display to be treated as if it were an HDR display in disguise. (See the note below)

In auto mode (the default), the chosen peak is an appropriate value based on the TRC in use. For SDR curves, it uses 100. For HDR curves, it uses 100 * the transfer function's nominal peak.

Note

When using an SDR transfer function, this is normally not needed, and setting it may lead to very unexpected results. The one time it is useful is if you want to calibrate a HDR display using traditional transfer functions and calibration equipment. In such cases, you can set your HDR display to a high brightness such as 800 cd/m^2, and then calibrate it to a standard curve like gamma2.8. Setting this value to 800 would then instruct mpv to essentially treat it as an HDR display with the given peak. This may be a good alternative in environments where PQ or HLG input to the display is not possible, and makes it possible to use HDR displays with mpv regardless of operating system support for HDMI HDR metadata.

In such a configuration, we highly recommend setting --tone-mapping to mobius or even clip.

--tone-mapping=<value>

Specifies the algorithm used for tone-mapping images onto the target display. This is relevant for both HDR->SDR conversion as well as gamut reduction (e.g. playing back BT.2020 content on a standard gamut display). Valid values are:

clip

Hard-clip any out-of-range values. Use this when you care about perfect color accuracy for in-range values at the cost of completely distorting out-of-range values. Not generally recommended.

mobius

Generalization of Reinhard to a Möbius transform with linear section. Smoothly maps out-of-range values while retaining contrast and colors for in-range material as much as possible. Use this when you care about color accuracy more than detail preservation. This is somewhere in between clip and reinhard, depending on the value of --tone-mapping-param.

reinhard

Reinhard tone mapping algorithm. Very simple continuous curve. Preserves overall image brightness but uses nonlinear contrast, which results in flattening of details and degradation in color accuracy.

hable

Similar to reinhard but preserves both dark and bright details better (slightly sigmoidal), at the cost of slightly darkening / desaturating everything. Developed by John Hable for use in video games. Use this when you care about detail preservation more than color/brightness accuracy. This is roughly equivalent to --tone-mapping=reinhard --tone-mapping-param=0.24. If possible, you should also enable --hdr-compute-peak for the best results. (Default)

gamma

Fits a logarithmic transfer between the tone curves.

linear

Linearly stretches the entire reference gamut to (a linear multiple of) the display.

--tone-mapping-param=<value>

Set tone mapping parameters. By default, this is set to the special string default, which maps to an algorithm-specific default value. Ignored if the tone mapping algorithm is not tunable. This affects the following tone mapping algorithms:

clip

Specifies an extra linear coefficient to multiply into the signal before clipping. Defaults to 1.0.

mobius

Specifies the transition point from linear to mobius transform. Every value below this point is guaranteed to be mapped 1:1. The higher the value, the more accurate the result will be, at the cost of losing bright details. Defaults to 0.3, which due to the steep initial slope still preserves in-range colors fairly accurately.

reinhard

Specifies the local contrast coefficient at the display peak. Defaults to 0.5, which means that in-gamut values will be about half as bright as when clipping.

gamma

Specifies the exponent of the function. Defaults to 1.8.

linear

Specifies the scale factor to use while stretching. Defaults to 1.0.

--tone-mapping-max-boost=<1.0..10.0>

Upper limit for how much the tone mapping algorithm is allowed to boost the average brightness by over-exposing the image. The default value of 1.0 allows no additional brightness boost. A value of 2.0 would allow over-exposing by a factor of 2, and so on. Raising this setting can help reveal details that would otherwise be hidden in dark scenes, but raising it too high will make dark scenes appear unnaturally bright.

--hdr-compute-peak=<auto|yes|no>

Compute the HDR peak and frame average brightness per-frame instead of relying on tagged metadata. These values are averaged over local regions as well as over several frames to prevent the value from jittering around too much. This option basically gives you dynamic, per-scene tone mapping. Requires compute shaders, which is a fairly recent OpenGL feature, and will probably also perform horribly on some drivers, so enable at your own risk. The special value auto (default) will enable HDR peak computation automatically if compute shaders and SSBOs are supported.

