mpv man page on DragonFly

mpv man page on DragonFly

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MPV(1) multimedia MPV(1)

NAME
mpv - a media player

SYNOPSIS
mpv [options] [file|URL|PLAYLIST|-]
mpv [options] files

DESCRIPTION
mpv is a media player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide
variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle
types. Special input URL types are available to read input from a vari‐
ety of sources other than disk files. Depending on platform, a variety
of different video and audio output methods are supported.

Usage examples to get you started quickly can be found at the end of
this man page.

INTERACTIVE CONTROL
mpv has a fully configurable, command-driven control layer which allows
you to control mpv using keyboard, mouse, or remote control (there is
no LIRC support - configure remotes as input devices instead).

See the --input- options for ways to customize it.

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.

[ and ]
Decrease/increase current playback speed by 10%.

{ and }
Halve/double current playback speed.

BACKSPACE
Reset playback speed to normal.

< 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 pos‐
sible.

/ 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 e
Decrease/increase pan-and-scan range.

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.

x and z
Adjust subtitle delay by +/- 0.1 seconds.

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

L Toggle infinite looping.

Ctrl + and Ctrl -
Adjust audio delay 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 --ass-style-override for more info.

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

r and t
Move subtitles up/down.

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).

I Show filename on the OSD.

PGUP and PGDWN
Seek to the beginning of the previous/next chapter. In most
cases, "previous" will actually go to the beginning of the cur‐
rent 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.

(The following keys are valid only when using a video output that sup‐
ports the corresponding adjustment, or the software equalizer
(--vf=eq).)

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).

command + [ and command + ] (OSX only)
Set video window alpha.

(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.

(The following keys are only valid if you compiled with TV or DVB input
support.)

h and k
Select previous/next tv-channel.

H and K
Select previous/next dvb-channel.

Mouse Control
button 3 and button 4
Seek backward/forward 1 minute.

button 5 and button 6
Decrease/increase volume.

USAGE
Every flag option has a no-flag counterpart, e.g. the opposite of the
--fs option is --no-fs. --fs=yes is same as --fs, --fs=no is the same
as --no-fs.

If an option is marked as (XXX only), it will only work in combination
with the XXX option or if XXX is compiled in.

Escaping spaces and other special characters
Keep in mind that the shell will partially parse and mangle the argu‐
ments 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 sub‐
option 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, the opengl VO can take multiple options:
mpv test.mkv --vo=opengl:scale=lanczos:icc-profile=file.icc,xv

This passes scale=lanczos and icc-profile=file.icc to opengl, and also
specifies xv as fallback VO. If the icc-profile path contains spaces or
characters like , or :, you need to quote them:
mpv '--vo=opengl:icc-profile="file with spaces.icc",xv'

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 match‐
ing [ 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

Examples

mpv --ao=pcm:file=%10%C:test.wav test.avi

Or in a script:

mpv --ao=pcm:file=%`expr length "$NAME"`%"$NAME" test.avi

Suboptions passed to the client API are also subject to escaping. Using
mpv_set_option_string() is exactly like passing --name=data to the com‐
mand 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. (--vo supports this in the same way,
although this fact is undocumented.)

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 relative
paths with ./.

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

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 ~/.con‐
fig/mpv/). ~/ expands to the user's home directory. (The trailing / is
always required.) There are the following paths as well:

┌─────────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│Name │ Meaning │
├─────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│~~home/ │ same as ~~/ │
├─────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│~~global/ │ the global config path, if │
│ │ available (not on win32) │
├─────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│~~osxbundle/ │ the OSX bundle resource │
│ │ path (OSX only) │
├─────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│~~desktop/ │ the path to the desktop │
│ │ (win32, OSX) │
└─────────────┴────────────────────────────┘

Per-File Options
When playing multiple files, any option given on the command line usu‐
ally affects all files. Example:

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

┌──────────┬────────────────┐
│File │ Active options │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│file1.mkv │ --a --b --c │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│file2.mkv │ --a --b --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

┌──────────┬─────────────────────────┐
│File │ Active options │
├──────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│file1.mkv │ --a --b --f │
├──────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│file2.mkv │ --a --b --f --c --d --e │
├──────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│file3.mkv │ --a --b --f --c --d --e │
└──────────┴─────────────────────────┘

│file4.mkv │ --a --b --f │
└──────────┴─────────────────────────┘

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

CONFIGURATION FILES
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 dis‐
abled by setting them to no. Even suboptions can be specified in this
way.

Example configuration file

# Use opengl video output by default.
vo=opengl
# 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 con‐
tains 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:

┌──────────────────┬──────────────────────────┐
│Option │ Configuration file entry │
├──────────────────┼──────────────────────────┤
│--flag │ flag │
├──────────────────┼──────────────────────────┤
│-opt val │ opt=val │
├──────────────────┼──────────────────────────┤
│--opt=val │ opt=val │
├──────────────────┼──────────────────────────┤
│-opt "has spaces" │ opt="has spaces" │
└──────────────────┴──────────────────────────┘

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 ~/.con‐
fig/mpv. In addition, the --use-filedir-conf option enables direc‐
tory-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.

Example mpv config file with profiles

# normal top-level option
fullscreen=yes

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

[slow]
profile-desc="some profile name"
vo=opengl:scale=ewa_lanczos:scale-radius=16

[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 demon‐
strates this:

Auto profile loading

[vo.vdpau]
# Use hardware decoding
hwdec=vdpau

[protocol.dvd]
profile-desc="profile for dvd:// streams"
alang=en

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

[ao.alsa]
device=spdif

The profile name follows the schema type.name, where type can be vo to
match the value the --vo option is set to, ao for --ao, 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.

TAKING SCREENSHOTS
Screenshots of the currently played file can be taken using the
'screenshot' input mode command, which is by default bound to the s
key. Files named mpv-shotNNNN.jpg will be saved in the working direc‐
tory, using the first available number - no files will be overwritten.
In pseudo-GUI mode, the screenshot will be saved somewhere else. See
PSEUDO GUI MODE.

A screenshot will usually contain the unscaled video contents at the
end of the video filter chain and subtitles. By default, S takes
screenshots without subtitles, while s includes subtitles.

Unlike with MPlayer, the screenshot video filter is not required. This
filter was never required in mpv, and has been removed.

TERMINAL STATUS LINE
During playback, mpv shows the playback status on the terminal. It
looks like something like this:
AV: 00:03:12 / 00:24:25 (13%) A-V: -0.000

The status line can be overridden with the --term-status-msg option.

The following is a list of things that can show up in the status line.
Input properties, that can be used to get the same information manu‐
ally, are also listed.

· AV: or V: (video only) or A: (audio only)

· The current time position in HH:MM:SS format (playback-time property)

· The total file duration (absent if unknown) (length property)

· Playback speed, e.g. `` x2.0``. Only visible if the speed is not nor‐
mal. This is the user-requested speed, and not the actual speed
(usually they should be the same, unless playback is too slow).
(speed property.)

· Playback percentage, e.g. (13%). How much of the file has been
played. Normally calculated out of playback position and duration,
but can fallback to other methods (like byte position) if these are
not available. (percent-pos property.)

· The audio/video sync as A-V: 0.000. This is the difference between
audio and video time. Normally it should be 0 or close to 0. If it's
growing, it might indicate a playback problem. (avsync property.)

· Total A/V sync change, e.g. ct: -0.417. Normally invisible. Can show
up if there is audio "missing", or not enough frames can be dropped.
Usually this will indicate a problem. (total-avsync-change property.)

· Encoding state in {...}, only shown in encoding mode.

· Display sync state. If display sync is active (display-sync-active
property), this shows DS: 2.500/13, where the first number is average
number of vsyncs per video frame (e.g. 2.5 when playing 24Hz videos
on 60Hz screens), which might jitter if the ratio doesn't round off,
or there are mistimed frames (vsync-ratio), and the second number of
estimated number of vsyncs which took too long
(vo-delayed-frame-count property). The latter is a heuristic, as it's
generally not possible to determine this with certainty.

· Dropped frames, e.g. Dropped: 4. Shows up only if the count is not 0.
Can grow if the video framerate is higher than that of the display,
or if video rendering is too slow. May also be incremented on "hic‐
cups" and when the video frame couldn't be displayed on time.
(vo-drop-frame-count property.) If the decoder drops frames, the
number of decoder-dropped frames is appended to the display as well,
e.g.: Dropped: 4/34. This happens only if decoder frame dropping is
enabled with the --framedrop options. (drop-frame-count property.)

· Cache state, e.g. Cache: 2s+134KB. Visible if the stream cache is
enabled. The first value shows the amount of video buffered in the
demuxer in seconds, the second value shows additional data buffered
in the stream cache in kilobytes. (demuxer-cache-duration and
cache-used properties.)

PROTOCOLS
http://..., https://, ...
Many network protocols are supported, but the protocol prefix
must always be specified. mpv will never attempt to guess
whether a filename is actually a network address. A protocol
prefix is always required.

Note that not all prefixes are documented here. Undocumented
prefixes are either aliases to documented protocols, or are just
redirections to protocols implemented and documented in FFmpeg.

- Play data from stdin.

smb://PATH
Play a path from Samba share.

bd://[title][/device] --bluray-device=PATH
Play a Blu-ray disc. Currently, this does not accept ISO files.
Instead, you must mount the ISO file as filesystem, and point
--bluray-device to the mounted directory directly.

dvd://[title|[starttitle]-endtitle][/device] --dvd-device=PATH
Play a DVD. DVD menus are not supported. If no title is given,
the longest title is auto-selected.

dvdnav:// is an old alias for dvd:// and does exactly the same
thing.

dvdread://...:
Play a DVD using the old libdvdread code. This is what MPlayer
and older mpv versions use for dvd://. Use is discouraged. It's
provided only for compatibility and for transition.

tv://[channel][/input_id] --tv-...
Analogue TV via V4L. Also useful for webcams. (Linux only.)

pvr:// --pvr-...
PVR. (Linux only.)

dvb://[cardnumber@]channel --dvbin-...
Digital TV via DVB. (Linux only.)

mf://[filemask|@listfile] --mf-...
Play a series of images as video.

cdda://track[-endtrack][:speed][/device] --cdrom-device=PATH --cdda-...
Play CD.

lavf://...
Access any FFmpeg/Libav libavformat protocol. Basically, this
passed the string after the // directly to libavformat.

av://type:options
This is intended for using libavdevice inputs. type is the
libavdevice demuxer name, and options is the (pseudo-)filename
passed to the demuxer.

For example, mpv av://lavfi:mandelbrot makes use of the libav‐
filter wrapper included in libavdevice, and will use the mandel‐
brot source filter to generate input data.

avdevice:// is an alias.

file://PATH
A local path as URL. Might be useful in some special use-cases.
Note that PATH itself should start with a third / to make the
path an absolute path.

fd://123
Read data from the given file descriptor (for example 123). This
is similar to piping data to stdin via -, but can use an arbi‐
trary file descriptor.

edl://[edl specification as in edl-mpv.rst]
Stitch together parts of multiple files and play them.

null://
Simulate an empty file.

memory://data
Use the data part as source data.

PSEUDO GUI MODE
mpv has no official GUI, other than the OSC (ON SCREEN CONTROLLER),
which is not a full GUI and is not meant to be. However, to compensate
for the lack of expected GUI behavior, mpv will in some cases start
with some settings changed to behave slightly more like a GUI mode.

Currently this happens only in the following cases:

· if started using the mpv.desktop file on Linux (e.g. started from
menus or file associations provided by desktop environments)

· if started from explorer.exe on Windows (technically, if it was
started on Windows, and all of the stdout/stderr/stdin handles are
unset)

· manually adding --profile=pseudo-gui to the command line

This mode implicitly adds --profile=pseudo-gui to the command line,
with the pseudo-gui profile being predefined with the following con‐
tents:

[pseudo-gui]
terminal=no
force-window=yes
idle=once
screenshot-directory=~~desktop/

This follows the mpv config file format. To customize pseudo-GUI mode,
you can put your own pseudo-gui profile into your mpv.conf. This pro‐
file will enhance the default profile, rather than overwrite it.

The profile always overrides other settings in mpv.conf.

OPTIONS
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.

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 in Japanese.

--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.

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 Ja‐
panese subtitles.

--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.

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

See also: --cache-file-size.

--cache-file-size=<kBytes>
Maximum size of the file created with --cache-file. For read
accesses above this size, the cache is simply not used.

Keep in mind that some use-cases, like playing ordered chapters
with cache enabled, will actually create multiple cache files,
each of which will use up to this much disk space.

(Default: 1048576, 1 GB.)

--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.
(Default: 10.)

--cache-pause, --no-cache-pause
Whether the player should automatically pause when the cache
runs low, and unpause once more data is available ("buffering").

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.

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

--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. This affects at least
HTTP. The special value 0 (default) uses the FFmpeg/Libav
defaults. If a protocol is used which does not support timeouts,
this option is silently ignored.

--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 guar‐
antee it's actually meaningful.

DVB
--dvbin-card=<1-4>
Specifies using card number 1-4 (default: 1).

--dvbin-file=<filename>
Instructs mpv to read the channels list from <filename>. The
default is in the mpv configuration directory (usually ~/.con‐
fig/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 recom‐
mended as it allows tuning to DVB-S2 channels, enabling subti‐
tles and decoding the PMT (which largely improves the demuxing).
Classic mplayer format channel lists are still supported (with‐
out these improvements), and for other card types, only limited
VDR format channel list support is implemented (patches wel‐
come). 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 fre‐
quency 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 prop‐
erty. 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

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.

--mc=<seconds/frame>
Maximum A-V sync correction per frame (in seconds)

--autosync=<factor>
Gradually adjusts the A/V sync based on audio delay measure‐
ments. Specifying --autosync=0, the default, will cause frame
timing to be based entirely on audio delay measurements. Speci‐
fying --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-sync=<audio|...>
How the player synchronizes audio and video.

The modes starting with display- try to output video frames com‐
pletely synchronously to the display, using the detected display
vertical refresh rate as a hint how fast frames will be dis‐
played on average. These modes change video speed slightly to
match the display. See --video-sync-... options for fine tun‐
ing. The robustness of this mode is further reduced by making a
some idealized assumptions, which may not always apply in real‐
ity. Behavior can depend on the VO and the system's video and
audio drivers. Media files must use constant framerate. Sec‐
tion-wise VFR might work as well with some container formats
(but not e.g. mkv). If the sync code detects severe A/V desync,
or the framerate cannot be detected, the player automatically
reverts to audio mode for some time or permanently.

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: play‐
ing 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). Nor‐
mally, the player play 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 skip‐
ping multiple video frames before the sync logic can react.

--video-sync-adrop-size=<value
For the --video-sync=display-adrop mode. This mode dupli‐
cates/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-capture=<filename>
Allows capturing the primary stream (not additional audio tracks
or other kind of streams) into the given file. Capturing can
also be started and stopped by changing the filename with the
stream-capture slave property. Generally this will not produce
usable results for anything else than MPEG or raw streams,
unless capturing includes the file headers and is not inter‐
rupted. Note that, due to cache latencies, captured data may
begin and end somewhat delayed compared to what you see dis‐
played.

The destination file is always appended. (Before mpv 0.8.0, the
file was overwritten.)

--stream-dump=<filename>
Same as --stream-capture, but do not start playback. Instead,
the entire file is dumped.

--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.)

--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.

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.

AUDIO OUTPUT DRIVERS
Audio output drivers are interfaces to different audio output facili‐
ties. The syntax is:

--ao=<driver1[:suboption1[=value]:...],driver2,...[,]>
Specify a priority list of audio output drivers to be used.

If the list has a trailing ',', mpv will fall back on drivers not con‐
tained in the list. Suboptions are optional and can mostly be omitted.

You can also set defaults for each driver. The defaults are applied
before the normal driver parameters.

--ao-defaults=<driver1[:parameter1:parameter2:...],driver2,...>
Set defaults for each driver.

NOTE:
See --ao=help for a list of compiled-in audio output drivers. The
driver --ao=alsa is preferred. --ao=pulse is preferred on systems
where PulseAudio is used. On BSD systems, --ao=oss or --ao=sndio may
work (the latter being experimental).

Examples

· --ao=alsa,oss, Try the ALSA driver, then the OSS driver, then oth‐
ers.

· --ao=alsa:resample=yes:device=[plughw:0,3] Lets ALSA resample and
sets the device-name as first card, fourth device.

Available audio output drivers are:

alsa (Linux only)
ALSA audio output driver

device=<device>
Sets the device name. For ac3 output via S/PDIF, use an
"iec958" or "spdif" device, unless you really know how to
set it correctly.

resample=yes
Enable ALSA resampling plugin. (This is disabled by
default, because some drivers report incorrect audio
delay in some cases.)

mixer-device=<device>
Set the mixer device used with --no-softvol (default:
default).

mixer-name=<name>
Set the name of the mixer element (default: Master). This
is for example PCM or Master.

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.

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.

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 con‐
figuration (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).

NOTE:
MPlayer and mplayer2 required you to replace any ',' with '.'
and any ':' with '=' in the ALSA device name. mpv does not do
this anymore. Instead, quote the device name:
--ao=alsa:device=[plug:surround50]

Note that the [ and ] simply quote the device name. With some
shells (like zsh), you have to quote the option string to
prevent the shell from interpreting the brackets instead of
passing them to mpv.

Actually, you should use the --audio-device option, instead
of setting the device directly.

WARNING:
Handling of multichannel/surround audio changed in mpv 0.8.0
from the behavior in MPlayer/mplayer2 and older versions of
mpv.

The old behavior is that the player always downmixed to
stereo by default. The --audio-channels (or --channels before
that) option had to be set to get multichannel audio. Then
playing stereo would use the default device (which typically
allows multiple programs to play audio at the same time via
dmix), while playing anything with more channels would open
one of the hardware devices, e.g. via the surround51 alias
(typically with exclusive access). Whether the player would
use exclusive access or not would depend on the file being
played.

The new behavior since mpv 0.8.0 always enables multichannel
audio, i.e. --audio-channels=auto is the default. However,
since ALSA provides no good way to play multichannel audio in
a non-exclusive way (without blocking other applications from
using audio), the player is restricted to the capabilities of
the default device by default, which means it supports only
stereo and mono (at least with current typical ALSA configu‐
rations). But if a hardware device is selected, then multi‐
channel audio will typically work.

The short story is: if you want multichannel audio with ALSA,
use --audio-device to select the device (use
--audio-device=help to get a list of all devices and their
mpv name).

You can also try using the upmix plugin. This setup enables
multichannel audio on the default device with automatic
upmixing with shared access, so playing stereo and multichan‐
nel audio at the same time will work as expected.

oss OSS audio output driver

<dsp-device>
Sets the audio output device (default: /dev/dsp).

