Solved mpv couldn't play video, mplayer could

[scottro]

I thought this was kind of interesting. I had a video that made (just a scene from a movie I watched). On my main workstation it played normally. However, on the Beelink I have, it wouldn't play, but if I used mplayer it was fine. With mpv it just showed a screen of a blur with traces of a picture.
I did some searching, and I confess, I wound up going to Claude.ai. The answer turned out to be that mplayer uses vo=xv or other older vo's while mpv seems to use gpu-next, but according to Claude there's some sort of bug



Anyway, the fix, according to Claude.ai, (and all suggested fixes worked) was to either run the video as mpv --vo=xv myvid.mp4 or to add these lines to $HOME/.config/mpv/mpv.conf

vo=gpu-next
gpu-api=opengl


I read this a few days ago, and have already forgotten the details, but it may be a bug with mpv, FreeBSD, and handling of AMD gpu's. But figured I'd put these two quick fixes up here. It holds for both Wayland and X.

Doing

mpv --vo=gpu-next

doesn't work.
So, if you have a video that won't work with mpv, but will with mplayer, either the edit of mpv.conf or the mpv vo=xv should work.[/file]

 

[kent_dorfman766]

mpv is the the replacement for the defunct mplayer, which was initially forked as mplayer2. It is buggy, but it's also a very complex piece of software. The bugs themselves don't bug me so much as the attitude of the mpv dev team. They make it very difficult to submit bug reports and then if they are not against the latest and greatest version then they silently close and ignore the report. I understand the the issue, but when the latest is version 0.41 and the bug report is against version 0.40 I think it's kind of silly to ignore the feedback...especially with as many corner cases exist that need to be tested and debugged.

I myself don't have the time or resources to do a parallel build of mpv using all the requisite library versions just to be able to report a problem.

OP doesn't mention the type of media that wouldn't play. Knowing it's 4cc codec type would be useful. mpv, using gpu-next, will by default attempt to use the hardware mp4 decoder it it is that type and there are countless options to use different decoders or video objects.