--hdr-peak-decay-rate=<1.0..1000.0>

The decay rate used for the HDR peak detection algorithm (default: 100.0). This is only relevant when --hdr-compute-peak is enabled. Higher values make the peak decay more slowly, leading to more stable values at the cost of more "eye adaptation"-like effects (although this is mitigated somewhat by --hdr-scene-threshold). A value of 1.0 (the lowest possible) disables all averaging, meaning each frame's value is used directly as measured, but doing this is not recommended for "noisy" sources since it may lead to excessive flicker. (In signal theory terms, this controls the time constant "tau" of an IIR low pass filter)

--hdr-scene-threshold-low=<0.0..100.0>, --hdr-scene-threshold-high=<0.0..100.0>

The lower and upper thresholds (in dB) for a brightness difference to be considered a scene change (default: 5.5 low, 10.0 high). This is only relevant when --hdr-compute-peak is enabled. Normally, small fluctuations in the frame brightness are compensated for by the peak averaging mechanism, but for large jumps in the brightness this can result in the frame remaining too bright or too dark for up to several seconds, depending on the value of --hdr-peak-decay-rate. To counteract this, when the brightness between the running average and the current frame exceeds the low threshold, mpv will make the averaging filter more aggressive, up to the limit of the high threshold (at which point the filter becomes instant).

--tone-mapping-desaturate=<0.0..1.0>

Apply desaturation for highlights (default: 0.75). The parameter controls the strength of the desaturation curve. A value of 0.0 completely disables it, while a value of 1.0 means that overly bright colors will tend towards white. (This is not always the case, especially not for highlights that are near primary colors)

Values in between apply progressively more/less aggressive desaturation. This setting helps prevent unnaturally oversaturated colors for super-highlights, by (smoothly) turning them into less saturated (per channel tone mapped) colors instead. This makes images feel more natural, at the cost of chromatic distortions for out-of-range colors. The default value of 0.75 provides a good balance. Setting this to 0.0 preserves the chromatic accuracy of the tone mapping process.

--tone-mapping-desaturate-exponent=<0.0..20.0>

This setting controls the exponent of the desaturation curve, which controls how bright a color needs to be in order to start being desaturated. The default of 1.5 provides a reasonable balance. Decreasing this exponent makes the curve more aggressive.

--gamut-warning

If enabled, mpv will mark all clipped/out-of-gamut pixels that exceed a given threshold (currently hard-coded to 101%). The affected pixels will be inverted to make them stand out. Note: This option applies after the effects of all of mpv's color space transformation / tone mapping options, so it's a good idea to combine this with --tone-mapping=clip and use --target-prim to set the gamut to simulate. For example, --target-prim=bt.709 would make mpv highlight all pixels that exceed the gamut of a standard gamut (sRGB) display. This option also does not work well with ICC profiles, since the 3DLUTs are always generated against the source color space and have chromatically-accurate clipping built in.

--use-embedded-icc-profile

Load the embedded ICC profile contained in media files such as PNG images. (Default: yes). Note that this option only works when also using a display ICC profile (--icc-profile or --icc-profile-auto), and also requires LittleCMS 2 support.

--icc-profile=<file>

Load an ICC profile and use it to transform video RGB to screen output. Needs LittleCMS 2 support compiled in. This option overrides the --target-prim, --target-trc and --icc-profile-auto options.

--icc-profile-auto

Automatically select the ICC display profile currently specified by the display settings of the operating system.

NOTE: On Windows, the default profile must be an ICC profile. WCS profiles are not supported.

Applications using libmpv with the render API need to provide the ICC profile via MPV_RENDER_PARAM_ICC_PROFILE.

--icc-cache-dir=<dirname>

Store and load the 3D LUTs created from the ICC profile in this directory. This can be used to speed up loading, since LittleCMS 2 can take a while to create a 3D LUT. Note that these files contain uncompressed LUTs. Their size depends on the --icc-3dlut-size, and can be very big.

NOTE: This is not cleaned automatically, so old, unused cache files may stick around indefinitely.