<mixer-device>
Sets the audio mixer device (default: /dev/mixer).

<mixer-channel>
Sets the audio mixer channel (default: pcm). Other valid
values include vol, pcm, line. For a complete list of
options look for SOUND_DEVICE_NAMES in
/usr/include/linux/soundcard.h.

jack JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit) audio output driver

port=<name>
Connects to the ports with the given name (default: phys‐
ical ports).

name=<client>
Client name that is passed to JACK (default: mpv). Useful
if you want to have certain connections established auto‐
matically.

(no-)autostart
Automatically start jackd if necessary (default: dis‐
abled). Note that this tends to be unreliable and will
flood stdout with server messages.

(no-)connect
Automatically create connections to output ports
(default: enabled). When enabled, the maximum number of
output channels will be limited to the number of avail‐
able output ports.

std-channel-layout=waveext|any
Select the standard channel layout (default: waveext).
JACK itself has no notion of channel layouts (i.e.
assigning which speaker a given channel is supposed to
map to) - it just takes whatever the application outputs,
and reroutes it to whatever the user defines. This means
the user and the application are in charge of dealing
with the channel layout. waveext uses WAVE_FORMAT_EXTEN‐
SIBLE order, which, even though it was defined by Micro‐
soft, is the standard on many systems. The value any
makes JACK accept whatever comes from the audio filter
chain, regardless of channel layout and without reorder‐
ing. This mode is probably not very useful, other than
for debugging or when used with fixed setups.

coreaudio (Mac OS X only)
Native Mac OS X audio output driver using AudioUnits and the
CoreAudio sound server.

Automatically redirects to coreaudio_exclusive when playing com‐
pressed formats.

change-physical-format=<yes|no>
Change the physical format to one similar to the
requested audio format (default: no). This has the advan‐
tage that multichannel audio output will actually work.
The disadvantage is that it will change the system-wide
audio settings. This is equivalent to changing the Format
setting in the Audio Devices dialog in the Audio MIDI
Setup utility. Note that this does not affect the
selected speaker setup.

exclusive
Use exclusive mode access. This merely redirects to core‐
audio_exclusive, but should be preferred over using that
AO directly.

coreaudio_exclusive (Mac OS X only)
Native Mac OS X audio output driver using direct device access
and exclusive mode (bypasses the sound server).

openal Experimental OpenAL audio output driver

NOTE:
This driver is not very useful. Playing multi-channel audio
with it is slow.

pulse PulseAudio audio output driver

[<host>][:<output sink>]
Specify the host and optionally output sink to use. An
empty <host> string uses a local connection, "localhost"
uses network transfer (most likely not what you want).

buffer=<1-2000|native>
Set the audio buffer size in milliseconds. A higher value
buffers more data, and has a lower probability of buffer
underruns. A smaller value makes the audio stream react
faster, e.g. to playback speed changes. Default: 250.

latency-hacks=<yes|no>
Enable hacks to workaround PulseAudio timing bugs
(default: no). If enabled, mpv will do elaborate latency
calculations on its own. If disabled, it will use
PulseAudio automatically updated timing information. Dis‐
abling this might help with e.g. networked audio or some
plugins, while enabling it might help in some unknown
situations (it used to be required to get good behavior
on old PulseAudio versions).

If you have stuttering video when using pulse, try to
enable this option. (Or try to update PulseAudio.)

sdl SDL 1.2+ audio output driver. Should work on any platform sup‐
ported by SDL 1.2, but may require the SDL_AUDIODRIVER environ‐
ment variable to be set appropriately for your system.

NOTE:
This driver is for compatibility with extremely foreign envi‐
ronments, such as systems where none of the other drivers are
available.

buflen=<length>
Sets the audio buffer length in seconds. Is used only as
a hint by the sound system. Playing a file with -v will
show the requested and obtained exact buffer size. A
value of 0 selects the sound system default.

bufcnt=<count>
Sets the number of extra audio buffers in mpv. Usually
needs not be changed.

null Produces no audio output but maintains video playback speed. Use
--ao=null:untimed for benchmarking.

untimed
Do not simulate timing of a perfect audio device. This
means audio decoding will go as fast as possible, instead
of timing it to the system clock.

buffer Simulated buffer length in seconds.

outburst
Simulated chunk size in samples.

speed Simulated audio playback speed as a multiplier. Usually,
a real audio device will not go exactly as fast as the
system clock. It will deviate just a little, and this
option helps to simulate this.

latency
Simulated device latency. This is additional to EOF.

broken-eof
Simulate broken audio drivers, which always add the fixed
device latency to the reported audio playback position.

broken-delay
Simulate broken audio drivers, which don't report latency
correctly.

channel-layouts
If not empty, this is a , separated list of channel lay‐
outs the AO allows. This can be used to test channel lay‐
out selection.

pcm Raw PCM/WAVE file writer audio output

(no-)waveheader
Include or do not include the WAVE header (default:
included). When not included, raw PCM will be generated.

file=<filename>
Write the sound to <filename> instead of the default
audiodump.wav. If no-waveheader is specified, the default
is audiodump.pcm.

(no-)append
Append to the file, instead of overwriting it. Always use
this with the no-waveheader option - with waveheader it's
broken, because it will write a WAVE header every time
the file is opened.

rsound Audio output to an RSound daemon

NOTE:
Completely useless, unless you intend to run RSound. Not to
be confused with RoarAudio, which is something completely
different.

host=<name/path>
Set the address of the server (default: localhost). Can
be either a network hostname for TCP connections or a
Unix domain socket path starting with '/'.

port=<number>
Set the TCP port used for connecting to the server
(default: 12345). Not used if connecting to a Unix
domain socket.

sndio Audio output to the OpenBSD sndio sound system

NOTE:
Experimental. There are known bugs and issues.

(Note: only supports mono, stereo, 4.0, 5.1 and 7.1 channel lay‐
outs.)

device=<device>
sndio device to use (default: $AUDIODEVICE, resp. snd0).

wasapi Audio output to the Windows Audio Session API.

exclusive
Requests exclusive, direct hardware access. By definition
prevents sound playback of any other program until mpv
exits.

device=<id>
Uses the requested endpoint instead of the system's
default audio endpoint. Both an ordinal number
(0,1,2,...) and the GUID String are valid; the GUID
string is guaranteed to not change unless the driver is
uninstalled.

Also supports searching active devices by human-readable
name. If more than one device matches the name, refuses
loading it.

This option is mostly deprecated in favour of the more
general --audio-device option. That said,
--audio-device=help will give a list of valid device
GUIDs (prefixed with wasapi/), as well as their human
readable names, which should work here.

VIDEO OUTPUT DRIVERS
Video output drivers are interfaces to different video output facili‐
ties. The syntax is:

--vo=<driver1[:suboption1[=value]:...],driver2,...[,]>
Specify a priority list of video output drivers to be used.

If the list has a trailing ',', mpv will fall back on drivers not con‐
tained in the list. Suboptions are optional and can mostly be omitted.

You can also set defaults for each driver. The defaults are applied
before the normal driver parameters.

--vo-defaults=<driver1[:parameter1:parameter2:...],driver2,...>
Set defaults for each driver.

NOTE:
See --vo=help for a list of compiled-in video output drivers.

The recommended output driver is --vo=opengl-hq. All other drivers
are for compatibility or special purposes. By default, --vo=opengl
is used, but if that appears not to work, it fallback to other driv‐
ers (in the same order as listed by --vo=help).

Available video output drivers are:

xv (X11 only)
Uses the XVideo extension to enable hardware-accelerated dis‐
play. This is the most compatible VO on X, but may be low-qual‐
ity, and has issues with OSD and subtitle display.

NOTE:
This driver is for compatibility with old systems.

adaptor=<number>
Select a specific XVideo adapter (check xvinfo results).

port=<number>
Select a specific XVideo port.

ck=<cur|use|set>
Select the source from which the color key is taken
(default: cur).

cur The default takes the color key currently set in
Xv.

use Use but do not set the color key from mpv (use the
--colorkey option to change it).

set Same as use but also sets the supplied color key.

ck-method=<man|bg|auto>
Sets the color key drawing method (default: man).

man Draw the color key manually (reduces flicker in
some cases).

bg Set the color key as window background.

auto Let Xv draw the color key.

colorkey=<number>
Changes the color key to an RGB value of your choice.
0x000000 is black and 0xffffff is white.

no-colorkey
Disables color-keying.

buffers=<number>
Number of image buffers to use for the internal ring‐
buffer (default: 2). Increasing this will use more mem‐
ory, but might help with the X server not responding
quickly enough if video FPS is close to or higher than
the display refresh rate.

x11 (X11 only)
Shared memory video output driver without hardware acceleration
that works whenever X11 is present.

NOTE:
This is a fallback only, and should not be normally used.

vdpau (X11 only)
Uses the VDPAU interface to display and optionally also decode
video. Hardware decoding is used with --hwdec=vdpau.

NOTE:
Earlier versions of mpv (and MPlayer, mplayer2) provided
sub-options to tune vdpau post-processing, like deint,
sharpen, denoise, chroma-deint, pullup, hqscaling. These
sub-options are deprecated, and you should use the vdpaupp
video filter instead.

sharpen=<-1-1>
(Deprecated. See note about vdpaupp.)

For positive values, apply a sharpening algorithm to the
video, for negative values a blurring algorithm (default:
0).

denoise=<0-1>
(Deprecated. See note about vdpaupp.)

Apply a noise reduction algorithm to the video (default:
0; no noise reduction).

deint=<-4-4>
(Deprecated. See note about vdpaupp.)

Select deinterlacing mode (default: 0). In older versions
(as well as MPlayer/mplayer2) you could use this option
to enable deinterlacing. This doesn't work anymore, and
deinterlacing is enabled with either the d key (by
default mapped to the command cycle deinterlace), or the
--deinterlace option. Also, to select the default deint
mode, you should use something like
--vf-defaults=vdpaupp:deint-mode=temporal instead of this
sub-option.

0 Pick the vdpaupp video filter default, which cor‐
responds to 3.

1 Show only first field.

2 Bob deinterlacing.

3 Motion-adaptive temporal deinterlacing. May lead
to A/V desync with slow video hardware and/or high
resolution.

4 Motion-adaptive temporal deinterlacing with
edge-guided spatial interpolation. Needs fast
video hardware.

chroma-deint
(Deprecated. See note about vdpaupp.)

Makes temporal deinterlacers operate both on luma and
chroma (default). Use no-chroma-deint to solely use luma
and speed up advanced deinterlacing. Useful with slow
video memory.

pullup (Deprecated. See note about vdpaupp.)

Try to apply inverse telecine, needs motion adaptive tem‐
poral deinterlacing.

hqscaling=<0-9>
(Deprecated. See note about vdpaupp.)

0 Use default VDPAU scaling (default).

1-9 Apply high quality VDPAU scaling (needs capable
hardware).

fps=<number>
Override autodetected display refresh rate value (the
value is needed for framedrop to allow video playback
rates higher than display refresh rate, and for
vsync-aware frame timing adjustments). Default 0 means
use autodetected value. A positive value is interpreted
as a refresh rate in Hz and overrides the autodetected
value. A negative value disables all timing adjustment
and framedrop logic.

composite-detect
NVIDIA's current VDPAU implementation behaves somewhat
differently under a compositing window manager and does
not give accurate frame timing information. With this
option enabled, the player tries to detect whether a com‐
positing window manager is active. If one is detected,
the player disables timing adjustments as if the user had
specified fps=-1 (as they would be based on incorrect
input). This means timing is somewhat less accurate than
without compositing, but with the composited mode behav‐
ior of the NVIDIA driver, there is no hard playback speed
limit even without the disabled logic. Enabled by
default, use no-composite-detect to disable.

queuetime_windowed=<number> and queuetime_fs=<number>
Use VDPAU's presentation queue functionality to queue
future video frame changes at most this many milliseconds
in advance (default: 50). See below for additional
information.

output_surfaces=<2-15>
Allocate this many output surfaces to display video
frames (default: 3). See below for additional informa‐
tion.

colorkey=<#RRGGBB|#AARRGGBB>
Set the VDPAU presentation queue background color, which
in practice is the colorkey used if VDPAU operates in
overlay mode (default: #020507, some shade of black). If
the alpha component of this value is 0, the default VDPAU
colorkey will be used instead (which is usually green).

force-yuv
Never accept RGBA input. This means mpv will insert a
filter to convert to a YUV format before the VO. Some‐
times useful to force availability of certain YUV-only
features, like video equalizer or deinterlacing.

Using the VDPAU frame queuing functionality controlled by the
queuetime options makes mpv's frame flip timing less sensitive
to system CPU load and allows mpv to start decoding the next
frame(s) slightly earlier, which can reduce jitter caused by
individual slow-to-decode frames. However, the NVIDIA graphics
drivers can make other window behavior such as window moves
choppy if VDPAU is using the blit queue (mainly happens if you
have the composite extension enabled) and this feature is
active. If this happens on your system and it bothers you then
you can set the queuetime value to 0 to disable this feature.
The settings to use in windowed and fullscreen mode are separate
because there should be no reason to disable this for fullscreen
mode (as the driver issue should not affect the video itself).

You can queue more frames ahead by increasing the queuetime val‐
ues and the output_surfaces count (to ensure enough surfaces to
buffer video for a certain time ahead you need at least as many
surfaces as the video has frames during that time, plus two).
This could help make video smoother in some cases. The main
downsides are increased video RAM requirements for the surfaces
and laggier display response to user commands (display changes
only become visible some time after they're queued). The graph‐
ics driver implementation may also have limits on the length of
maximum queuing time or number of queued surfaces that work well
or at all.

direct3d_shaders (Windows only)
Video output driver that uses the Direct3D interface.

NOTE:
This driver is for compatibility with systems that don't pro‐
vide proper OpenGL drivers.

prefer-stretchrect
Use IDirect3DDevice9::StretchRect over other methods if
possible.

disable-stretchrect
Never render the video using IDirect3DDe‐
vice9::StretchRect.

disable-textures
Never render the video using D3D texture rendering. Ren‐
dering with textures + shader will still be allowed. Add
disable-shaders to completely disable video rendering
with textures.

disable-shaders
Never use shaders when rendering video.

only-8bit
Never render YUV video with more than 8 bits per compo‐
nent. Using this flag will force software conversion to
8-bit.

disable-texture-align
Normally texture sizes are always aligned to 16. With
this option enabled, the video texture will always have
exactly the same size as the video itself.

Debug options. These might be incorrect, might be removed in the
future, might crash, might cause slow downs, etc. Contact the
developers if you actually need any of these for performance or
proper operation.

force-power-of-2
Always force textures to power of 2, even if the device
reports non-power-of-2 texture sizes as supported.

texture-memory=<mode>
Only affects operation with shaders/texturing enabled,
and (E)OSD. Possible values:

default (default)
Use D3DPOOL_DEFAULT, with a D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM tex‐
ture for locking. If the driver supports D3DDEV‐
CAPS_TEXTURESYSTEMMEMORY, D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM is
used directly.

default-pool
Use D3DPOOL_DEFAULT. (Like default, but never use
a shadow-texture.)

default-pool-shadow
Use D3DPOOL_DEFAULT, with a D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM tex‐
ture for locking. (Like default, but always force
the shadow-texture.)

managed
Use D3DPOOL_MANAGED.

scratch
Use D3DPOOL_SCRATCH, with a D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM tex‐
ture for locking.

swap-discard
Use D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD, which might be faster. Might
be slower too, as it must(?) clear every frame.

exact-backbuffer
Always resize the backbuffer to window size.

direct3d (Windows only)
Same as direct3d_shaders, but with the options disable-textures
and disable-shaders forced.

NOTE:
This driver is for compatibility with old systems.

opengl OpenGL video output driver. It supports extended scaling meth‐
ods, dithering and color management.

By default, it tries to use fast and fail-safe settings. Use the
alias opengl-hq to use this driver with defaults set to high
quality rendering.

Requires at least OpenGL 2.1.

Some features are available with OpenGL 3 capable graphics driv‐
ers only (or if the necessary extensions are available).

OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0 are supported as well.

Hardware decoding over OpenGL-interop is supported to some
degree. Note that in this mode, some corner case might not be
gracefully handled, and color space conversion and chroma upsam‐
pling is generally in the hand of the hardware decoder APIs.

opengl makes use of FBOs by default. Sometimes you can achieve
better quality or performance by changing the fbo-format subop‐
tion to rgb16f, rgb32f or rgb. Known problems include Mesa/Intel
not accepting rgb16, Mesa sometimes not being compiled with
float texture support, and some OS X setups being very slow with
rgb16 but fast with rgb32f. If you have problems, you can also
try passing the dumb-mode=yes sub-option.

dumb-mode=<yes|no>
This mode is extremely restricted, and will disable most
extended OpenGL features. This 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. It's also enabled
automatically if nothing uses features which require
FBOs.

This option might be silently removed in the future.

scale=<filter>

bilinear
Bilinear hardware texture filtering (fastest, very low
quality). This is the default for compatibility rea‐
sons.

spline36
Mid quality and speed. This is the default when using
opengl-hq.

lanczos
Lanczos scaling. Provides mid quality and speed. Gen‐
erally 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 corresponds to the old lanczos3 alias if
the default radius is used, while lanczos2 corresponds
to a radius of 2.

(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, precon‐
figured 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) oversam‐
ples pixels, so that pixels overlapping edges get lin‐
early interpolated instead of rounded. This essen‐
tially 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 "smooth‐
motion" (see tscale).

custom A user-defined custom shader (see scale-shader).

There are some more filters, but most are not as useful. For
a complete list, pass help as value, e.g.:

mpv --vo=opengl:scale=help

scale-param1=<value>, scale-param2=<value>
Set filter parameters. Ignored if the filter is not tun‐
able. 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 inter‐
polate, thus behaving as if the regular nearest
neighbour algorithm was used. Defaults to 0.0.

scale-blur=<value>
Kernel 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 recom‐
mended to stick to values between 0.8 and 1.2.

scale-radius=<value>
Set radius for filters listed below, must be a float num‐
ber between 0.5 and 16.0. Defaults to the filter's pre‐
ferred radius if not specified.
sinc and derivatives, jinc and derivatives, gaussian,
box and triangle

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>
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 bilin‐
ear and bicubic_fast.

scale-window=<window>
(Advanced users only) Choose a custom windowing function
for the kernel. Defaults to the filter's preferred win‐
dow if unset. Use scale-window=help to get a list of sup‐
ported windowing functions.

scale-wparam=<window>
(Advanced users only) Configure the parameter for the
window function given by scale-window. Ignored if the
window is not tunable. Currently, this affects the fol‐
lowing 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 bilinearly interpolated from those sam‐
ples, 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 whatever is set with
scale. Bilinear will reproduce the source image perfectly
if no scaling is performed. Note that this option never
affects cscale.

