Gnome MPV

[OscarTalks]

Many Puppy variants have command line MPlayer with gnome-mplayer to provide a GTK2 frontend GUI for convenience of use.

An alternative to MPlayer is mpv which some users have reported good things about. This player comes with a "pseudo gui" set of controls within the window, but is largely operated by command line and keyboard. You can of course use SMplayer as a GUI for either mpv or MPlayer, but that requires Qt.

Dpup Stretch has mpv included in the build. This appears to be the official Debian version 0.23.0 which works very well in the tests that I have done.

There is a Gnome MPV frontend GUI available for mpv if people prefer this, but it is GTK3 and not GTK2, so be aware of the limitations in Puppy including themes and icons. PPM in Dpup Stretch offers version 0.11 which seems fine. Take note that Gnome MPV requires mpv compiled as a library rather than as the executable binary - /usr/lib/libmpv.so.1 rather than /usr/bin/mpv

I did some test compiling of later versions in Dpup Stretch just out of curiosity. Latest mpv release is 0.29.1 but I downloaded a git master snapshot at 317 commits ahead of this and compiled it as 0.29.2

This now requires ffmpeg 4 whereas Stretch only has ffmpeg 3 so I compiled latest ffmpeg 4.1.3 as static libraries only. This then produces a larger, statically linked mpv executable or library which does not depend on earlier ffmpeg 3 libraries in system.

Turning to Gnome MPV, latest release is 0.16 but this requires a later GTK3 than the one in Stretch, but I was able to compile 0.15 successfully.

This post is mainly just for information.
The package to do these version upgrades in Dpup Stretch is quite large so probably not worth the bother uploading unless anyone found an urgent need. Folks may wish to adapt for installation of mpv or Gnome MPV in other Puppies.

[nic007]

Many Puppy variants have command line MPlayer with gnome-mplayer to provide a GTK2 frontend GUI for convenience of use.

An alternative to MPlayer is mpv which some users have reported good things about. This player comes with a "pseudo gui" set of controls within the window, but is largely operated by command line and keyboard. You can of course use SMplayer as a GUI for either mpv or MPlayer, but that requires Qt.

Dpup Stretch has mpv included in the build. This appears to be the official Debian version 0.23.0 which works very well in the tests that I have done.

There is a Gnome MPV frontend GUI available for mpv if people prefer this, but it is GTK3 and not GTK2, so be aware of the limitations in Puppy including themes and icons. PPM in Dpup Stretch offers version 0.11 which seems fine. Take note that Gnome MPV requires mpv compiled as a library rather than as the executable binary - /usr/lib/libmpv.so.1 rather than /usr/bin/mpv

I did some test compiling of later versions in Dpup Stretch just out of curiosity. Latest mpv release is 0.29.1 but I downloaded a git master snapshot at 317 commits ahead of this and compiled it as 0.29.2

This now requires ffmpeg 4 whereas Stretch only has ffmpeg 3 so I compiled latest ffmpeg 4.1.3 as static libraries only. This then produces a larger, statically linked mpv executable or library which does not depend on earlier ffmpeg 3 libraries in system.

Turning to Gnome MPV, latest release is 0.16 but this requires a later GTK3 than the one in Stretch, but I was able to compile 0.15 successfully.

This post is mainly just for information.
The package to do these version upgrades in Dpup Stretch is quite large so probably not worth the bother uploading unless anyone found an urgent need. Folks may wish to adapt for installation of mpv or Gnome MPV in other Puppies.

What special effects does MPV player have? VLC for instance has sigma-sharpen which is excellent for low quality video. This is one reason I prefer VLC, also for its different interfaces. MPV/Mplayer seems very limited in this regard. MPV is just a fork of MPlayer anyway

[Mike Walsh]

@ Oscar:-

Were you aware of the static ffmpeg builds John Van Sickle has put together and made available, here?

https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/

I could be wrong, but I think this is where Fred got his static-ffmpeg builds from. Fabrice_035 put me onto them.


Mike.

[Mike Walsh]

Again, just for information, I tried installing the version of gnome-mpv from the PPM in peebee's UPup Bionic. Now, this could be because I'm not using the actual Puppy 8.....I'm still using one of the early versions of 1805; around version 3 or 5, from what I recall. But I haven't bothered 'upgrading' because it does everything I need without issues.

Anyway; the version from the repos fires up, but when you go to play anything, it'll show for a split second, then expires with a glib-Critical error. I've made up a .pet package from the version in DPup 'Stretch'; so long as you install libmpv from the Ubuntu repos, this'll run and play stuff fine.

If anybody would like to try it (experimental, of course), you can find it here:-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EjYA38 ... sp=sharing

I will warn you; the 'locale' stuff is not present. So; US English only, I'm afraid, for the moment. I'll redo it with this present when I get time....


Mike.

[OscarTalks]

What special effects does MPV player have? VLC for instance has sigma-sharpen which is excellent for low quality video. This is one reason I prefer VLC, also for its different interfaces. MPV/Mplayer seems very limited in this regard. MPV is just a fork of MPlayer anyway

Must confess I am not sure about special effects. The documentation is fairly lengthy and I haven't studied all of it, but it may well be that VLC has features which mpv does not.

I am a fan of VLC myself, having spent lots of time compiling it with added optional dependencies. With these media players they pretty much all work fine for almost everything. I mostly use them for playing of files and streams in the standard way. Often it is just a case of my mood or preference at the time which one I use. In some cases you find a certain function which one player doesn't cope with so you use a different one. One example is .pls and .m3u playlist metafiles. With mpv these will parse and play directly. With MPlayer or gMPlayer you have to use the -playlist argument although if using SMplayer or gnome-mplayer as the frontend they will load and play directly.

One thing about mpv which I am unsure about is audio CD's (they do play) but DeaDBeeF would always be my first choice for that task anyway.