--icc-intent=<value>

Specifies the ICC intent used for the color transformation (when using --icc-profile).

0

perceptual

1

relative colorimetric (default)

2

saturation

3

absolute colorimetric

--icc-3dlut-size=<r>x<g>x<b>

Size of the 3D LUT generated from the ICC profile in each dimension. Default is 64x64x64. Sizes may range from 2 to 512.

--icc-contrast=<0-1000000|inf>

Specifies an upper limit on the target device's contrast ratio. This is detected automatically from the profile if possible, but for some profiles it might be missing, causing the contrast to be assumed as infinite. As a result, video may appear darker than intended. This only affects BT.1886 content. The default of 0 means no limit if the detected contrast is less than 100000, and limits to 1000 otherwise. Use --icc-contrast=inf to preserve the infinite contrast (most likely when using OLED displays).

--blend-subtitles=<yes|video|no>

Blend subtitles directly onto upscaled video frames, before interpolation and/or color management (default: no). Enabling this causes subtitles to be affected by --icc-profile, --target-prim, --target-trc, --interpolation, --gamma-factor and --glsl-shaders. It also increases subtitle performance when using --interpolation.

The downside of enabling this is that it restricts subtitles to the visible portion of the video, so you can't have subtitles exist in the black margins below a video (for example).

If video is selected, the behavior is similar to yes, but subs are drawn at the video's native resolution, and scaled along with the video.

Warning

This changes the way subtitle colors are handled. Normally, subtitle colors are assumed to be in sRGB and color managed as such. Enabling this makes them treated as being in the video's color space instead. This is good if you want things like softsubbed ASS signs to match the video colors, but may cause SRT subtitles or similar to look slightly off.

--alpha=<blend-tiles|blend|yes|no>

Decides what to do if the input has an alpha component.

blend-tiles

Blend the frame against a 16x16 gray/white tiles background (default).

blend

Blend the frame against the background color (--background, normally black).

yes

Try to create a framebuffer with alpha component. This only makes sense if the video contains alpha information (which is extremely rare). May not be supported on all platforms. If alpha framebuffers are unavailable, it silently falls back on a normal framebuffer. Note that if you set the --fbo-format option to a non-default value, a format with alpha must be specified, or this won't work. This does not work on X11 with EGL and Mesa (freedesktop bug 67676).

no

Ignore alpha component.

--opengl-rectangle-textures

Force use of rectangle textures (default: no). Normally this shouldn't have any advantages over normal textures. Note that hardware decoding overrides this flag. Could be removed any time.

--background=<color>

Color used to draw parts of the mpv window not covered by video. See --osd-color option how colors are defined.

--gpu-tex-pad-x, --gpu-tex-pad-y

Enlarge the video source textures by this many pixels. For debugging only (normally textures are sized exactly, but due to hardware decoding interop we may have to deal with additional padding, which can be tested with these options). Could be removed any time.

--opengl-early-flush=<yes|no|auto>

Call glFlush() after rendering a frame and before attempting to display it (default: auto). Can fix stuttering in some cases, in other cases probably causes it. The auto mode will call glFlush() only if the renderer is going to wait for a while after rendering, instead of flipping GL front and backbuffers immediately (i.e. it doesn't call it in display-sync mode).

On OSX this is always deactivated because it only causes performance problems and other regressions.

--gpu-dumb-mode=<yes|no|auto>

This mode is extremely restricted, and will disable most extended features. That includes high quality scalers and custom shaders!

It is intended for hardware that does not support FBOs (including GLES, which supports it insufficiently), or to get some more performance out of bad or old hardware.

This mode is forced automatically if needed, and this option is mostly useful for debugging. The default of auto will enable it automatically if nothing uses features which require FBOs.

This option might be silently removed in the future.

--gpu-shader-cache-dir=<dirname>

Store and load compiled GLSL shaders in this directory. Normally, shader compilation is very fast, so this is usually not needed. It mostly matters for GPU APIs that require internally recompiling shaders to other languages, for example anything based on ANGLE or Vulkan. Enabling this can improve startup performance on these platforms.

NOTE: This is not cleaned automatically, so old, unused cache files may stick around indefinitely.