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.

In theory, this can sometimes lead to sporadic and tempo‐
rary image corruption (because reupload is not retried
when it fails).

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
can not be detected. Often, LCD panels will do dithering
on their own, which conflicts with opengl's dithering 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|no>
Select dithering algorithm (default: fruit). (Normally,
the dither-depth option controls whether dithering is
enabled.)

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 orienta‐
tion 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.

debug Check for OpenGL errors, i.e. call glGetError(). Also,
request a debug OpenGL context (which does nothing with
current graphics drivers as of this writing).

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 dis‐
abled. 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 set‐
ting.

Note that this relies on vsync to work, see swapinterval
for more information.

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 --display-fps).

dscale=<filter>
Like scale, but apply these filters on downscaling
instead. If this option is unset, the filter implied by
scale will be applied.

cscale=<filter>
As scale, but for interpolating chroma information. If
the image is not subsampled, this option is ignored
entirely.

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 convolu‐
tion filters (use tscale=help to get a list). The default
is mitchell.

Note that the maximum supported filter radius is cur‐
rently 3, due to limitations in the number of video tex‐
tures that can be loaded simultaneously.

tscale-clamp
Clamp the tscale filter kernel's value range to [0-1].
This 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.

dscale-radius, cscale-radius, tscale-radius, etc.
Set filter parameters for dscale, cscale and tscale,
respectively.

See the corresponding options for scale.

linear-scaling
Scale in linear light. It should only be used with a
fbo-format that has at least 16 bit precision.

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.

prescale=<filter>
This option provides non-convolution-based filters for
upscaling. These filters resize the video to multiple of
the original size (all currently supported prescalers can
only perform image doubling in a single pass). Generally
another convolution based filter (the main scaler) will
be applied after prescaler to match the target display
size.

none Disable all prescalers. This is the default.

superxbr
A relatively fast prescaler originally developed
for pixel art.

Some parameters can be tuned with superxbr-sharp‐
ness and superxbr-edge-strength options.

nnedi3 An artificial neural network based deinterlacer,
which can be used to upscale images.

Extremely slow and requires a recent mid or high
end graphics card to work smoothly (as of 2015).

Note that all the filters above are designed (or imple‐
mented) to process luma plane only and probably won't
work as intended for video in RGB format.

prescale-passes=<1..5>
The number of passes to apply the prescaler (defaults to
be 1). Setting it to 2 will perform a 4x upscaling.

prescale-downscaling-threshold=<0..32>
This option prevents "overkill" use of prescalers, which
can be caused by misconfiguration, or user trying to play
a video with much larger size. With this option, user can
specify the maximal allowed downscaling ratio in both
dimension. To satisfy it, the number of passes for
prescaler will be reduced, and if necessary prescaler
could also be disabled.

The default value is 2.0, and should be able to prevent
most seemingly unreasonable use of prescalers. Most user
would probably want to set it to a smaller value between
1.0 and 1.5 for better performance.

A value less than 1.0 will disable the check.

nnedi3-neurons=<16|32|64|128>
Specify the neurons for nnedi3 prescaling (defaults to be
32). The rendering time is expected to be linear to the
number of neurons.

nnedi3-window=<8x4|8x6>
Specify the size of local window for sampling in nnedi3
prescaling (defaults to be 8x4). The 8x6 window produces
sharper images, but is also slower.

nnedi3-upload=<ubo|shader>
Specify how to upload the NN weights to GPU. Depending on
the graphics card, driver, shader compiler and nnedi3
settings, both method can be faster or slower.

ubo Upload these weights via uniform buffer objects.
This is the default. (requires OpenGL 3.1 / GLES
3.0)

shader Hard code all the weights into the shader source
code. (requires OpenGL 3.3 / GLES 3.0)

pre-shaders=<files>, post-shaders=<files>, scale-shader=<file>
Custom GLSL fragment shaders.

pre-shaders (list)
These get applied after conversion to RGB and
before linearization and upscaling. Operates on
non-linear RGB (same as input). This is the best
place to put things like sharpen filters.

scale-shader
This gets used instead of scale/cscale when those
options are set to custom. The colorspace it oper‐
ates on depends on the values of linear-scaling
and sigmoid-upscaling, so no assumptions should be
made here.

post-shaders (list)
These get applied after upscaling and subtitle
blending (when blend-subtitles is enabled), but
before color management. Operates on linear RGB
if linear-scaling is in effect, otherwise non-lin‐
ear RGB. This is the best place for colorspace
transformations (eg. saturation mapping).

These files must define a function with the following
signature:

vec4 sample(sampler2D tex, vec2 pos, vec2 tex_size)

The meanings of the parameters are as follows:

sampler2D tex
The source texture for the shader.

vec2 pos
The position to be sampled, in coordinate space
[0-1].

vec2 tex_size
The size of the texture, in pixels. This may dif‐
fer from image_size, eg. for subsampled content or
for post-shaders.

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 image_size
The size in pixels of the input image.

For example, a shader that inverts the colors could look
like this:

vec4 sample(sampler2D tex, vec2 pos, vec2 tex_size)
{
vec4 color = texture(tex, pos);
return vec4(1.0 - color.rgb, color.a);
}

deband Enable the debanding algorithm. This greatly reduces the
amount of visible banding, blocking and other quantiza‐
tion artifacts, at the expensive of very slightly blur‐
ring some of the finest details. In practice, it's virtu‐
ally 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 com‐
pute. 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 progres‐
sively 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 proba‐
bly 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)

sigmoid-upscaling
When upscaling, use a sigmoidal color transform to avoid
emphasizing ringing artifacts. This also implies lin‐
ear-scaling.

sigmoid-center
The center of the sigmoid curve used for sigmoid-upscal‐
ing, 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-upscal‐
ing, must be a float between 1.0 and 20.0. Defaults to
6.5 if not specified.

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 alterna‐
tives like the ewa_lanczossharp scale filter, or the
scale-blur sub-option.

(This feature is the replacement for the old sharpen3 and
sharpen5 scalers.)

glfinish
Call glFinish() before and after swapping buffers
(default: disabled). Slower, but might improve results
when doing framedropping. Can completely ruin perfor‐
mance. The details depend entirely on the OpenGL driver.

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.

vsync-fences=<N>
Synchronize the CPU to the Nth past frame using the
GL_ARB_sync extension. A value of 0 disables this behav‐
ior (default). A value of 1 means it will synchronize to
the current frame after rendering it. Like glfinish and
waitvsync, this can lower or ruin performance. Its
advantage is that it can span multiple frames, and effec‐
tively limit the number of frames the GPU queues ahead
(which also has an influence on vsync).

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 composi‐
tor 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.

sw Continue even if a software renderer is detected.

backend=<sys>
The value auto (the default) selects the windowing back‐
end. 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

win Win32/WGL

angle Direct3D11 through the OpenGL ES translation layer
ANGLE. This supports almost everything the win
backend does, except ICC profiles, high bit depth
video input, and the nnedi3 prescaler.

dxinterop (experimental)
Win32, using WGL for rendering and Direct3D 9Ex
for presentation. Works on Nvidia and AMD only.

x11 X11/GLX

wayland
Wayland/EGL

drm-egl
DRM/EGL

x11egl X11/EGL

es=<mode>
Select whether to use GLES:

yes Try to prefer ES over Desktop GL

no Try to prefer desktop GL over ES

auto Use the default for each backend (default)

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: rgb, rgba, rgb8, rgb10,
rgb10_a2, rgb16, rgb16f, rgb32f, rgba12, rgba16, rgba16f,
rgba32f. Default: auto, which maps to rgba16 on desktop
GL, and rgb10_a2 on GLES (e.g. ANGLE).

gamma=<0.1..2.0>
Set a gamma value (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 Brightly illuminated (default)

0.9 Slightly dim

0.8 Pitch black room

gamma-auto
Automatically corrects the gamma value depending on ambi‐
ent lighting conditions (adding a gamma boost for dark
rooms).

With ambient illuminance of 64lux, mpv will pick the 1.0
gamma value (no boost), and slightly increase the boost
up until 0.8 for 16lux.

NOTE: Only implemented on OS X.

target-prim=<value>
Specifies the primaries of the display. Video colors will
be adapted to this colorspace if necessary. Valid values
are:

auto Disable any adaptation (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)

target-trc=<value>
Specifies the transfer characteristics (gamma) of the
display. Video colors will be adjusted to this curve.
Valid values are:

auto Disable any adaptation (default)

bt.1886
ITU-R BT.1886 curve, without the brightness drop
(approx. 1.961)

srgb IEC 61966-2-4 (sRGB)

linear Linear light output

gamma1.8
Pure power curve (gamma 1.8), also used for Apple
RGB

gamma2.2
Pure power curve (gamma 2.2)

gamma2.8
Pure power curve (gamma 2.8), also used for
BT.470-BG

prophoto
ProPhoto RGB (ROMM)

icc-profile=<file>
Load an ICC profile and use it to transform linear 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 sys‐
tem.

NOTE: On Windows, the default profile must be an ICC pro‐
file. WCS profiles are not supported.

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 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 transforma‐
tion (when using icc-profile).

0 perceptual

1 relative colorimetric (default)

2 saturation

3 absolute colorimetric

3dlut-size=<r>x<g>x<b>
Size of the 3D LUT generated from the ICC profile in each
dimension. Default is 128x256x64. Sizes must be a power
of two, and 512 at most.

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 and post-shader. It also increases subtitle perfor‐
mance when using interpolation.

The downside of enabling this is that it restricts subti‐
tles 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. Nor‐
mally, 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 a black background.

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 nor‐
mal framebuffer. Note that if you set the fbo-for‐
mat option to a non-default value, a format with
alpha must be specified, or this won't work.

no Ignore alpha component.

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.

background=<color>
Color used to draw parts of the mpv window not covered by
video. See --osd-color option how colors are defined.

opengl-hq
Same as opengl, but with default settings for high quality ren‐
dering.

This is equivalent to:

--vo=opengl:scale=spline36:cscale=spline36:dscale=mitchell:dither-depth=auto:correct-downscaling:sigmoid-upscaling:deband:es=no

Note that some cheaper LCDs do dithering that gravely interferes
with opengl's dithering. Disabling dithering with
dither-depth=no helps.

sdl SDL 2.0+ Render video output driver, depending on system with or
without hardware acceleration. Should work on all platforms sup‐
ported by SDL 2.0. For tuning, refer to your copy of the file
SDL_hints.h.

NOTE:
This driver is for compatibility with systems that don't pro‐
vide proper graphics drivers, or which support GLES only.

sw Continue even if a software renderer is detected.

switch-mode
Instruct SDL to switch the monitor video mode when going
fullscreen.

vaapi Intel VA API video output driver with support for hardware
decoding. Note that there is absolutely no reason to use this,
other than wanting to use hardware decoding to save power on
laptops, or possibly preventing video tearing with some setups.

NOTE:
This driver is for compatibility with crappy systems. You can
use vaapi hardware decoding with --vo=opengl too.

scaling=<algorithm>

default
Driver default (mpv default as well).

fast Fast, but low quality.

hq Unspecified driver dependent high-quality scaling,
slow.

nla non-linear anamorphic scaling

deint-mode=<mode>
Select deinterlacing algorithm. Note that by default
deinterlacing is initially always off, and needs to be
enabled with the d key (default key binding for cycle
deinterlace).

This option doesn't apply if libva supports video post
processing (vpp). In this case, the default for
deint-mode is no, and enabling deinterlacing via user
interaction using the methods mentioned above actually
inserts the vavpp video filter. If vpp is not actually
supported with the libva backend in use, you can use this
option to forcibly enable VO based deinterlacing.

no Don't allow deinterlacing (default for newer
libva).

first-field
Show only first field (going by --field-domi‐
nance).

bob bob deinterlacing (default for older libva).

scaled-osd=<yes|no>
If enabled, then the OSD is rendered at video resolution
and scaled to display resolution. By default, this is
disabled, and the OSD is rendered at display resolution
if the driver supports it.

null Produces no video output. Useful for benchmarking.

Usually, it's better to disable video with --no-video instead.

fps=<value>
Simulate display FPS. This artificially limits how many
frames the VO accepts per second.

caca Color ASCII art video output driver that works on a text con‐
sole.

NOTE:
This driver is a joke.

image Output each frame into an image file in the current directory.
Each file takes the frame number padded with leading zeros as
name.

format=<format>
Select the image file format.

jpg JPEG files, extension .jpg. (Default.)

jpeg JPEG files, extension .jpeg.

png PNG files.

ppm Portable bitmap format.

pgm Portable graymap format.

pgmyuv Portable graymap format, using the YV12 pixel for‐
mat.

tga Truevision TGA.

png-compression=<0-9>
PNG compression factor (speed vs. file size tradeoff)
(default: 7)

png-filter=<0-5>
Filter applied prior to PNG compression (0 = none; 1 =
sub; 2 = up; 3 = average; 4 = Paeth; 5 = mixed) (default:
5)

jpeg-quality=<0-100>
JPEG quality factor (default: 90)

(no-)jpeg-progressive
Specify standard or progressive JPEG (default: no).

(no-)jpeg-baseline
Specify use of JPEG baseline or not (default: yes).

jpeg-optimize=<0-100>
JPEG optimization factor (default: 100)

jpeg-smooth=<0-100>
smooth factor (default: 0)

jpeg-dpi=<1->
JPEG DPI (default: 72)

outdir=<dirname>
Specify the directory to save the image files to
(default: ./).

wayland (Wayland only)
Wayland shared memory video output as fallback for opengl.

NOTE:
This driver is for compatibility with systems that don't pro‐
vide working OpenGL drivers.

alpha Use a buffer format that supports videos and images with
alpha information

rgb565 Use RGB565 as buffer format. This format is implemented
on most platforms, especially on embedded where it is far
more efficient then RGB8888.

triple-buffering
Use 3 buffers instead of 2. This can lead to more fluid
playback, but uses more memory.

opengl-cb
For use with libmpv direct OpenGL embedding; useless in any
other contexts. (See <mpv/opengl_cb.h>.)

This also supports many of the suboptions the opengl VO has. Run
mpv --vo=opengl-cb:help for a list.

This also supports the vo_cmdline command.

rpi (Raspberry Pi)
Native video output on the Raspberry Pi using the MMAL API.

display=<number>
Select the display number on which the video overlay
should be shown (default: 0).

layer=<number>
Select the dispmanx layer on which the video overlay
should be shown (default: -10). Note that mpv will also
use the 2 layers above the selected layer, to handle the
window background and OSD. Actual video rendering will
happen on the layer above the selected layer.

background=<yes|no>
Whether to render a black background behind the video
(default: no). Normally it's better to kill the console
framebuffer instead, which gives better performance.

osd=<yes|no>
Enabled by default. If disabled with no, no OSD layer is
created. This also means there will be no subtitles ren‐
dered.

drm (Direct Rendering Manager)
Video output driver using Kernel Mode Setting / Direct Rendering
Manager. Should be used when one doesn't want to install
full-blown graphical environment (e.g. no X). Does not support
hardware acceleration (if you need this, check the drm-egl back‐
end for opengl VO).

connector=<number>
Select the connector to use (usually this is a monitor.)
If set to -1, mpv renders the output on the first avail‐
able connector. (default: -1)

devpath=<filename>
Path to graphic card device. (default: /dev/dri/card0)

mode=<number>
Mode ID to use (resolution, bit depth and frame rate).
(default: 0)

AUDIO FILTERS
Audio filters allow you to modify the audio stream and its properties.
The syntax is:

--af=<filter1[=parameter1:parameter2:...],filter2,...>
Setup a chain of audio filters.

NOTE:
To get a full list of available audio filters, see --af=help.

Also, keep in mind that most actual filters are available via the
lavfi wrapper, which gives you access to most of libavfilter's fil‐
ters. This includes all filters that have been ported from MPlayer
to libavfilter.

You can also set defaults for each filter. The defaults are applied
before the normal filter parameters.

--af-defaults=<filter1[=parameter1:parameter2:...],filter2,...>
Set defaults for each filter.

Audio filters are managed in lists. There are a few commands to manage
the filter list:

--af-add=<filter1[,filter2,...]>
Appends the filters given as arguments to the filter list.

--af-pre=<filter1[,filter2,...]>
Prepends the filters given as arguments to the filter list.

--af-del=<index1[,index2,...]>
Deletes the filters at the given indexes. Index numbers start at
0, negative numbers address the end of the list (-1 is the
last).

--af-clr
Completely empties the filter list.

Available filters are:

lavrresample[=option1:option2:...]
This filter uses libavresample (or libswresample, depending on
the build) to change sample rate, sample format, or channel lay‐
out of the audio stream. This filter is automatically enabled
if the audio output does not support the audio configuration of
the file being played.

It supports only the following sample formats: u8, s16, s32,
float.

filter-size=<length>
Length of the filter with respect to the lower sampling
rate. (default: 16)

phase-shift=<count>
Log2 of the number of polyphase entries. (..., 10->1024,
11->2048, 12->4096, ...) (default: 10->1024)

cutoff=<cutoff>
Cutoff frequency (0.0-1.0), default set depending upon
filter length.

linear If set then filters will be linearly interpolated between
polyphase entries. (default: no)

no-detach
Do not detach if input and output audio format/rate/chan‐
nels match. (If you just want to set defaults for this
filter that will be used even by automatically inserted
lavrresample instances, you should prefer setting them
with --af-defaults=lavrresample:....)

normalize=<yes|no>
Whether to normalize when remixing channel layouts
(default: yes). This is e.g. applied when downmixing sur‐
round audio to stereo. The advantage is that this guaran‐
tees that no clipping can happen. Unfortunately, this can
also lead to too low volume levels. Whether you enable or
disable this is essentially a matter of taste, but the
default uses the safer choice.

o=<string>
Set AVOptions on the SwrContext or AVAudioResampleCon‐
text. These should be documented by FFmpeg or Libav.

lavcac3enc[=tospdif[:bitrate[:minch]]]
Encode multi-channel audio to AC-3 at runtime using libavcodec.
Supports 16-bit native-endian input format, maximum 6 channels.
The output is big-endian when outputting a raw AC-3 stream,
native-endian when outputting to S/PDIF. If the input sample
rate is not 48 kHz, 44.1 kHz or 32 kHz, it will be resampled to
48 kHz.

tospdif=<yes|no>
Output raw AC-3 stream if no, output to S/PDIF for
pass-through if yes (default).

bitrate=<rate>
The bitrate use for the AC-3 stream. Set it to 384 to get
384 kbps.

The default is 640. Some receivers might not be able to
handle this.

Valid values: 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160,
192, 224, 256, 320, 384, 448, 512, 576, 640.

The special value auto selects a default bitrate based on
the input channel number:

1ch 96

2ch 192

3ch 224

4ch 384

5ch 448

6ch 448

minch=<n>
If the input channel number is less than <minch>, the
filter will detach itself (default: 3).

equalizer=g1:g2:g3:...:g10
10 octave band graphic equalizer, implemented using 10 IIR
band-pass filters. This means that it works regardless of what
type of audio is being played back. The center frequencies for
the 10 bands are:

┌────┬────────────┐
│No. │ frequency │
└────┴────────────┘

│0 │ 31.25 Hz │
├────┼────────────┤
│1 │ 62.50 Hz │
├────┼────────────┤
│2 │ 125.00 Hz │
├────┼────────────┤
│3 │ 250.00 Hz │
├────┼────────────┤
│4 │ 500.00 Hz │
├────┼────────────┤
│5 │ 1.00 kHz │
├────┼────────────┤
│6 │ 2.00 kHz │
├────┼────────────┤
│7 │ 4.00 kHz │
├────┼────────────┤
│8 │ 8.00 kHz │
├────┼────────────┤
│9 │ 16.00 kHz │
└────┴────────────┘

If the sample rate of the sound being played is lower than the
center frequency for a frequency band, then that band will be
disabled. A known bug with this filter is that the characteris‐
tics for the uppermost band are not completely symmetric if the
sample rate is close to the center frequency of that band. This
problem can be worked around by upsampling the sound using a
resampling filter before it reaches this filter.

<g1>:<g2>:<g3>:...:<g10>
floating point numbers representing the gain in dB for
each frequency band (-12-12)

Example

mpv --af=equalizer=11:11:10:5:0:-12:0:5:12:12 media.avi
Would amplify the sound in the upper and lower fre‐
quency region while canceling it almost completely
around 1 kHz.

channels=nch[:routes]
Can be used for adding, removing, routing and copying audio
channels. If only <nch> is given, the default routing is used.
It works as follows: If the number of output channels is greater
than the number of input channels, empty channels are inserted
(except when mixing from mono to stereo; then the mono channel
is duplicated). If the number of output channels is less than
the number of input channels, the exceeding channels are trun‐
cated.

<nch> number of output channels (1-8)

<routes>
List of , separated routes, in the form
from1-to1,from2-to2,.... Each pair defines where to
route each channel. There can be at most 8 routes. With‐
out this argument, the default routing is used. Since ,
is also used to separate filters, you must quote this
argument with [...] or similar.

Examples

mpv --af=channels=4:[0-1,1-0,2-2,3-3] media.avi
Would change the number of channels to 4 and set up 4
routes that swap channel 0 and channel 1 and leave
channel 2 and 3 intact. Observe that if media con‐
taining two channels were played back, channels 2 and
3 would contain silence but 0 and 1 would still be
swapped.

mpv --af=channels=6:[0-0,0-1,0-2,0-3] media.avi
Would change the number of channels to 6 and set up 4
routes that copy channel 0 to channels 0 to 3. Channel
4 and 5 will contain silence.

NOTE:
You should probably not use this filter. If you want to
change the output channel layout, try the format filter,
which can make mpv automatically up- and downmix standard
channel layouts.

format=format:srate:channels:out-format:out-srate:out-channels
Does not do any format conversion itself. Rather, it may cause
the filter system to insert necessary conversion filters before
or after this filter if needed. It is primarily useful for con‐
trolling the audio format going into other filters. To specify
the format for audio output, see --audio-format, --audio-sam‐
plerate, and --audio-channels. This filter is able to force a
particular format, whereas --audio-* may be overridden by the ao
based on output compatibility.

All parameters are optional. The first 3 parameters restrict
what the filter accepts as input. They will therefore cause con‐
version filters to be inserted before this one. The out- param‐
eters tell the filters or audio outputs following this filter
how to interpret the data without actually doing a conversion.
Setting these will probably just break things unless you really
know you want this for some reason, such as testing or dealing
with broken media.

<format>
Force conversion to this format. Use --af=format=for‐
mat=help to get a list of valid formats.

<srate>
Force conversion to a specific sample rate. The rate is
an integer, 48000 for example.

<channels>
Force mixing to a specific channel layout. See
--audio-channels option for possible values.

<out-format>

<out-srate>

<out-channels>

NOTE: this filter used to be named force. The old format filter
used to do conversion itself, unlike this one which lets the
filter system handle the conversion.

volume[=<volumedb>[:...]]
Implements software volume control. Use this filter with caution
since it can reduce the signal to noise ratio of the sound. In
most cases it is best to use the Master volume control of your
sound card or the volume knob on your amplifier.

NOTE: This filter is not reentrant and can therefore only be
enabled once for every audio stream.

<volumedb>
Sets the desired gain in dB for all channels in the
stream from -200 dB to +60 dB, where -200 dB mutes the
sound completely and +60 dB equals a gain of 1000
(default: 0).

replaygain-track
Adjust volume gain according to the track-gain replaygain
value stored in the file metadata.

replaygain-album
Like replaygain-track, but using the album-gain value
instead.

replaygain-preamp
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
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.

softclip
Turns soft clipping on. Soft-clipping can make the sound
more smooth if very high volume levels are used. Enable
this option if the dynamic range of the loudspeakers is
very low.

WARNING: This feature creates distortion and should be
considered a last resort.

s16 Force S16 sample format if set. Lower quality, but might
be faster in some situations.

detach Remove the filter if the volume is not changed at audio
filter config time. Useful with replaygain: if the cur‐
rent file has no replaygain tags, then the filter will be
removed if this option is enabled. (If --softvol=yes is
used and the player volume controls are used during play‐
back, a different volume filter will be inserted.)

Example

mpv --af=volume=10.1 media.avi
Would amplify the sound by 10.1 dB and hard-clip if
the sound level is too high.

pan=n:[<matrix>]
Mixes channels arbitrarily. Basically a combination of the vol‐
ume and the channels filter that can be used to down-mix many
channels to only a few, e.g. stereo to mono, or vary the "width"
of the center speaker in a surround sound system. This filter is
hard to use, and will require some tinkering before the desired
result is obtained. The number of options for this filter
depends on the number of output channels. An example how to
downmix a six-channel file to two channels with this filter can
be found in the examples section near the end.

<n> Number of output channels (1-8).

<matrix>
A list of values
[L00,L01,L02,...,L10,L11,L12,...,Ln0,Ln1,Ln2,...], where
each element Lij means how much of input channel i is
mixed into output channel j (range 0-1). So in principle
you first have n numbers saying what to do with the first
input channel, then n numbers that act on the second
input channel etc. If you do not specify any numbers for
some input channels, 0 is assumed. Note that the values
are separated by ,, which is already used by the option
parser to separate filters. This is why you must quote
the value list with [...] or similar.

Examples

mpv --af=pan=1:[0.5,0.5] media.avi
Would downmix from stereo to mono.

mpv --af=pan=3:[1,0,0.5,0,1,0.5] media.avi
Would give 3 channel output leaving channels 0 and 1
intact, and mix channels 0 and 1 into output channel 2
(which could be sent to a subwoofer for example).

NOTE:
If you just want to force remixing to a certain output chan‐
nel layout, it is easier to use the format filter. For exam‐
ple, mpv '--af=format=channels=5.1' '--audio-channels=5.1'
would always force remixing audio to 5.1 and output it like
this.

delay[=[ch1,ch2,...]]
Delays the sound to the loudspeakers such that the sound from
the different channels arrives at the listening position simul‐
taneously. It is only useful if you have more than 2 loudspeak‐
ers.

[ch1,ch2,...]
The delay in ms that should be imposed on each channel
(floating point number between 0 and 1000).

To calculate the required delay for the different channels, do
as follows:

1. Measure the distance to the loudspeakers in meters in rela‐
tion to your listening position, giving you the distances s1
to s5 (for a 5.1 system). There is no point in compensating
for the subwoofer (you will not hear the difference anyway).

2. Subtract the distances s1 to s5 from the maximum distance,
i.e. s[i] = max(s) - s[i]; i = 1...5.

3. Calculate the required delays in ms as d[i] = 1000*s[i]/342;
i = 1...5.

Example

mpv --af=delay=[10.5,10.5,0,0,7,0] media.avi
Would delay front left and right by 10.5 ms, the two
rear channels and the subwoofer by 0 ms and the center
channel by 7 ms.

drc[=method:target]
Applies dynamic range compression. This maximizes the volume by
compressing the audio signal's dynamic range. (Formerly called
volnorm.)

<method>
Sets the used method.

1 Use a single sample to smooth the variations via
the standard weighted mean over past samples
(default).

2 Use several samples to smooth the variations via
the standard weighted mean over past samples.

<target>
Sets the target amplitude as a fraction of the maximum
for the sample type (default: 0.25).

NOTE:
This filter can cause distortion with audio signals that have
a very large dynamic range.

scaletempo[=option1:option2:...]
Scales audio tempo without altering pitch, optionally synced to
playback speed (default).

This works by playing 'stride' ms of audio at normal speed then
consuming 'stride*scale' ms of input audio. It pieces the
strides together by blending 'overlap'% of stride with audio
following the previous stride. It optionally performs a short
statistical analysis on the next 'search' ms of audio to deter‐
mine the best overlap position.

scale=<amount>
Nominal amount to scale tempo. Scales this amount in
addition to speed. (default: 1.0)

stride=<amount>
Length in milliseconds to output each stride. Too high of
a value will cause noticeable skips at high scale amounts
and an echo at low scale amounts. Very low values will
alter pitch. Increasing improves performance. (default:
60)

overlap=<percent>
Percentage of stride to overlap. Decreasing improves per‐
formance. (default: .20)

search=<amount>
Length in milliseconds to search for best overlap posi‐
tion. Decreasing improves performance greatly. On slow
systems, you will probably want to set this very low.
(default: 14)

speed=<tempo|pitch|both|none>
Set response to speed change.

tempo Scale tempo in sync with speed (default).

pitch Reverses effect of filter. Scales pitch without
altering tempo. Add this to your input.conf to
step by musical semi-tones:

[ multiply speed 0.9438743126816935
] multiply speed 1.059463094352953

WARNING:
Loses sync with video.

both Scale both tempo and pitch.

none Ignore speed changes.

Examples

mpv --af=scaletempo --speed=1.2 media.ogg
Would play media at 1.2x normal speed, with audio at
normal pitch. Changing playback speed would change
audio tempo to match.

mpv --af=scaletempo=scale=1.2:speed=none --speed=1.2
media.ogg
Would play media at 1.2x normal speed, with audio at
normal pitch, but changing playback speed would have
no effect on audio tempo.

mpv --af=scaletempo=stride=30:overlap=.50:search=10 media.ogg
Would tweak the quality and performance parameters.

mpv --af=format=float,scaletempo media.ogg
Would make scaletempo use float code. Maybe faster on
some platforms.

mpv --af=scaletempo=scale=1.2:speed=pitch audio.ogg
Would play media at 1.2x normal speed, with audio at
normal pitch. Changing playback speed would change
pitch, leaving audio tempo at 1.2x.

rubberband
High quality pitch correction with librubberband. This can be
used in place of scaletempo, and will be used to adjust audio
pitch when playing at speed different from normal.

This filter has a number of sub-options. You can list them with
mpv --af=rubberband=help. This will also show the default values
for each option. The options are not documented here, because
they are merely passed to librubberband. Look at the librubber‐
band documentation to learn what each option does:
http://breakfastquay.com/rubberband/code-doc/classRubberBand_1_1RubberBandStretcher.html
(The mapping of the mpv rubberband filter sub-option names and
values to those of librubberband follows a simple pattern:
"Option" + Name + Value.)

lavfi=graph
Filter audio using FFmpeg's libavfilter.

<graph>
Libavfilter graph. See lavfi video filter for details -
the graph syntax is the same.

WARNING:
Don't forget to quote libavfilter graphs as described
in the lavfi video filter section.

o=<string>
AVOptions.

VIDEO FILTERS
Video filters allow you to modify the video stream and its properties.
The syntax is:

--vf=<filter1[=parameter1:parameter2:...],filter2,...>
Setup a chain of video filters.

You can also set defaults for each filter. The defaults are applied
before the normal filter parameters.

--vf-defaults=<filter1[=parameter1:parameter2:...],filter2,...>
Set defaults for each filter.

NOTE:
To get a full list of available video filters, see --vf=help.

Video filters are managed in lists. There are a few commands to manage
the filter list.

--vf-add=<filter1[,filter2,...]>
Appends the filters given as arguments to the filter list.

--vf-pre=<filter1[,filter2,...]>
Prepends the filters given as arguments to the filter list.

--vf-del=<index1[,index2,...]>
Deletes the filters at the given indexes. Index numbers start at
0, negative numbers address the end of the list (-1 is the
last).

--vf-clr
Completely empties the filter list.

With filters that support it, you can access parameters by their name.

--vf=<filter>=help
Prints the parameter names and parameter value ranges for a par‐
ticular filter.

--vf=<filter=named_parameter1=value1[:named_parameter2=value2:...]>
Sets a named parameter to the given value. Use on and off or yes
and no to set flag parameters.

Available filters are:

crop[=w:h:x:y]
Crops the given part of the image and discards the rest. Useful
to remove black bands from widescreen videos.

<w>,<h>
Cropped width and height, defaults to original width and
height.

<x>,<y>
Position of the cropped picture, defaults to center.

expand[=w:h:x:y:aspect:round]
Expands (not scales) video resolution to the given value and
places the unscaled original at coordinates x, y.

<w>,<h>
Expanded width,height (default: original width,height).
Negative values for w and h are treated as offsets to the
original size.

Example

expand=0:-50:0:0
Adds a 50 pixel border to the bottom of the
picture.

<x>,<y>
position of original image on the expanded image
(default: center)

<aspect>
Expands to fit an aspect instead of a resolution
(default: 0).

Example

expand=800::::4/3
Expands to 800x600, unless the source is higher
resolution, in which case it expands to fill a
4/3 aspect.

<round>
Rounds up to make both width and height divisible by <r>
(default: 1).

flip Flips the image upside down.

mirror Mirrors the image on the Y axis.

rotate[=0|90|180|270]
Rotates the image by a multiple of 90 degrees clock-wise.

scale[=w:h:param:param2:chr-drop:noup:arnd
Scales the image with the software scaler (slow) and performs a
YUV<->RGB color space conversion (see also --sws).

All parameters are optional.

<w>:<h>
scaled width/height (default: original width/height)

0 scaled d_width/d_height

-1 original width/height

-2 Calculate w/h using the other dimension and the
prescaled aspect ratio.

-3 Calculate w/h using the other dimension and the
original aspect ratio.

-(n+8) Like -n above, but rounding the dimension to the
closest multiple of 16.

<param>[:<param2>] (see also --sws)
Set some scaling parameters depending on the type of
scaler selected with --sws:

--sws=2 (bicubic): B (blurring) and C (ringing)
0.00:0.60 default
0.00:0.75 VirtualDub's "precise bicubic"
0.00:0.50 Catmull-Rom spline
0.33:0.33 Mitchell-Netravali spline
1.00:0.00 cubic B-spline

--sws=7 (Gaussian): sharpness (0 (soft) - 100 (sharp))

--sws=9 (Lanczos): filter length (1-10)

<chr-drop>
chroma skipping

0 Use all available input lines for chroma
(default).

1 Use only every 2. input line for chroma.

2 Use only every 4. input line for chroma.

3 Use only every 8. input line for chroma.

<noup> Disallow upscaling past the original dimensions.

0 Allow upscaling (default).

1 Disallow upscaling if one dimension exceeds its
original value.

2 Disallow upscaling if both dimensions exceed their
original values.

<arnd> Accurate rounding for the vertical scaler, which may be
faster or slower than the default rounding.

no Disable accurate rounding (default).

yes Enable accurate rounding.

dsize[=w:h:aspect-method:r:aspect]
Changes the intended display aspect at an arbitrary point in the
filter chain. Aspect can be given as a fraction (4/3) or float‐
ing point number (1.33). Note that this filter does not do any
scaling itself; it just affects what later scalers (software or
hardware) will do when auto-scaling to the correct aspect.

<w>,<h>
New aspect ratio given by a display width and height.
Unlike older mpv versions or MPlayer, this does not set
the display size.

Can also be these special values:

0 original display width and height

-1 original video width and height (default)

-2 Calculate w/h using the other dimension and the
original display aspect ratio.

-3 Calculate w/h using the other dimension and the
original video aspect ratio.

Example

dsize=800:-2
Specifies a display resolution of 800x600 for a
4/3 aspect video, or 800x450 for a 16/9 aspect
video.

<aspect-method>
Modifies width and height according to original aspect
ratios.

-1 Ignore original aspect ratio (default).

0 Keep display aspect ratio by using <w> and <h> as
maximum resolution.

1 Keep display aspect ratio by using <w> and <h> as
minimum resolution.

2 Keep video aspect ratio by using <w> and <h> as
maximum resolution.

3 Keep video aspect ratio by using <w> and <h> as
minimum resolution.

Example

dsize=800:600:0
Specifies a display resolution of at most
800x600, or smaller, in order to keep aspect.

<r> Rounds up to make both width and height divisible by <r>
(default: 1).

<aspect>
Force an aspect ratio.

format=fmt=<value>:colormatrix=<value>:...
Restricts the color space for the next filter without doing any
conversion. Use together with the scale filter for a real con‐
version.

NOTE:
For a list of available formats, see format=fmt=help.

<fmt> Format name, e.g. rgb15, bgr24, 420p, etc. (default:
don't change).

<outfmt>
Format name that should be substituted for the output. If
they do not have the same bytes per pixel and chroma sub‐
samplimg, it will fail.

<colormatrix>
Controls the YUV to RGB color space conversion when play‐
ing video. There are various standards. Normally, BT.601
should be used for SD video, and BT.709 for HD video.
(This is done by default.) Using incorrect color space
results in slightly under or over saturated and shifted
colors.

These options are not always supported. Different video
outputs provide varying degrees of support. The opengl
and vdpau video output drivers usually offer full sup‐
port. The xv output can set the color space if the system
video driver supports it, but not input and output lev‐
els. The scale video filter can configure color space and
input levels, but only if the output format is RGB (if
the video output driver supports RGB output, you can
force this with -vf scale,format=rgba).

If this option is set to auto (which is the default), the
video's color space flag will be used. If that flag is
unset, the color space will be selected automatically.
This is done using a simple heuristic that attempts to
distinguish SD and HD video. If the video is larger than
1279x576 pixels, BT.709 (HD) will be used; otherwise
BT.601 (SD) is selected.