Miscellaneous

--display-tags=tag1,tags2,...

Set the list of tags that should be displayed on the terminal. Tags that are in the list, but are not present in the played file, will not be shown. If a value ends with *, all tags are matched by prefix (though there is no general globbing). Just passing * essentially filtering.

The default includes a common list of tags, call mpv with --list-options to see it.

This is a string list option. See List Options for details.

--mc=<seconds/frame>

Maximum A-V sync correction per frame (in seconds)

--autosync=<factor>

Gradually adjusts the A/V sync based on audio delay measurements. Specifying --autosync=0, the default, will cause frame timing to be based entirely on audio delay measurements. Specifying --autosync=1 will do the same, but will subtly change the A/V correction algorithm. An uneven video framerate in a video which plays fine with --no-audio can often be helped by setting this to an integer value greater than 1. The higher the value, the closer the timing will be to --no-audio. Try --autosync=30 to smooth out problems with sound drivers which do not implement a perfect audio delay measurement. With this value, if large A/V sync offsets occur, they will only take about 1 or 2 seconds to settle out. This delay in reaction time to sudden A/V offsets should be the only side effect of turning this option on, for all sound drivers.

--video-timing-offset=<seconds>

Control how long before video display target time the frame should be rendered (default: 0.050). If a video frame should be displayed at a certain time, the VO will start rendering the frame earlier, and then will perform a blocking wait until the display time, and only then "swap" the frame to display. The rendering cannot start before the previous frame is displayed, so this value is implicitly limited by the video framerate. With normal video frame rates, the default value will ensure that rendering is always immediately started after the previous frame was displayed. On the other hand, setting a too high value can reduce responsiveness with low FPS value.

For client API users using the render API (or the deprecated opengl-cb API), this option is interesting, because you can stop the render API from limiting your FPS (see mpv_render_context_render() documentation).

This applies only to audio timing modes (e.g. --video-sync=audio). In other modes (--video-sync=display-...), video timing relies on vsync blocking, and this option is not used.

--video-sync=<audio|...>

How the player synchronizes audio and video.

If you use this option, you usually want to set it to display-resample to enable a timing mode that tries to not skip or repeat frames when for example playing 24fps video on a 24Hz screen.

The modes starting with display- try to output video frames completely synchronously to the display, using the detected display vertical refresh rate as a hint how fast frames will be displayed on average. These modes change video speed slightly to match the display. See --video-sync-... options for fine tuning. The robustness of this mode is further reduced by making a some idealized assumptions, which may not always apply in reality. Behavior can depend on the VO and the system's video and audio drivers. Media files must use constant framerate. Section-wise VFR might work as well with some container formats (but not e.g. mkv).

Under some circumstances, the player automatically reverts to audio mode for some time or permanently. This can happen on very low framerate video, or if the framerate cannot be detected.

Also in display-sync modes it can happen that interruptions to video playback (such as toggling fullscreen mode, or simply resizing the window) will skip the video frames that should have been displayed, while audio mode will display them after the renderer has resumed (typically resulting in a short A/V desync and the video "catching up").

Before mpv 0.30.0, there was a fallback to audio mode on severe A/V desync. This was changed for the sake of not sporadically stopping. Now, display-desync does what it promises and may desync with audio by an arbitrary amount, until it is manually fixed with a seek.

These modes also require a vsync blocked presentation mode. For OpenGL, this translates to --opengl-swapinterval=1. For Vulkan, it translates to --vulkan-swap-mode=fifo (or fifo-relaxed).