Available color spaces are:

auto automatic selection (default)

bt.601 ITU-R BT.601 (SD)

bt.709 ITU-R BT.709 (HD)

bt.2020-ncl
ITU-R BT.2020 non-constant luminance system

bt.2020-cl
ITU-R BT.2020 constant luminance system

smpte-240m
SMPTE-240M

<colorlevels>
YUV color levels used with YUV to RGB conversion. This
option is only necessary when playing broken files which
do not follow standard color levels or which are flagged
wrong. If the video does not specify its color range, it
is assumed to be limited range.

The same limitations as with <colormatrix> apply.

Available color ranges are:

auto automatic selection (normally limited range)
(default)

limited
limited range (16-235 for luma, 16-240 for chroma)

full full range (0-255 for both luma and chroma)

<primaries>
RGB primaries the source file was encoded with. Nor‐
mally this should be set in the file header, but when
playing broken or mistagged files this can be used to
override the setting.

This option only affects video output drivers that
perform color management, for example opengl with the
target-prim or icc-profile suboptions set.

If this option is set to auto (which is the default),
the video's primaries flag will be used. If that flag
is unset, the color space will be selected automati‐
cally, using the following heuristics: If the <color‐
matrix> is set or determined as BT.2020 or BT.709, the
corresponding primaries are used. Otherwise, if the
video height is exactly 576 (PAL), BT.601-625 is used.
If it's exactly 480 or 486 (NTSC), BT.601-525 is used.
If the video resolution is anything else, BT.709 is
used.

Available primaries are:

auto automatic selection (default)

bt.601-525
ITU-R BT.601 (SD) 525-line systems (NTSC,
SMPTE-C)

bt.601-625
ITU-R BT.601 (SD) 625-line systems (PAL, SECAM)

bt.709 ITU-R BT.709 (HD) (same primaries as sRGB)

bt.2020
ITU-R BT.2020 (UHD)

apple Apple RGB

adobe Adobe RGB (1998)

prophoto
ProPhoto RGB (ROMM)

cie1931
CIE 1931 RGB

<gamma>
Gamma function the source file was encoded with.
Normally this should be set in the file header,
but when playing broken or mistagged files this
can be used to override the setting.

This option only affects video output drivers that
perform color management.

If this option is set to auto (which is the
default), the gamma will be set to BT.1886 for
YCbCr content, sRGB for RGB content and Linear for
XYZ content.

Available gamma functions are:

auto automatic selection (default)

bt.1886
ITU-R BT.1886 (approximation of
BT.601/BT.709/BT.2020 curve)

srgb IEC 61966-2-4 (sRGB)

linear Linear light

gamma1.8
Pure power curve (gamma 1.8)

gamma2.2
Pure power curve (gamma 2.2)

gamma2.8
Pure power curve (gamma 2.8)

prophoto
ProPhoto RGB (ROMM) curve

<stereo-in>
Set the stereo mode the video is assumed to be encoded
in. Takes the same values as the --video-stereo-mode
option.

<stereo-out>
Set the stereo mode the video should be displayed as.
Takes the same values as the --video-stereo-mode option.

<rotate>
Set the rotation the video is assumed to be encoded with
in degrees. The special value -1 uses the input format.

<dw>, <dh>
Set the display size. Note that setting the display size
such that the video is scaled in both directions instead
of just changing the aspect ratio is an implementation
detail, and might change later.

<dar> Set the display aspect ratio of the video frame. This is
a float, but values such as [16:9] can be passed too
([...] for quoting to prevent the option parser from
interpreting the : character).

noformat[=fmt]
Restricts the color space for the next filter without doing any
conversion. Unlike the format filter, this will allow any color
space except the one you specify.

NOTE:
For a list of available formats, see noformat=fmt=help.

<fmt> Format name, e.g. rgb15, bgr24, 420p, etc. (default:
420p).

lavfi=graph[:sws-flags[:o=opts]]
Filter video using FFmpeg's libavfilter.

<graph>
The libavfilter graph string. The filter must have a sin‐
gle video input pad and a single video output pad.

See https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html for syntax and
available filters.

WARNING:
If you want to use the full filter syntax with this
option, you have to quote the filter graph in order to
prevent mpv's syntax and the filter graph syntax from
clashing.

Examples

-vf lavfi=[gradfun=20:30,vflip]
gradfun filter with nonsense parameters, fol‐
lowed by a vflip filter. (This demonstrates how
libavfilter takes a graph and not just a single
filter.) The filter graph string is quoted with
[ and ]. This requires no additional quoting or
escaping with some shells (like bash), while
others (like zsh) require additional " quotes
around the option string.

'--vf=lavfi="gradfun=20:30,vflip"'
Same as before, but uses quoting that should be
safe with all shells. The outer ' quotes make
sure that the shell does not remove the "
quotes needed by mpv.

'--vf=lavfi=graph="grad‐
fun=radius=30:strength=20,vflip"'
Same as before, but uses named parameters for
everything.

<sws-flags>
If libavfilter inserts filters for pixel format conver‐
sion, this option gives the flags which should be passed
to libswscale. This option is numeric and takes a
bit-wise combination of SWS_ flags.

See http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=blob;f=lib‐
swscale/swscale.h.

<o> Set AVFilterGraph options. These should be documented by
FFmpeg.

Example

'--vf=lavfi=yadif:o="threads=2,thread_type=slice"'
forces a specific threading configuration.

eq[=gamma:contrast:brightness:saturation:rg:gg:bg:weight]
Software equalizer that uses lookup tables (slow), allowing
gamma correction in addition to simple brightness and contrast
adjustment. The parameters are given as floating point values.

<0.1-10>
initial gamma value (default: 1.0)

<-2-2> initial contrast, where negative values result in a nega‐
tive image (default: 1.0)

<-1-1> initial brightness (default: 0.0)

<0-3> initial saturation (default: 1.0)

<0.1-10>
gamma value for the red component (default: 1.0)

<0.1-10>
gamma value for the green component (default: 1.0)

<0.1-10>
gamma value for the blue component (default: 1.0)

<0-1> The weight parameter can be used to reduce the effect of
a high gamma value on bright image areas, e.g. keep them
from getting overamplified and just plain white. A value
of 0.0 turns the gamma correction all the way down while
1.0 leaves it at its full strength (default: 1.0).

pullup[=jl:jr:jt:jb:sb:mp]
Pulldown reversal (inverse telecine) filter, capable of handling
mixed hard-telecine, 24000/1001 fps progressive, and 30000/1001
fps progressive content. The pullup filter makes use of future
context in making its decisions. It is stateless in the sense
that it does not lock onto a pattern to follow, but it instead
looks forward to the following fields in order to identify
matches and rebuild progressive frames.

jl, jr, jt, and jb
These options set the amount of "junk" to ignore at the
left, right, top, and bottom of the image, respectively.
Left/right are in units of 8 pixels, while top/bottom are
in units of 2 lines. The default is 8 pixels on each
side.

sb (strict breaks)
Setting this option to 1 will reduce the chances of
pullup generating an occasional mismatched frame, but it
may also cause an excessive number of frames to be
dropped during high motion sequences. Conversely, set‐
ting it to -1 will make pullup match fields more easily.
This may help process video with slight blurring between
the fields, but may also cause interlaced frames in the
output.

mp (metric plane)
This option may be set to u or v to use a chroma plane
instead of the luma plane for doing pullup's computa‐
tions. This may improve accuracy on very clean source
material, but more likely will decrease accuracy, espe‐
cially if there is chroma noise (rainbow effect) or any
grayscale video. The main purpose of setting mp to a
chroma plane is to reduce CPU load and make pullup usable
in realtime on slow machines.

yadif=[mode:interlaced-only]
Yet another deinterlacing filter

<mode>

frame Output 1 frame for each frame.

field Output 1 frame for each field (default).

frame-nospatial
Like frame but skips spatial interlacing check.

field-nospatial
Like field but skips spatial interlacing check.

<interlaced-only>

no Deinterlace all frames.

yes Only deinterlace frames marked as interlaced
(default).

This filter is automatically inserted when using the d key (or
any other key that toggles the deinterlace property or when
using the --deinterlace switch), assuming the video output does
not have native deinterlacing support.

If you just want to set the default mode, put this filter and
its options into --vf-defaults instead, and enable deinterlacing
with d or --deinterlace.

Also, note that the d key is stupid enough to insert a deinter‐
lacer twice when inserting yadif with --vf, so using the above
methods is recommended.

sub=[=bottom-margin:top-margin]
Moves subtitle rendering to an arbitrary point in the filter
chain, or force subtitle rendering in the video filter as
opposed to using video output OSD support.

<bottom-margin>
Adds a black band at the bottom of the frame. The SSA/ASS
renderer can place subtitles there (with --sub-use-mar‐
gins).

<top-margin>
Black band on the top for toptitles (with --sub-use-mar‐
gins).

Examples

--vf=sub,eq
Moves sub rendering before the eq filter. This will
put both subtitle colors and video under the influence
of the video equalizer settings.

stereo3d[=in:out]
Stereo3d converts between different stereoscopic image formats.

<in> Stereoscopic image format of input. Possible values:

sbsl or side_by_side_left_first
side by side parallel (left eye left, right eye
right)

sbsr or side_by_side_right_first
side by side crosseye (right eye left, left eye
right)

abl or above_below_left_first
above-below (left eye above, right eye below)

abr or above_below_right_first
above-below (right eye above, left eye below)

ab2l or above_below_half_height_left_first
above-below with half height resolution (left eye
above, right eye below)

ab2r or above_below_half_height_right_first
above-below with half height resolution (right eye
above, left eye below)

<out> Stereoscopic image format of output. Possible values are
all the input formats as well as:

arcg or anaglyph_red_cyan_gray
anaglyph red/cyan gray (red filter on left eye,
cyan filter on right eye)

arch or anaglyph_red_cyan_half_color
anaglyph red/cyan half colored (red filter on left
eye, cyan filter on right eye)

arcc or anaglyph_red_cyan_color
anaglyph red/cyan color (red filter on left eye,
cyan filter on right eye)

arcd or anaglyph_red_cyan_dubois
anaglyph red/cyan color optimized with the
least-squares projection of Dubois (red filter on
left eye, cyan filter on right eye)

agmg or anaglyph_green_magenta_gray
anaglyph green/magenta gray (green filter on left
eye, magenta filter on right eye)

agmh or anaglyph_green_magenta_half_color
anaglyph green/magenta half colored (green filter
on left eye, magenta filter on right eye)

agmc or anaglyph_green_magenta_color
anaglyph green/magenta colored (green filter on
left eye, magenta filter on right eye)

aybg or anaglyph_yellow_blue_gray
anaglyph yellow/blue gray (yellow filter on left
eye, blue filter on right eye)

aybh or anaglyph_yellow_blue_half_color
anaglyph yellow/blue half colored (yellow filter
on left eye, blue filter on right eye)

aybc or anaglyph_yellow_blue_color
anaglyph yellow/blue colored (yellow filter on
left eye, blue filter on right eye)

irl or interleave_rows_left_first
Interleaved rows (left eye has top row, right eye
starts on next row)

irr or interleave_rows_right_first
Interleaved rows (right eye has top row, left eye
starts on next row)

ml or mono_left
mono output (left eye only)

mr or mono_right
mono output (right eye only)

gradfun[=strength[:radius|:size=<size>]]
Fix the banding artifacts that are sometimes introduced into
nearly flat regions by truncation to 8-bit color depth. Interpo‐
lates the gradients that should go where the bands are, and
dithers them.

<strength>
Maximum amount by which the filter will change any one
pixel. Also the threshold for detecting nearly flat
regions (default: 1.5).

<radius>
Neighborhood to fit the gradient to. Larger radius makes
for smoother gradients, but also prevents the filter from
modifying pixels near detailed regions (default: dis‐
abled).

<size> size of the filter in percent of the image diagonal size.
This is used to calculate the final radius size (default:
1).

dlopen=dll[:a0[:a1[:a2[:a3]]]]
Loads an external library to filter the image. The library
interface is the vf_dlopen interface specified using libmp‐
codecs/vf_dlopen.h.

WARNING:
This filter is deprecated.

dll=<library>
Specify the library to load. This may require a full file
system path in some cases. This argument is required.

a0=<string>
Specify the first parameter to pass to the library.

a1=<string>
Specify the second parameter to pass to the library.

a2=<string>
Specify the third parameter to pass to the library.

a3=<string>
Specify the fourth parameter to pass to the library.

vapoursynth=file:buffered-frames:concurrent-frames
Loads a VapourSynth filter script. This is intended for streamed
processing: mpv actually provides a source filter, instead of
using a native VapourSynth video source. The mpv source will
answer frame requests only within a small window of frames (the
size of this window is controlled with the buffered-frames
parameter), and requests outside of that will return errors. As
such, you can't use the full power of VapourSynth, but you can
use certain filters.

If you just want to play video generated by a VapourSynth (i.e.
using a native VapourSynth video source), it's better to use
vspipe and a FIFO to feed the video to mpv. The same applies if
the filter script requires random frame access (see
buffered-frames parameter).

This filter is experimental. If it turns out that it works well
and is used, it will be ported to libavfilter. Otherwise, it
will be just removed.

file Filename of the script source. Currently, this is always
a python script. The variable video_in is set to the mpv
video source, and it is expected that the script reads
video from it. (Otherwise, mpv will decode no video, and
the video packet queue will overflow, eventually leading
to audio being stopped.) The script is also expected to
pass through timestamps using the _DurationNum and _Dura‐
tionDen frame properties.

Example:

import vapoursynth as vs
core = vs.get_core()
core.std.AddBorders(video_in, 10, 10, 20, 20).set_output()

WARNING:
The script will be reloaded on every seek. This is
done to reset the filter properly on discontinuities.

buffered-frames
Maximum number of decoded video frames that should be
buffered before the filter (default: 4). This specifies
the maximum number of frames the script can request in
reverse direction. E.g. if buffered-frames=5, and the
script just requested frame 15, it can still request
frame 10, but frame 9 is not available anymore. If it
requests frame 30, mpv will decode 15 more frames, and
keep only frames 25-30.

The actual number of buffered frames also depends on the
value of the concurrent-frames option. Currently, both
option values are multiplied to get the final buffer
size.

(Normally, VapourSynth source filters must provide random
access, but mpv was made for playback, and does not pro‐
vide frame-exact random access. The way this video filter
works is a compromise to make simple filters work any‐
way.)

concurrent-frames
Number of frames that should be requested in parallel.
The level of concurrency depends on the filter and how
quickly mpv can decode video to feed the filter. This
value should probably be proportional to the number of
cores on your machine. Most time, making it higher than
the number of cores can actually make it slower.

By default, this uses the special value auto, which sets
the option to the number of detected logical CPU cores.

The following variables are defined by mpv:

video_in
The mpv video source as vapoursynth clip. Note that this
has no length set, which confuses many filters. Using
Trim on the clip with a high dummy length can turn it
into a finite clip.

video_in_dw, video_in_dh
Display size of the video. Can be different from video
size if the video does not use square pixels (e.g. DVD).

container_fps
FPS value as reported by file headers. This value can be
wrong or completely broken (e.g. 0 or NaN). Even if the
value is correct, if another filter changes the real FPS
(by dropping or inserting frames), the value of this
variable might not be useful. Note that the --fps command
line option overrides this value.

Useful for some filters which insist on having a FPS.

display_fps
Refresh rate of the current display. Note that this value
can be 0.

vapoursynth-lazy
The same as vapoursynth, but doesn't load Python scripts.
Instead, a custom backend using Lua and the raw VapourSynth API
is used. The syntax is completely different, and absolutely no
convenience features are provided. There's no type checking
either, and you can trigger crashes.

Example:

video_out = invoke("morpho", "Open", {clip = video_in})

The special variable video_in is the mpv video source, while the
special variable video_out is used to read video from. The 1st
argument is the plugin (queried with getPluginByNs), the 2nd is
the filter name, and the 3rd argument is a table with the argu‐
ments. Positional arguments are not supported. The types must
match exactly. Since Lua is terrible and can't distinguish inte‐
gers and floats, integer arguments must be prefixed with i_, in
which case the prefix is removed and the argument is cast to an
integer. Should the argument's name start with i_, you're out of
luck.

Clips (VSNodeRef) are passed as light userdata, so trying to
pass any other userdata type will result in hard crashes.

vavpp VA-AP-API video post processing. Works with --vo=vaapi and
--vo=opengl only. Currently deinterlaces. This filter is auto‐
matically inserted if deinterlacing is requested (either using
the d key, by default mapped to the command cycle deinterlace,
or the --deinterlace option).

deint=<method>
Select the deinterlacing algorithm.

no Don't perform deinterlacing.

first-field
Show only first field (going by --field-domi‐
nance).

bob bob deinterlacing (default).

weave, motion-adaptive, motion-compensated
Advanced deinterlacing algorithms. Whether these
actually work depends on the GPU hardware, the GPU
drivers, driver bugs, and mpv bugs.

<interlaced-only>

no Deinterlace all frames.

yes Only deinterlace frames marked as interlaced
(default).

vdpaupp
VDPAU video post processing. Works with --vo=vdpau and
--vo=opengl only. This filter is automatically inserted if dein‐
terlacing is requested (either using the d key, by default
mapped to the command cycle deinterlace, or the --deinterlace
option). When enabling deinterlacing, it is always preferred
over software deinterlacer filters if the vdpau VO is used, and
also if opengl is used and hardware decoding was activated at
least once (i.e. vdpau was loaded).

sharpen=<-1-1>
For positive values, apply a sharpening algorithm to the
video, for negative values a blurring algorithm (default:
0).

denoise=<0-1>
Apply a noise reduction algorithm to the video (default:
0; no noise reduction).

deint=<yes|no>
Whether deinterlacing is enabled (default: no). If
enabled, it will use the mode selected with deint-mode.

deint-mode=<first-field|bob|temporal|temporal-spatial>
Select deinterlacing mode (default: temporal). All modes
respect --field-dominance.

Note that there's currently a mechanism that allows the
vdpau VO to change the deint-mode of auto-inserted
vdpaupp filters. To avoid confusion, it's recommended not
to use the --vo=vdpau suboptions related to filtering.

first-field
Show only first field.

bob Bob deinterlacing.

temporal
Motion-adaptive temporal deinterlacing. May lead
to A/V desync with slow video hardware and/or high
resolution.

temporal-spatial
Motion-adaptive temporal deinterlacing with
edge-guided spatial interpolation. Needs fast
video hardware.

chroma-deint
Makes temporal deinterlacers operate both on luma and
chroma (default). Use no-chroma-deint to solely use luma
and speed up advanced deinterlacing. Useful with slow
video memory.

pullup Try to apply inverse telecine, needs motion adaptive tem‐
poral deinterlacing.

interlaced-only=<yes|no>
If yes (default), only deinterlace frames marked as
interlaced.

hqscaling=<0-9>

0 Use default VDPAU scaling (default).

1-9 Apply high quality VDPAU scaling (needs capable
hardware).

vdpaurb
VDPAU video read back. Works with --vo=vdpau and --vo=opengl
only. This filter will read back frames decoded by VDPAU so
that other filters, which are not normally compatible with
VDPAU, can be used like normal. This filter must be specified
before vdpaupp in the filter chain if vdpaupp is used.

buffer=<num>
Buffer <num> frames in the filter chain. This filter is probably
pretty useless, except for debugging. (Note that this won't help
to smooth out latencies with decoding, because the filter will
never output a frame if the buffer isn't full, except on EOF.)

ENCODING
You can encode files from one format/codec to another using this facil‐
ity.

--o=<filename>
Enables encoding mode and specifies the output file name.

--of=<format>
Specifies the output format (overrides autodetection by the file
name extension of the file specified by -o). This can be a comma
separated list of possible formats to try. See --of=help for a
full list of supported formats.

--ofopts=<options>
Specifies the output format options for libavformat. See
--ofopts=help for a full list of supported options.

Options are managed in lists. There are a few commands to manage
the options list.

--ofopts-add=<options1[,options2,...]>
Appends the options given as arguments to the options
list.

--ofopts-pre=<options1[,options2,...]>
Prepends the options given as arguments to the options
list.

--ofopts-del=<index1[,index2,...]>
Deletes the options at the given indexes. Index numbers
start at 0, negative numbers address the end of the list
(-1 is the last).

--ofopts-clr
Completely empties the options list.

--ofps=<float value>
Specifies the output format time base (default: 24000). Low val‐
ues like 25 limit video fps by dropping frames.

--oautofps
Sets the output format time base to the guessed frame rate of
the input video (simulates MEncoder behavior, useful for AVI;
may cause frame drops). Note that not all codecs and not all
formats support VFR encoding, and some which do have bugs when a
target bitrate is specified - use --ofps or --oautofps to force
CFR encoding in these cases.

--omaxfps=<float value>
Specifies the minimum distance of adjacent frames (default: 0,
which means unset). Content of lower frame rate is not read‐
justed to this frame rate; content of higher frame rate is deci‐
mated to this frame rate.

--oharddup
If set, the frame rate given by --ofps is attained not by skip‐
ping time codes, but by duplicating frames (constant frame rate
mode).

--oneverdrop
If set, frames are never dropped. Instead, time codes of video
are readjusted to always increase. This may cause AV desync,
though; to work around this, use a high-fps time base using
--ofps and absolutely avoid --oautofps.

--oac=<codec>
Specifies the output audio codec. This can be a comma separated
list of possible codecs to try. See --oac=help for a full list
of supported codecs.

--oaoffset=<value>
Shifts audio data by the given time (in seconds) by
adding/removing samples at the start.

--oacopts=<options>
Specifies the output audio codec options for libavcodec. See
--oacopts=help for a full list of supported options.

Example

--oac=libmp3lame --oacopts=b=128000
selects 128 kbps MP3 encoding.

Options are managed in lists. There are a few commands to manage
the options list.

--oacopts-add=<options1[,options2,...]>
Appends the options given as arguments to the options
list.

--oacopts-pre=<options1[,options2,...]>
Prepends the options given as arguments to the options
list.

--oacopts-del=<index1[,index2,...]>
Deletes the options at the given indexes. Index numbers
start at 0, negative numbers address the end of the list
(-1 is the last).

--oacopts-clr
Completely empties the options list.

--oafirst
Force the audio stream to become the first stream in the output.
By default, the order is unspecified.

--ovc=<codec>
Specifies the output video codec. This can be a comma separated
list of possible codecs to try. See --ovc=help for a full list
of supported codecs.

--ovoffset=<value>
Shifts video data by the given time (in seconds) by shifting the
pts values.

--ovcopts <options>
Specifies the output video codec options for libavcodec. See
--ovcopts=help for a full list of supported options.

Examples

"--ovc=mpeg4 --ovcopts=qscale=5"
selects constant quantizer scale 5 for MPEG-4 encod‐
ing.

"--ovc=libx264 --ovcopts=crf=23"
selects VBR quality factor 23 for H.264 encoding.

Options are managed in lists. There are a few commands to manage
the options list.

--ovcopts-add=<options1[,options2,...]>
Appends the options given as arguments to the options
list.

--ovcopts-pre=<options1[,options2,...]>
Prepends the options given as arguments to the options
list.

--ovcopts-del=<index1[,index2,...]>
Deletes the options at the given indexes. Index numbers
start at 0, negative numbers address the end of the list
(-1 is the last).

--ovcopts-clr
Completely empties the options list.

--ovfirst
Force the video stream to become the first stream in the output.
By default, the order is unspecified.

--ocopyts
Copies input pts to the output video (not supported by some out‐
put container formats, e.g. AVI). Discontinuities are still
fixed. By default, audio pts are set to playback time and video
pts are synchronized to match audio pts, as some output formats
do not support anything else.

--orawts
Copies input pts to the output video (not supported by some out‐
put container formats, e.g. AVI). In this mode, discontinuities
are not fixed and all pts are passed through as-is. Never seek
backwards or use multiple input files in this mode!

--no-ometadata
Turns off copying of metadata from input files to output files
when encoding (which is enabled by default).

COMMAND INTERFACE
The mpv core can be controlled with commands and properties. A number
of ways to interact with the player use them: key bindings
(input.conf), OSD (showing information with properties), JSON IPC, the
client API (libmpv), and the classic slave mode.

input.conf
The input.conf file consists of a list of key bindings, for example:

s screenshot # take a screenshot with the s key
LEFT seek 15 # map the left-arrow key to seeking forward by 15 seconds

Each line maps a key to an input command. Keys are specified with their
literal value (upper case if combined with Shift), or a name for spe‐
cial keys. For example, a maps to the a key without shift, and A maps
to a with shift.

The file is located in the mpv configuration directory (normally at
~/.config/mpv/input.conf depending on platform). The default bindings
are defined here:

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/etc/input.conf

A list of special keys can be obtained with
mpv --input-keylist

In general, keys can be combined with Shift, Ctrl and Alt:

ctrl+q quit

mpv can be started in input test mode, which displays key bindings and
the commands they're bound to on the OSD, instead of executing the com‐
mands:

mpv --input-test --force-window --idle

(Only closing the window will make mpv exit, pressing normal keys will
merely display the binding, even if mapped to quit.)

General Input Command Syntax
[Shift+][Ctrl+][Alt+][Meta+]<key> [{<section>}] [<prefixes>] <command>
(<argument>)* [; <command>]

Note that by default, the right Alt key can be used to create special
characters, and thus does not register as a modifier. The option
--no-input-right-alt-gr changes this behavior.

Newlines always start a new binding. # starts a comment (outside of
quoted string arguments). To bind commands to the # key, SHARP can be
used.

<key> is either the literal character the key produces (ASCII or Uni‐
code character), or a symbolic name (as printed by --input-keylist).

<section> (braced with { and }) is the input section for this command.

Arguments are separated by whitespace. This applies even to string
arguments. For this reason, string arguments should be quoted with ".
Inside quotes, C-style escaping can be used.

You can bind multiple commands to one key. For example:
a show-text "command 1" ; show-text "command 2"

It's also possible to bind a command to a sequence of keys:
a-b-c show-text "command run after a, b, c have been pressed"

(This is not shown in the general command syntax.)

If a or a-b or b are already bound, this will run the first command
that matches, and the multi-key command will never be called. Interme‐
diate keys can be remapped to ignore in order to avoid this issue. The
maximum number of (non-modifier) keys for combinations is currently 4.

List of Input Commands
ignore Use this to "block" keys that should be unbound, and do nothing.
Useful for disabling default bindings, without disabling all
bindings with --no-input-default-bindings.

The second argument consists of flags controlling the seek mode:

relative (default)
Seek relative to current position (a negative value seeks
backwards).

absolute
Seek to a given time.

absolute-percent
Seek to a given percent position.

relative-percent
Seek relative to current position in percent.

keyframes
Always restart playback at keyframe boundaries (fast).

exact Always do exact/hr/precise seeks (slow).

Multiple flags can be combined, e.g.: absolute+keyframes.

By default, keyframes is used for relative seeks, and exact is
used for absolute seeks.

Before mpv 0.9, the keyframes and exact flags had to be passed
as 3rd parameter (essentially using a space instead of +). The
3rd parameter is still parsed, but is considered deprecated.

revert-seek [mode]
Undoes the seek command, and some other commands that seek (but
not necessarily all of them). Calling this command once will
jump to the playback position before the seek. Calling it a sec‐
ond time undoes the revert-seek command itself. This only works
within a single file.

The first argument is optional, and can change the behavior:

mark Mark the current time position. The next normal
revert-seek command will seek back to this point, no mat‐
ter how many seeks happened since last time.

Using it without any arguments gives you the default behavior.

frame-step
Play one frame, then pause. Does nothing with audio-only play‐
back.

frame-back-step
Go back by one frame, then pause. Note that this can be very
slow (it tries to be precise, not fast), and sometimes fails to
behave as expected. How well this works depends on whether pre‐
cise seeking works correctly (e.g. see the
--hr-seek-demuxer-offset option). Video filters or other video
post-processing that modifies timing of frames (e.g. deinterlac‐
ing) should usually work, but might make backstepping silently
behave incorrectly in corner cases. Using --hr-seek-framedrop=no
should help, although it might make precise seeking slower.

This does not work with audio-only playback.

set <property> <value>
Set the given property to the given value.

add <property> [<value>]
Add the given value to the property. On overflow or underflow,
clamp the property to the maximum. If <value> is omitted, assume
1.

cycle <property> [up|down]
Cycle the given property. up and down set the cycle direction.
On overflow, set the property back to the minimum, on underflow
set it to the maximum. If up or down is omitted, assume up.

multiply <property> <factor>
Multiplies the value of a property with the numeric factor.

screenshot [subtitles|video|window|- [single|each-frame]]
Take a screenshot.

First argument:

<subtitles> (default)
Save the video image, in its original resolution, and
with subtitles. Some video outputs may still include the
OSD in the output under certain circumstances.

<video>
Like subtitles, but typically without OSD or subtitles.
The exact behavior depends on the selected video output.

<window>
Save the contents of the mpv window. Typically scaled,
with OSD and subtitles. The exact behavior depends on the
selected video output, and if no support is available,
this will act like video.

<each-frame>
Take a screenshot each frame. Issue this command again to
stop taking screenshots. Note that you should disable
frame-dropping when using this mode - or you might
receive duplicate images in cases when a frame was
dropped. This flag can be combined with the other flags,
e.g. video+each-frame.

screenshot-to-file <filename> [subtitles|video|window]
Take a screenshot and save it to a given file. The format of the
file will be guessed by the extension (and --screenshot-format
is ignored - the behavior when the extension is missing or
unknown is arbitrary).

The second argument is like the first argument to screenshot.

If the file already exists, it's overwritten.

Like all input command parameters, the filename is subject to
property expansion as described in Property Expansion.

playlist-next [weak|force]
Go to the next entry on the playlist.

weak (default)
If the last file on the playlist is currently played, do
nothing.

force Terminate playback if there are no more files on the
playlist.

playlist-prev [weak|force]
Go to the previous entry on the playlist.

weak (default)
If the first file on the playlist is currently played, do
nothing.

force Terminate playback if the first file is being played.

loadfile <file> [replace|append|append-play [options]]
Load the given file and play it.

Second argument:

<replace> (default)
Stop playback of the current file, and play the new file
immediately.

<append>
Append the file to the playlist.

<append-play>
Append the file, and if nothing is currently playing,
start playback. (Always starts with the added file, even
if the playlist was not empty before running this com‐
mand.)

The third argument is a list of options and values which should
be set while the file is playing. It is of the form
opt1=value1,opt2=value2,... Not all options can be changed this
way. Some options require a restart of the player.

loadlist <playlist> [replace|append]
Load the given playlist file (like --playlist).

playlist-clear
Clear the playlist, except the currently played file.

playlist-remove current|<index>
Remove the playlist entry at the given index. Index values start
counting with 0. The special value current removes the current
entry. Note that removing the current entry also stops playback
and starts playing the next entry.

playlist-move <index1> <index2>
Move the playlist entry at index1, so that it takes the place of
the entry index2. (Paradoxically, the moved playlist entry will
not have the index value index2 after moving if index1 was lower
than index2, because index2 refers to the target entry, not the
index the entry will have after moving.)

playlist-shuffle
Shuffle the playlist. This is similar to what is done on start
if the --shuffle option is used.

run command arg1 arg2 ...
Run the given command. Unlike in MPlayer/mplayer2 and earlier
versions of mpv (0.2.x and older), this doesn't call the shell.
Instead, the command is run directly, with each argument passed
separately. Each argument is expanded like in Property Expan‐
sion. Note that there is a static limit of (as of this writing)
9 arguments (this limit could be raised on demand).

The program is run in a detached way. mpv doesn't wait until the
command is completed, but continues playback right after spawn‐
ing it.

To get the old behavior, use /bin/sh and -c as the first two
arguments.

Example

run "/bin/sh" "-c" "echo ${title} > /tmp/playing"

This is not a particularly good example, because it
doesn't handle escaping, and a specially prepared file
might allow an attacker to execute arbitrary shell
commands. It is recommended to write a small shell
script, and call that with run.

quit [<code>]
Exit the player. If an argument is given, it's used as process
exit code.

quit-watch-later [<code>]
Exit player, and store current playback position. Playing that
file later will seek to the previous position on start. The
(optional) argument is exactly as in the quit command.

sub-add <file> [<flags> [<title> [<lang>]]]
Load the given subtitle file. It is selected as current subtitle
after loading.

The flags args is one of the following values:

<select>
Select the subtitle immediately.

<auto>
Don't select the subtitle. (Or in some special situations,
let the default stream selection mechanism decide.)

<cached>
Select the subtitle. If a subtitle with the same filename was
already added, that one is selected, instead of loading a
duplicate entry. (In this case, title/language are ignored,
and if the was changed since it was loaded, these changes
won't be reflected.)

The title argument sets the track title in the UI.

The lang argument sets the track language, and can also influ‐
ence stream selection with flags set to auto.

sub-remove [<id>]
Remove the given subtitle track. If the id argument is missing,
remove the current track. (Works on external subtitle files
only.)

sub-reload [<id>]
Reload the given subtitle tracks. If the id argument is missing,
reload the current track. (Works on external subtitle files
only.)

This works by unloading and re-adding the subtitle track.

sub-step <skip>
Change subtitle timing such, that the subtitle event after the
next <skip> subtitle events is displayed. <skip> can be negative
to step backwards.

sub-seek <skip>
Seek to the next (skip set to 1) or the previous (skip set to
-1) subtitle. This is similar to sub-step, except that it seeks
video and audio instead of adjusting the subtitle delay.

For embedded subtitles (like with Matroska), this works only
with subtitle events that have already been displayed, or are
within a short prefetch range.

osd [<level>]
Toggle OSD level. If <level> is specified, set the OSD mode (see
--osd-level for valid values).

print-text <string>
Print text to stdout. The string can contain properties (see
Property Expansion).

show-text <string> [<duration>|- [<level>]]
Show text on the OSD. The string can contain properties, which
are expanded as described in Property Expansion. This can be
used to show playback time, filename, and so on.

<duration>
The time in ms to show the message for. By default, it
uses the same value as --osd-duration.

<level>
The minimum OSD level to show the text at (see
--osd-level).

show-progress
Show the progress bar, the elapsed time and the total duration
of the file on the OSD.

write-watch-later-config
Write the resume config file that the quit-watch-later command
writes, but continue playback normally.

stop Stop playback and clear playlist. With default settings, this is
essentially like quit. Useful for the client API: playback can
be stopped without terminating the player.

mouse <x> <y> [<button> [single|double]]
Send a mouse event with given coordinate (<x>, <y>).

Second argument:

<button>
The button number of clicked mouse button. This should be
one of 0-19. If <button> is omitted, only the position
will be updated.

Third argument:

<single> (default)
The mouse event represents regular single click.

<double>
The mouse event represents double-click.

keypress <key_name>
Send a key event through mpv's input handler, triggering what‐
ever behavior is configured to that key. key_name uses the
input.conf naming scheme for keys and modifiers. Useful for the
client API: key events can be sent to libmpv to handle inter‐
nally.

keydown <key_name>
Similar to keypress, but sets the KEYDOWN flag so that if the
key is bound to a repeatable command, it will be run repeatedly
with mpv's key repeat timing until the keyup command is called.

keyup [<key_name>]
Set the KEYUP flag, stopping any repeated behavior that had been
triggered. key_name is optional. If key_name is not given or is
an empty string, KEYUP will be set on all keys. Otherwise, KEYUP
will only be set on the key specified by key_name.

audio-add <file> [<flags> [<title> [<lang>]]]
Load the given audio file. See sub-add command.

audio-remove [<id>]
Remove the given audio track. See sub-remove command.

audio-reload [<id>]
Reload the given audio tracks. See sub-reload command.

rescan-external-files [<mode>]
Rescan external files according to the current --sub-auto and
--audio-file-auto settings. This can be used to auto-load exter‐
nal files after the file was loaded.

The mode argument is one of the following:

<reselect> (default)
Select the default audio and subtitle streams, which typ‐
ically selects external files with the highest prefer‐
ence. (The implementation is not perfect, and could be
improved on request.)

<keep-selection>
Do not change current track selections.

Input Commands that are Possibly Subject to Change
af set|add|toggle|del|clr filter1=params,filter2,...
Change audio filter chain. See vf command.

vf set|add|toggle|del|clr filter1=params,filter2,...
Change video filter chain.

The first argument decides what happens:

set Overwrite the previous filter chain with the new one.

add Append the new filter chain to the previous one.

toggle Check if the given filter (with the exact parameters) is
already in the video chain. If yes, remove the filter. If
no, add the filter. (If several filters are passed to
the command, this is done for each filter.)

del Remove the given filters from the video chain. Unlike in
the other cases, the second parameter is a comma sepa‐
rated list of filter names or integer indexes. 0 would
denote the first filter. Negative indexes start from the
last filter, and -1 denotes the last filter.

clr Remove all filters. Note that like the other sub-com‐
mands, this does not control automatically inserted fil‐
ters.

You can assign labels to filter by prefixing them with @name:
(where name is a user-chosen arbitrary identifier). Labels can
be used to refer to filters by name in all of the filter chain
modification commands. For add, using an already used label
will replace the existing filter.

The vf command shows the list of requested filters on the OSD
after changing the filter chain. This is roughly equivalent to
show-text ${vf}. Note that auto-inserted filters for format con‐
version are not shown on the list, only what was requested by
the user.