The modes with desync in their names do not attempt to keep audio/video in sync. They will slowly (or quickly) desync, until e.g. the next seek happens. These modes are meant for testing, not serious use.

audio:	Time video frames to audio. This is the most robust mode, because the player doesn't have to assume anything about how the display behaves. The disadvantage is that it can lead to occasional frame drops or repeats. If audio is disabled, this uses the system clock. This is the default mode.
display-resample:
	Resample audio to match the video. This mode will also try to adjust audio speed to compensate for other drift. (This means it will play the audio at a different speed every once in a while to reduce the A/V difference.)
display-resample-vdrop:
	Resample audio to match the video. Drop video frames to compensate for drift.
display-resample-desync:
	Like the previous mode, but no A/V compensation.
display-vdrop:	Drop or repeat video frames to compensate desyncing video. (Although it should have the same effects as audio, the implementation is very different.)
display-adrop:	Drop or repeat audio data to compensate desyncing video. See --video-sync-adrop-size. This mode will cause severe audio artifacts if the real monitor refresh rate is too different from the reported or forced rate.
display-desync:	Sync video to display, and let audio play on its own.
desync:	Sync video according to system clock, and let audio play on its own.

--video-sync-max-video-change=<value>

Maximum speed difference in percent that is applied to video with --video-sync=display-... (default: 1). Display sync mode will be disabled if the monitor and video refresh way do not match within the given range. It tries multiples as well: playing 30 fps video on a 60 Hz screen will duplicate every second frame. Playing 24 fps video on a 60 Hz screen will play video in a 2-3-2-3-... pattern.

The default settings are not loose enough to speed up 23.976 fps video to 25 fps. We consider the pitch change too extreme to allow this behavior by default. Set this option to a value of 5 to enable it.

Note that in the --video-sync=display-resample mode, audio speed will additionally be changed by a small amount if necessary for A/V sync. See --video-sync-max-audio-change.

--video-sync-max-audio-change=<value>

Maximum additional speed difference in percent that is applied to audio with --video-sync=display-... (default: 0.125). Normally, the player plays the audio at the speed of the video. But if the difference between audio and video position is too high, e.g. due to drift or other timing errors, it will attempt to speed up or slow down audio by this additional factor. Too low values could lead to video frame dropping or repeating if the A/V desync cannot be compensated, too high values could lead to chaotic frame dropping due to the audio "overshooting" and skipping multiple video frames before the sync logic can react.

--video-sync-adrop-size=<value>

For the --video-sync=display-adrop mode. This mode duplicates/drops audio data to keep audio in sync with video. To avoid audio artifacts on jitter (which would add/remove samples all the time), this is done in relatively large, fixed units, controlled by this option. The unit is seconds.

--mf-fps=<value>

Framerate used when decoding from multiple PNG or JPEG files with mf:// (default: 1).

--mf-type=<value>

Input file type for mf:// (available: jpeg, png, tga, sgi). By default, this is guessed from the file extension.

--stream-dump=<destination-filename>

Instead of playing a file, read its byte stream and write it to the given destination file. The destination is overwritten. Can be useful to test network-related behavior.

--stream-lavf-o=opt1=value1,opt2=value2,...

Set AVOptions on streams opened with libavformat. Unknown or misspelled options are silently ignored. (They are mentioned in the terminal output in verbose mode, i.e. --v. In general we can't print errors, because other options such as e.g. user agent are not available with all protocols, and printing errors for unknown options would end up being too noisy.)

This is a key/value list option. See List Options for details.

--vo-mmcss-profile=<name>

(Windows only.) Set the MMCSS profile for the video renderer thread (default: Playback).

--priority=<prio>

(Windows only.) Set process priority for mpv according to the predefined priorities available under Windows.

Possible values of <prio>: idle|belownormal|normal|abovenormal|high|realtime

Warning

Using realtime priority can cause system lockup.

--force-media-title=<string>

Force the contents of the media-title property to this value. Useful for scripts which want to set a title, without overriding the user's setting in --title.

--external-files=<file-list>

Load a file and add all of its tracks. This is useful to play different files together (for example audio from one file, video from another), or for advanced --lavfi-complex used (like playing two video files at the same time).

Unlike --sub-files and --audio-files, this includes all tracks, and does not cause default stream selection over the "proper" file. This makes it slightly less intrusive. (In mpv 0.28.0 and before, this was not quite strictly enforced.)

This is a path list option. See List Options for details.

--external-file=<file>

CLI/config file only alias for --external-files-append. Each use of this option will add a new external files.

--autoload-files=<yes|no>

Automatically load/select external files (default: yes).