Normally, the commands will check whether the video chain is
recreated successfully, and will undo the operation on failure.
If the command is run before video is configured (can happen if
the command is run immediately after opening a file and before a
video frame is decoded), this check can't be run. Then it can
happen that creating the video chain fails.

Example for input.conf

· a vf set flip turn video upside-down on the a key

· b vf set "" remove all video filters on b

· c vf toggle lavfi=gradfun toggle debanding on c

cycle-values ["!reverse"] <property> <value1> <value2> ...
Cycle through a list of values. Each invocation of the command
will set the given property to the next value in the list. The
command maintains an internal counter which value to pick next,
and which is initially 0. It is reset to 0 once the last value
is reached.

The internal counter is associated using the property name and
the value list. If multiple commands (bound to different keys)
use the same name and value list, they will share the internal
counter.

The special argument !reverse can be used to cycle the value
list in reverse. Compared with a command that just lists the
value in reverse, this command will actually share the internal
counter with the forward-cycling key binding (as long as the
rest of the arguments are the same).

Note that there is a static limit of (as of this writing) 10
arguments (this limit could be raised on demand).

enable-section <section> [flags]
Enable all key bindings in the named input section.

The enabled input sections form a stack. Bindings in sections on
the top of the stack are preferred to lower sections. This com‐
mand puts the section on top of the stack. If the section was
already on the stack, it is implicitly removed beforehand. (A
section cannot be on the stack more than once.)

The flags parameter can be a combination (separated by +) of the
following flags:

<exclusive>
All sections enabled before the newly enabled section are
disabled. They will be re-enabled as soon as all exclu‐
sive sections above them are removed. In other words, the
new section shadows all previous sections.

<allow-hide-cursor>
This feature can't be used through the public API.

<allow-vo-dragging>
Same.

disable-section <section>
Disable the named input section. Undoes enable-section.

define-section <section> <contents> [default|forced]
Create a named input section, or replace the contents of an
already existing input section. The contents parameter uses the
same syntax as the input.conf file (except that using the sec‐
tion syntax in it is not allowed), including the need to sepa‐
rate bindings with a newline character.

If the contents parameter is an empty string, the section is
removed.

The section with the name default is the normal input section.

In general, input sections have to be enabled with the
enable-section command, or they are ignored.

The last parameter has the following meaning:

<default> (also used if parameter omitted)
Use a key binding defined by this section only if the
user hasn't already bound this key to a command.

<forced>
Always bind a key. (The input section that was made
active most recently wins if there are ambiguities.)

This command can be used to dispatch arbitrary keys to a script
or a client API user. If the input section defines script-bind‐
ing commands, it is also possible to get separate events on key
up/down, and relatively detailed information about the key
state. The special key name unmapped can be used to match any
unmapped key.

overlay-add <id> <x> <y> <file> <offset> <fmt> <w> <h> <stride>
Add an OSD overlay sourced from raw data. This might be useful
for scripts and applications controlling mpv, and which want to
display things on top of the video window.

Overlays are usually displayed in screen resolution, but with
some VOs, the resolution is reduced to that of the video's. You
can read the osd-width and osd-height properties. At least with
--vo-xv and anamorphic video (such as DVD), osd-par should be
read as well, and the overlay should be aspect-compensated.
(Future directions: maybe mpv should take care of some of these
things automatically, but it's hard to tell where to draw the
line.)

id is an integer between 0 and 63 identifying the overlay ele‐
ment. The ID can be used to add multiple overlay parts, update a
part by using this command with an already existing ID, or to
remove a part with overlay-remove. Using a previously unused ID
will add a new overlay, while reusing an ID will update it.
(Future directions: there should be something to ensure differ‐
ent programs wanting to create overlays don't conflict with each
others, should that ever be needed.)

x and y specify the position where the OSD should be displayed.

file specifies the file the raw image data is read from. It can
be either a numeric UNIX file descriptor prefixed with @ (e.g.
@4), or a filename. The file will be mapped into memory with
mmap(). Some VOs will pass the mapped pointer directly to dis‐
play APIs (e.g. opengl or vdpau), so no actual copying is
involved. Truncating the source file while the overlay is active
will crash the player. You shouldn't change the data while the
overlay is active, because the data is essentially accessed at
random points. Instead, call overlay-add again (preferably with
a different memory region to prevent tearing).

It is also possible to pass a raw memory address for use as bit‐
map memory by passing a memory address as integer prefixed with
an & character. Passing the wrong thing here will crash the
player. This mode might be useful for use with libmpv. The off‐
set parameter is simply added to the memory address (since mpv
0.8.0, ignored before).

offset is the byte offset of the first pixel in the source file.
(The current implementation always mmap's the whole file from
position 0 to the end of the image, so large offsets should be
avoided. Before mpv 0.8.0, the offset was actually passed
directly to mmap, but it was changed to make using it easier.)

fmt is a string identifying the image format. Currently, only
bgra is defined. This format has 4 bytes per pixels, with 8 bits
per component. The least significant 8 bits are blue, and the
most significant 8 bits are alpha (in little endian, the compo‐
nents are B-G-R-A, with B as first byte). This uses premulti‐
plied alpha: every color component is already multiplied with
the alpha component. This means the numeric value of each compo‐
nent is equal to or smaller than the alpha component. (Violating
this rule will lead to different results with different VOs:
numeric overflows resulting from blending broken alpha values is
considered something that shouldn't happen, and consequently
implementations don't ensure that you get predictable behavior
in this case.)

w, h, and stride specify the size of the overlay. w is the visi‐
ble width of the overlay, while stride gives the width in bytes
in memory. In the simple case, and with the bgra format,
stride==4*w. In general, the total amount of memory accessed is
stride * h. (Technically, the minimum size would be stride * (h
- 1) + w * 4, but for simplicity, the player will access all
stride * h bytes.)

Warning

When updating the overlay, you should prepare a second
shared memory region (e.g. make use of the offset
parameter) and add this as overlay, instead of reusing
the same memory every time. Otherwise, you might get
the equivalent of tearing, when your application and
mpv write/read the buffer at the same time. Also, keep
in mind that mpv might access an overlay's memory at
random times whenever it feels the need to do so, for
example when redrawing the screen.

overlay-remove <id>
Remove an overlay added with overlay-add and the same ID. Does
nothing if no overlay with this ID exists.

script-message <arg1> <arg2> ...
Send a message to all clients, and pass it the following list of
arguments. What this message means, how many arguments it
takes, and what the arguments mean is fully up to the receiver
and the sender. Every client receives the message, so be careful
about name clashes (or use script_message_to).

script-message-to <target> <arg1> <arg2> ...
Same as script_message, but send it only to the client named
<target>. Each client (scripts etc.) has a unique name. For
example, Lua scripts can get their name via
mp.get_script_name().

script-binding <name>
Invoke a script-provided key binding. This can be used to remap
key bindings provided by external Lua scripts.

The argument is the name of the binding.

It can optionally be prefixed with the name of the script, using
/ as separator, e.g. script_binding scriptname/bindingname.

For completeness, here is how this command works internally. The
details could change any time. On any matching key event,
script_message_to or script_message is called (depending on
whether the script name is included), with the following argu‐
ments:

1. The string key-binding.

2. The name of the binding (as established above).

3. The key state as string (see below).

4. The key name (since mpv 0.15.0).

The key state consists of 2 letters:

1. One of d (key was pressed down), u (was released), r (key is
still down, and was repeated; only if key repeat is enabled
for this binding), p (key was pressed; happens if up/down
can't be tracked).

2. Whether the event originates from the mouse, either m (mouse
button) or - (something else).

ab-loop
Cycle through A-B loop states. The first command will set the A
point (the ab-loop-a property); the second the B point, and the
third will clear both points.

vo-cmdline <args>
Reset the sub-option of the current VO. Currently works with
opengl (including opengl-hq). The argument is the sub-option
string usually passed to the VO on the command line. Not all
sub-options can be set, but those which can will be reset even
if they don't appear in the argument. This command might be
changed or removed in the future.

drop-buffers
Drop audio/video/demuxer buffers, and restart from fresh. Might
help with unseekable streams that are going out of sync. This
command might be changed or removed in the future.

screenshot-raw [subtitles|video|window]
Return a screenshot in memory. This can be used only through the
client API. The MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP returned by this command has
the w, h, stride fields set to obvious contents. A format field
is set to bgr0 by default. This format is organized as B8G8R8X8
(where B is the LSB). The contents of the padding X is unde‐
fined. The data field is of type MPV_FORMAT_BYTE_ARRAY with the
actual image data. The image is freed as soon as the result node
is freed.

Undocumented commands: tv-last-channel (TV/DVB only), ao-reload (exper‐
imental/internal).

Hooks
Hooks are synchronous events between player core and a script or simi‐
lar. This applies to client API (including the Lua scripting inter‐
face). Normally, events are supposed to be asynchronous, and the hook
API provides an awkward and obscure way to handle events that require
stricter coordination. There are no API stability guarantees made. Not
following the protocol exactly can make the player freeze randomly.
Basically, nobody should use this API.

There are two special commands involved. Also, the client must listen
for client messages (MPV_EVENT_CLIENT_MESSAGE in the C API).

hook-add <hook-name> <id> <priority>
Subscribe to the hook identified by the first argument (basi‐
cally, the name of event). The id argument is an arbitrary inte‐
ger chosen by the user. priority is used to sort all hook han‐
dlers globally across all clients. Each client can register mul‐
tiple hook handlers (even for the same hook-name). Once the hook
is registered, it cannot be unregistered.

When a specific event happens, all registered handlers are run
serially. This uses a protocol every client has to follow
explicitly. When a hook handler is run, a client message
(MPV_EVENT_CLIENT_MESSAGE) is sent to the client which regis‐
tered the hook. This message has the following arguments:

1. the string hook_run

2. the id argument the hook was registered with as string (this
can be used to correctly handle multiple hooks registered by
the same client, as long as the id argument is unique in the
client)

3. something undefined, used by the hook mechanism to track hook
execution (currently, it's the hook-name, but this might
change without warning)

Upon receiving this message, the client can handle the event.
While doing this, the player core will still react to requests,
but playback will typically be stopped.

When the client is done, it must continue the core's hook execu‐
tion by running the hook-ack command.

hook-ack <string>
Run the next hook in the global chain of hooks. The argument is
the 3rd argument of the client message that starts hook execu‐
tion for the current client.

The following hooks are currently defined:

on_load
Called when a file is to be opened, before anything is actually
done. For example, you could read and write the
stream-open-filename property to redirect an URL to something
else (consider support for streaming sites which rarely give the
user a direct media URL), or you could set per-file options with
by setting the property file-local-options/<option name>. The
player will wait until all hooks are run.

on_unload
Run before closing a file, and before actually uninitializing
everything. It's not possible to resume playback in this state.

Input Command Prefixes
These prefixes are placed between key name and the actual command. Mul‐
tiple prefixes can be specified. They are separated by whitespace.

osd-auto (default)
Use the default behavior for this command.

no-osd Do not use any OSD for this command.

osd-bar
If possible, show a bar with this command. Seek commands will
show the progress bar, property changing commands may show the
newly set value.

osd-msg
If possible, show an OSD message with this command. Seek command
show the current playback time, property changing commands show
the newly set value as text.

osd-msg-bar
Combine osd-bar and osd-msg.

raw Do not expand properties in string arguments. (Like "${prop‐
erty-name}".)

expand-properties (default)
All string arguments are expanded as described in Property
Expansion.

repeatable
For some commands, keeping a key pressed doesn't run the command
repeatedly. This prefix forces enabling key repeat in any case.

All of the osd prefixes are still overridden by the global --osd-level
settings.

Input Sections
Input sections group a set of bindings, and enable or disable them at
once. In input.conf, each key binding is assigned to an input section,
rather than actually having explicit text sections.

See also: enable_section and disable_section commands.

Predefined bindings:

default
Bindings without input section are implicitly assigned to this
section. It is enabled by default during normal playback.

encode Section which is active in encoding mode. It is enabled exclu‐
sively, so that bindings in the default sections are ignored.

Properties
Properties are used to set mpv options during runtime, or to query
arbitrary information. They can be manipulated with the set/add/cycle
commands, and retrieved with show-text, or anything else that uses
property expansion. (See Property Expansion.)

The property name is annotated with RW to indicate whether the property
is generally writable.

If an option is referenced, the property will normally take/return
exactly the same values as the option. In these cases, properties are
merely a way to change an option at runtime.

Property list
osd-level (RW)
See --osd-level.

osd-scale (RW)
OSD font size multiplier, see --osd-scale.

loop (RW)
See --loop.

loop-file (RW)
See --loop-file (uses yes/no).

speed (RW)
See --speed.

audio-speed-correction, video-speed-correction
Factor multiplied with speed at which the player attempts to
play the file. Usually it's exactly 1. (Display sync mode will
make this useful.)

OSD formatting will display it in the form of +1.23456%, with
the number being (raw - 1) * 100 for the given raw property
value.

display-sync-active
Return whether --video-sync=display is actually active.

filename
Currently played file, with path stripped. If this is an URL,
try to undo percent encoding as well. (The result is not neces‐
sarily correct, but looks better for display purposes. Use the
path property to get an unmodified filename.)

file-size
Length in bytes of the source file/stream. (This is the same as
${stream-end}. For ordered chapters and such, the size of the
currently played segment is returned.)

estimated-frame-count
Total number of frames in current file.

NOTE:
This is only an estimate. (It's computed from two unreliable
quantities: fps and stream length.)

estimated-frame-number
Number of current frame in current stream.

NOTE:
This is only an estimate. (It's computed from two unreliable
quantities: fps and possibly rounded timestamps.)

path Full path of the currently played file. Usually this is exactly
the same string you pass on the mpv command line or the loadfile
command, even if it's a relative path. If you expect an absolute
path, you will have to determine it yourself, for example by
using the working-directory property.

media-title
If the currently played file has a title tag, use that.

Otherwise, if the media type is DVD, return the volume ID of
DVD.

Otherwise, return the filename property.

file-format
Symbolic name of the file format. In some cases, this is a
comma-separated list of format names, e.g. mp4 is
mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 (the list may grow in the future for any
format).

demuxer
Name of the current demuxer. (This is useless.)

stream-path
Filename (full path) of the stream layer filename. (This is
probably useless. It looks like this can be different from path
only when using e.g. ordered chapters.)

stream-pos (RW)
Raw byte position in source stream.

stream-end
Raw end position in bytes in source stream.

duration
Duration of the current file in seconds. If the duration is
unknown, the property is unavailable. Note that the file dura‐
tion is not always exactly known, so this is an estimate.

This replaces the length property, which was deprecated after
the mpv 0.9 release. (The semantics are the same.)

avsync Last A/V synchronization difference. Unavailable if audio or
video is disabled.

total-avsync-change
Total A-V sync correction done. Unavailable if audio or video is
disabled.

drop-frame-count
Video frames dropped by decoder, because video is too far behind
audio (when using --framedrop=decoder). Sometimes, this may be
incremented in other situations, e.g. when video packets are
damaged, or the decoder doesn't follow the usual rules. Unavail‐
able if video is disabled.

vo-drop-frame-count
Frames dropped by VO (when using --framedrop=vo).

mistimed-frame-count
Number of video frames that were not timed correctly in dis‐
play-sync mode for the sake of keeping A/V sync. This does not
include external circumstances, such as video rendering being
too slow or the graphics driver somehow skipping a vsync. It
does not include rounding errors either (which can happen espe‐
cially with bad source timestamps). For example, using the dis‐
play-desync mode should never change this value from 0.

vsync-ratio
For how many vsyncs a frame is displayed on average. This is
available if display-sync is active only. For 30 FPS video on a
60 Hz screen, this will be 2. This is the moving average of what
actually has been scheduled, so 24 FPS on 60 Hz will never
remain exactly on 2.5, but jitter depending on the last frame
displayed.

vo-delayed-frame-count
Estimated number of frames delayed due to external circumstances
in display-sync mode. Note that in general, mpv has to guess
that this is happening, and the guess can be inaccurate.

percent-pos (RW)
Position in current file (0-100). The advantage over using this
instead of calculating it out of other properties is that it
properly falls back to estimating the playback position from the
byte position, if the file duration is not known.

time-pos (RW)
Position in current file in seconds.

time-start
Deprecated. Always returns 0. Before mpv 0.14, this used to
return the start time of the file (could affect e.g. transport
streams). See --rebase-start-time option.

time-remaining
Remaining length of the file in seconds. Note that the file
duration is not always exactly known, so this is an estimate.

playtime-remaining
time-remaining scaled by the current speed.

playback-time (RW)
Position in current file in seconds. Unlike time-pos, the time
is clamped to the range of the file. (Inaccurate file durations
etc. could make it go out of range. Useful on attempts to seek
outside of the file, as the seek target time is considered the
current position during seeking.)

chapter (RW)
Current chapter number. The number of the first chapter is 0.

edition (RW)
Current MKV edition number. Setting this property to a different
value will restart playback. The number of the first edition is
0.

disc-titles
Number of BD/DVD titles.

This has a number of sub-properties. Replace N with the 0-based
edition index.

disc-titles/count
Number of titles.

disc-titles/id
Title ID as integer. Currently, this is the same as the
title index.

disc-titles/length
Length in seconds. Can be unavailable in a number of
cases (currently it works for libdvdnav only).

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_ARRAY
MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP (for each edition)
"id" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"length" MPV_FORMAT_DOUBLE

disc-title-list
List of BD/DVD titles.

disc-title (RW)
Current BD/DVD title number. Writing works only for dvdnav://
and bd:// (and aliases for these).

chapters
Number of chapters.

editions
Number of MKV editions.

edition-list
List of editions, current entry marked. Currently, the raw prop‐
erty value is useless.

This has a number of sub-properties. Replace N with the 0-based
edition index.

edition-list/count
Number of editions. If there are no editions, this can be
0 or 1 (1 if there's a useless dummy edition).

edition-list/N/id
Edition ID as integer. Use this to set the edition prop‐
erty. Currently, this is the same as the edition index.

edition-list/N/default
yes if this is the default edition, no otherwise.

edition-list/N/title
Edition title as stored in the file. Not always avail‐
able.

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_ARRAY
MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP (for each edition)
"id" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"title" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"default" MPV_FORMAT_FLAG

ab-loop-a, ab-loop-b (RW)
Set/get A-B loop points. See corresponding options and ab_loop
command. The special value no on either of these properties
disables looping.

angle (RW)
Current DVD angle.

metadata
Metadata key/value pairs.

If the property is accessed with Lua's mp.get_property_native,
this returns a table with metadata keys mapping to metadata val‐
ues. If it is accessed with the client API, this returns a
MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP, with tag keys mapping to tag values.