If set to no, then do not automatically load external files as specified by --sub-auto and --audio-file-auto. If external files are forcibly added (like with --sub-files), they will not be auto-selected.

This does not affect playlist expansion, redirection, or other loading of referenced files like with ordered chapters.

--record-file=<file>

Deprecated, use --stream-record, or the dump-cache command.

Record the current stream to the given target file. The target file will always be overwritten without asking.

This was deprecated because it isn't very nice to use. For one, seeking while this is enabled will be directly reflected in the output, which was not useful and annoying.

--stream-record=<file>

Write received/read data from the demuxer to the given output file. The output file will always be overwritten without asking. The output format is determined by the extension of the output file.

Switching streams or seeking during recording might result in recording being stopped and/or broken files. Use with care.

Seeking outside of the demuxer cache will result in "skips" in the output file, but seeking within the demuxer cache should not affect recording. One exception is when you seek back far enough to exceed the forward buffering size, in which case the cache stops actively reading. This will return in dropped data if it's a live stream.

If this is set at runtime, the old file is closed, and the new file is opened. Note that this will write only data that is appended at the end of the cache, and the already cached data cannot be written. You can try the dump-cache command as an alternative.

External files (--audio-file etc.) are ignored by this, it works on the "main" file only. Using this with files using ordered chapters or EDL files will also not work correctly in general.

There are some glitches with this because it uses FFmpeg's libavformat for writing the output file. For example, it's typical that it will only work if the output format is the same as the input format. This is the case even if it works with the ffmpeg tool. One reason for this is that ffmpeg and its libraries contain certain hacks and workarounds for these issues, that are unavailable to outside users.

This replaces --record-file. It is similar to the ancient/removed --stream-capture/-capture options, and provides better behavior in most cases (i.e. actually works).

--lavfi-complex=<string>

Set a "complex" libavfilter filter, which means a single filter graph can take input from multiple source audio and video tracks. The graph can result in a single audio or video output (or both).

Currently, the filter graph labels are used to select the participating input tracks and audio/video output. The following rules apply:

• A label of the form aidN selects audio track N as input (e.g. aid1).
• A label of the form vidN selects video track N as input.
• A label named ao will be connected to the audio output.
• A label named vo will be connected to the video output.

Each label can be used only once. If you want to use e.g. an audio stream for multiple filters, you need to use the asplit filter. Multiple video or audio outputs are not possible, but you can use filters to merge them into one.

It's not possible to change the tracks connected to the filter at runtime, unless you explicitly change the lavfi-complex property and set new track assignments. When the graph is changed, the track selection is changed according to the used labels as well.

Other tracks, as long as they're not connected to the filter, and the corresponding output is not connected to the filter, can still be freely changed with the normal methods.

Note that the normal filter chains (--af, --vf) are applied between the complex graphs (e.g. ao label) and the actual output.

Examples

• --lavfi-complex='[aid1] [aid2] amix [ao]' Play audio track 1 and 2 at the same time.
• --lavfi-complex='[vid1] [vid2] vstack [vo]' Stack video track 1 and 2 and play them at the same time. Note that both tracks need to have the same width, or filter initialization will fail (you can add scale filters before the vstack filter to fix the size). To load a video track from another file, you can use --external-file=other.mkv.
• --lavfi-complex='[aid1] asplit [t1] [ao] ; [t1] showvolume [t2] ; [vid1] [t2] overlay [vo]' Play audio track 1, and overlay the measured volume for each speaker over video track 1.
• null:// --lavfi-complex='life [vo]' A libavfilter source-only filter (Conways' Life Game).

See the FFmpeg libavfilter documentation for details on the available filters.

--metadata-codepage=<codepage>

Codepage for various input metadata (default: utf-8). This affects how file tags, chapter titles, etc. are interpreted. You can for example set this to auto to enable autodetection of the codepage. (This is not the default because non-UTF-8 codepages are an obscure fringe use-case.)

See --sub-codepage option on how codepages are specified and further details regarding autodetection and codepage conversion. (The underlying code is the same.)

Conversion is not applied to metadata that is updated at runtime.