For OSD, it returns a formatted list. Trying to retrieve this
property as a raw string doesn't work.

This has a number of sub-properties:

metadata/by-key/<key>
Value of metadata entry <key>.

metadata/list/count
Number of metadata entries.

metadata/list/N/key
Key name of the Nth metadata entry. (The first entry is
0).

metadata/list/N/value
Value of the Nth metadata entry.

metadata/<key>
Old version of metadata/by-key/<key>. Use is discouraged,
because the metadata key string could conflict with other
sub-properties.

The layout of this property might be subject to change. Sugges‐
tions are welcome how exactly this property should work.

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP
(key and string value for each metadata entry)

filtered-metadata
Like metadata, but includes only fields listed in the --dis‐
play-tags option. This is the same set of tags that is printed
to the terminal.

chapter-metadata
Metadata of current chapter. Works similar to metadata property.
It also allows the same access methods (using sub-properties).

Per-chapter metadata is very rare. Usually, only the chapter
name (title) is set.

For accessing other information, like chapter start, see the
chapter-list property.

vf-metadata/<filter-label>
Metadata added by video filters. Accessed by the filter label,
which, if not explicitly specified using the @filter-label: syn‐
tax, will be <filter-name>NN.

Works similar to metadata property. It allows the same access
methods (using sub-properties).

An example of this kind of metadata are the cropping parameters
added by --vf=lavfi=cropdetect.

af-metadata/<filter-label>
Equivalent to vf-metadata/<filter-label>, but for audio filters.

pause (RW)
Pause status. This is usually yes or no. See --pause.

idle Return yes if no file is loaded, but the player is staying
around because of the --idle option.

core-idle
Return yes if the playback core is paused, otherwise no. This
can be different pause in special situations, such as when the
player pauses itself due to low network cache.

This also returns yes if playback is restarting or if nothing is
playing at all. In other words, it's only no if there's actually
video playing. (Behavior since mpv 0.7.0.)

cache Network cache fill state (0-100.0).

cache-size (RW)
Network cache size in KB. This is similar to --cache. This
allows setting the cache size at runtime. Currently, it's not
possible to enable or disable the cache at runtime using this
property, just to resize an existing cache.

This does not include the backbuffer size (changed after mpv
0.10.0).

Note that this tries to keep the cache contents as far as possi‐
ble. To make this easier, the cache resizing code will allocate
the new cache while the old cache is still allocated.

Don't use this when playing DVD or Blu-ray.

cache-free (R)
Total free cache size in KB.

cache-used (R)
Total used cache size in KB.

cache-idle (R)
Returns yes if the cache is idle, which means the cache is
filled as much as possible, and is currently not reading more
data.

demuxer-cache-duration
Approximate duration of video buffered in the demuxer, in sec‐
onds. The guess is very unreliable, and often the property will
not be available at all, even if data is buffered.

demuxer-cache-time
Approximate time of video buffered in the demuxer, in seconds.
Same as demuxer-cache-duration but returns the last timestamp of
buffered data in demuxer.

demuxer-cache-idle
Returns yes if the demuxer is idle, which means the demuxer
cache is filled to the requested amount, and is currently not
reading more data.

paused-for-cache
Returns yes when playback is paused because of waiting for the
cache.

cache-buffering-state
Return the percentage (0-100) of the cache fill status until the
player will unpause (related to paused-for-cache).

eof-reached
Returns yes if end of playback was reached, no otherwise. Note
that this is usually interesting only if --keep-open is enabled,
since otherwise the player will immediately play the next file
(or exit or enter idle mode), and in these cases the eof-reached
property will logically be cleared immediately after it's set.

seeking
Returns yes if the player is currently seeking, or otherwise
trying to restart playback. (It's possible that it returns yes
while a file is loaded, or when switching ordered chapter seg‐
ments. This is because the same underlying code is used for
seeking and resyncing.)

hr-seek (RW)
See --hr-seek.

volume (RW)
Current volume (see --volume for details).

mute (RW)
Current mute status (yes/no).

audio-delay (RW)
See --audio-delay.

audio-codec
Audio codec selected for decoding.

audio-codec-name
Audio codec.

audio-params
Audio format as output by the audio decoder. This has a number
of sub-properties:

audio-params/format
The sample format as string. This uses the same names as
used in other places of mpv.

audio-params/samplerate
Samplerate.

audio-params/channels
The channel layout as a string. This is similar to what
the --audio-channels accepts.

audio-params/hr-channels
As channels, but instead of the possibly cryptic actual
layout sent to the audio device, return a hopefully more
human readable form. (Usually only
audio-out-params/hr-channels makes sense.)

audio-params/channel-count
Number of audio channels. This is redundant to the chan‐
nels field described above.

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP
"format" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"samplerate" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"channels" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"channel-count" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"hr-channels" MPV_FORMAT_STRING

audio-out-params
Same as audio-params, but the format of the data written to the
audio API.

aid (RW)
Current audio track (similar to --aid).

audio (RW)
Alias for aid.

balance (RW)
Audio channel balance. (The implementation of this feature is
rather odd. It doesn't change the volumes of each channel, but
instead sets up a pan matrix to mix the left and right chan‐
nels.)

fullscreen (RW)
See --fullscreen.

deinterlace (RW)
See --deinterlace.

field-dominance (RW)
See --field-dominance

colormatrix (R)
Redirects to video-params/colormatrix. This parameter (as well
as similar ones) can be overridden with the format video filter.

colormatrix-input-range (R)
See colormatrix.

video-output-levels (RW)
See --video-output-levels,

colormatrix-primaries (R)
See colormatrix.

ontop (RW)
See --ontop.

border (RW)
See --border.

on-all-workspaces (RW)
See --on-all-workspaces. Unsetting may not work on all WMs.

framedrop (RW)
See --framedrop.

gamma (RW)
See --gamma.

brightness (RW)
See --brightness.

contrast (RW)
See --contrast.

saturation (RW)
See --saturation.

hue (RW)
See --hue.

hwdec (RW)
Reflects the --hwdec option.

Writing to it may change the currently used hardware decoder, if
possible. (Internally, the player may reinitialize the decoder,
and will perform a seek to refresh the video properly.) You can
watch the other hwdec properties to see whether this was suc‐
cessful.

Unlike in mpv 0.9.x and before, this does not return the cur‐
rently active hardware decoder.

hwdec-active
Return yes or no, depending on whether any type of hardware
decoding is actually in use.

hwdec-detected
If software decoding is active, this returns the hardware
decoder in use. Otherwise, it returns either no, or if applica‐
ble, the currently loaded hardware decoding API. This is known
only once the VO has opened (and possibly later). With some VOs
(like opengl), this is never known in advance, but only when the
decoder attempted to create the hw decoder successfully. Also,
hw decoders with -copy suffix will return no while no video is
being decoded. All this reflects how detecting hw decoders are
detected and used internally in mpv.

panscan (RW)
See --panscan.

video-format
Video format as string.

video-codec
Video codec selected for decoding.

width, height
Video size. This uses the size of the video as decoded, or if no
video frame has been decoded yet, the (possibly incorrect) con‐
tainer indicated size.

video-params
Video parameters, as output by the decoder (with overrides like
aspect etc. applied). This has a number of sub-properties:

video-params/pixelformat
The pixel format as string. This uses the same names as
used in other places of mpv.

video-params/average-bpp
Average bits-per-pixel as integer. Subsampled planar for‐
mats use a different resolution, which is the reason this
value can sometimes be odd or confusing. Can be unavail‐
able with some formats.

video-params/plane-depth
Bit depth for each color component as integer. This is
only exposed for planar or single-component formats, and
is unavailable for other formats.

video-params/w, video-params/h
Video size as integers, with no aspect correction
applied.

video-params/dw, video-params/dh
Video size as integers, scaled for correct aspect ratio.

video-params/aspect
Display aspect ratio as float.

video-params/par
Pixel aspect ratio.

video-params/colormatrix
The colormatrix in use as string. (Exact values subject
to change.)

video-params/colorlevels
The colorlevels as string. (Exact values subject to
change.)

video-params/primaries
The primaries in use as string. (Exact values subject to
change.)

video-params/gamma
The gamma function in use as string. (Exact values sub‐
ject to change.)

video-params/chroma-location
Chroma location as string. (Exact values subject to
change.)

video-params/rotate
Intended display rotation in degrees (clockwise).

video-params/stereo-in
Source file stereo 3D mode. (See --video-stereo-mode
option.)

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP
"pixelformat" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"w" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"h" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"dw" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"dh" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"aspect" MPV_FORMAT_DOUBLE
"par" MPV_FORMAT_DOUBLE
"colormatrix" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"colorlevels" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"primaries" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"chroma-location" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"rotate" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"stereo-in" MPV_FORMAT_STRING

dwidth, dheight
Video display size. This is the video size after filters and
aspect scaling have been applied. The actual video window size
can still be different from this, e.g. if the user resized the
video window manually.

These have the same values as video-out-params/dw and
video-out-params/dh.

video-out-params
Same as video-params, but after video filters have been applied.
If there are no video filters in use, this will contain the same
values as video-params. Note that this is still not necessarily
what the video window uses, since the user can change the window
size, and all real VOs do their own scaling independently from
the filter chain.

Has the same sub-properties as video-params.

video-frame-info
Approximate information of the current frame. Note that if any
of these are used on OSD, the information might be off by a few
frames due to OSD redrawing and frame display being somewhat
disconnected, and you might have to pause and force a redraw.

Sub-properties:

video-frame-info/picture-type video-frame-info/interlaced
video-frame-info/tff video-frame-info/repeat

fps Container FPS. This can easily contain bogus values. For videos
that use modern container formats or video codecs, this will
often be incorrect.

estimated-vf-fps
Estimated/measured FPS of the video filter chain output. (If no
filters are used, this corresponds to decoder output.) This uses
the average of the 10 past frame durations to calculate the FPS.
It will be inaccurate if frame-dropping is involved (such as
when framedrop is explicitly enabled, or after precise seeking).
Files with imprecise timestamps (such as Matroska) might lead to
unstable results.

window-scale (RW)
Window size multiplier. Setting this will resize the video win‐
dow to the values contained in dwidth and dheight multiplied
with the value set with this property. Setting 1 will resize to
original video size (or to be exact, the size the video filters
output). 2 will set the double size, 0.5 halves the size.

window-minimized
Return whether the video window is minimized or not.

display-names
Names of the displays that the mpv window covers. On X11, these
are the xrandr names (LVDS1, HDMI1, DP1, VGA1, etc.).

display-fps (RW)
The refresh rate of the current display. Currently, this is the
lowest FPS of any display covered by the video, as retrieved by
the underlying system APIs (e.g. xrandr on X11). It is not the
measured FPS. It's not necessarily available on all platforms.
Note that any of the listed facts may change any time without a
warning.

estimated-display-fps
Only available if display-sync mode (as selected by
--video-sync) is active. Returns the actual rate at which dis‐
play refreshes seem to occur, measured by system time.

vsync-jitter
Estimated deviation factor of the vsync duration.

video-aspect (RW)
Video aspect, see --video-aspect.

osd-width, osd-height
Last known OSD width (can be 0). This is needed if you want to
use the overlay_add command. It gives you the actual OSD size,
which can be different from the window size in some cases.

osd-par
Last known OSD display pixel aspect (can be 0).

vid (RW)
Current video track (similar to --vid).

video (RW)
Alias for vid.

video-align-x, video-align-y (RW)
See --video-align-x and --video-align-y.

video-pan-x, video-pan-y (RW)
See --video-pan-x and --video-pan-y.

video-zoom (RW)
See --video-zoom.

video-unscaled (W)
See --video-unscaled.

program (W)
Switch TS program (write-only).

dvb-channel (W)
Pair of integers: card,channel of current DVB stream. Can be
switched to switch to another channel on the same card.

dvb-channel-name (RW)
Name of current DVB program. On write, a channel-switch to the
named channel on the same card is performed. Can also be used
for channel switching.

sid (RW)
Current subtitle track (similar to --sid).

secondary-sid (RW)
Secondary subtitle track (see --secondary-sid).

sub (RW)
Alias for sid.

sub-delay (RW)
See --sub-delay.

sub-pos (RW)
See --sub-pos.

sub-visibility (RW)
See --sub-visibility.

sub-forced-only (RW)
See --sub-forced-only.

sub-scale (RW)
Subtitle font size multiplier.

ass-force-margins (RW)
See --ass-force-margins.

sub-use-margins (RW)
See --sub-use-margins.

ass-vsfilter-aspect-compat (RW)
See --ass-vsfilter-aspect-compat.

ass-style-override (RW)
See --ass-style-override.

stream-capture (RW)
A filename, see --stream-capture. Setting this will start cap‐
ture using the given filename. Setting it to an empty string
will stop it.

tv-brightness, tv-contrast, tv-saturation, tv-hue (RW)
TV stuff.

playlist-pos (RW)
Current position on playlist. The first entry is on position 0.
Writing to the property will restart playback at the written
entry.

playlist-count
Number of total playlist entries.

playlist
Playlist, current entry marked. Currently, the raw property
value is useless.

This has a number of sub-properties. Replace N with the 0-based
playlist entry index.

playlist/count
Number of playlist entries (same as playlist-count).

playlist/N/filename
Filename of the Nth entry.

playlist/N/current, playlist/N/playing
yes if this entry is currently playing (or being loaded).
Unavailable or no otherwise. When changing files, current
and playing can be different, because the currently play‐
ing file hasn't been unloaded yet; in this case, current
refers to the new selection. (Since mpv 0.7.0.)

playlist/N/title
Name of the Nth entry. Only available if the playlist
file contains such fields, and only if mpv's parser sup‐
ports it for the given playlist format.

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_ARRAY
MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP (for each playlist entry)
"filename" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"current" MPV_FORMAT_FLAG (might be missing; since mpv 0.7.0)
"playing" MPV_FORMAT_FLAG (same)
"title" MPV_FORMAT_STRING (optional)

track-list
List of audio/video/sub tracks, current entry marked. Currently,
the raw property value is useless.

This has a number of sub-properties. Replace N with the 0-based
track index.

track-list/count
Total number of tracks.

track-list/N/id
The ID as it's used for -sid/--aid/--vid. This is unique
within tracks of the same type (sub/audio/video), but
otherwise not.

track-list/N/type
String describing the media type. One of audio, video,
sub.

track-list/N/src-id
Track ID as used in the source file. Not always avail‐
able.

track-list/N/title
Track title as it is stored in the file. Not always
available.

track-list/N/lang
Track language as identified by the file. Not always
available.

track-list/N/audio-channels
For audio tracks, the number of audio channels in the
audio stream. Not always accurate (depends on container
hints). Not always available.

track-list/N/albumart
yes if this is a video track that consists of a single
picture, no or unavailable otherwise. This is used for
video tracks that are really attached pictures in audio
files.

track-list/N/default
yes if the track has the default flag set in the file, no
otherwise.

track-list/N/forced
yes if the track has the forced flag set in the file, no
otherwise.

track-list/N/codec
The codec name used by this track, for example h264.
Unavailable in some rare cases.

track-list/N/external
yes if the track is an external file, no otherwise. This
is set for separate subtitle files.

track-list/N/external-filename
The filename if the track is from an external file,
unavailable otherwise.

track-list/N/selected
yes if the track is currently decoded, no otherwise.

track-list/N/ff-index
The stream index as usually used by the FFmpeg utilities.
Note that this can be potentially wrong if a demuxer
other than libavformat (--demuxer=lavf) is used. For mkv
files, the index will usually match even if the default
(builtin) demuxer is used, but there is no hard guaran‐
tee.

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_ARRAY
MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP (for each track)
"id" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"type" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"src-id" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"title" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"lang" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"audio-channels" MPV_FORMAT_INT64
"albumart" MPV_FORMAT_FLAG
"default" MPV_FORMAT_FLAG
"forced" MPV_FORMAT_FLAG
"external" MPV_FORMAT_FLAG
"external-filename" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"codec" MPV_FORMAT_STRING

chapter-list
List of chapters, current entry marked. Currently, the raw prop‐
erty value is useless.

This has a number of sub-properties. Replace N with the 0-based
chapter index.

chapter-list/count
Number of chapters.

chapter-list/N/title
Chapter title as stored in the file. Not always avail‐
able.

chapter-list/N/time
Chapter start time in seconds as float.

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_ARRAY
MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP (for each chapter)
"title" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"time" MPV_FORMAT_DOUBLE

af (RW)
See --af and the af command.

vf (RW)
See --vf and the vf command.

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_ARRAY
MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP (for each filter entry)
"name" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"label" MPV_FORMAT_STRING [optional]
"params" MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP [optional]
"key" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"value" MPV_FORMAT_STRING

It's also possible to write the property using this format.

video-rotate (RW)
See --video-rotate option.

seekable
Return whether it's generally possible to seek in the current
file.

partially-seekable
Return yes if the current file is considered seekable, but only
because the cache is active. This means small relative seeks may
be fine, but larger seeks may fail anyway. Whether a seek will
succeed or not is generally not known in advance.

If this property returns true, seekable will also return true.

playback-abort
Return whether playback is stopped or is to be stopped. (Useful
in obscure situations like during on_load hook processing, when
the user can stop playback, but the script has to explicitly end
processing.)

cursor-autohide (RW)
See --cursor-autohide. Setting this to a new value will always
update the cursor, and reset the internal timer.

osd-sym-cc
Inserts the current OSD symbol as opaque OSD control code (cc).
This makes sense only with the show-text command or options
which set OSD messages. The control code is implementation spe‐
cific and is useless for anything else.

osd-ass-cc
${osd-ass-cc/0} disables escaping ASS sequences of text in OSD,
${osd-ass-cc/1} enables it again. By default, ASS sequences are
escaped to avoid accidental formatting, and this property can
disable this behavior. Note that the properties return an opaque
OSD control code, which only makes sense for the show-text com‐
mand or options which set OSD messages.

Example

· --osd-status-msg='This is ${osd-ass-cc/0}{\\b1}bold text'

· show-text "This is ${osd-ass-cc/0}{\b1}bold text"

Any ASS override tags as understood by libass can be used.

Note that you need to escape the \ character, because the string
is processed for C escape sequences before passing it to the OSD
code.

A list of tags can be found here:
http://docs.aegisub.org/latest/ASS_Tags/

vo-configured
Return whether the VO is configured right now. Usually this cor‐
responds to whether the video window is visible. If the
--force-window option is used, this is usually always returns
yes.

video-bitrate, audio-bitrate, sub-bitrate
Bitrate values calculated on the packet level. This works by
dividing the bit size of all packets between two keyframes by
their presentation timestamp distance. (This uses the timestamps
are stored in the file, so e.g. playback speed does not influ‐
ence the returned values.) In particular, the video bitrate will
update only per keyframe, and show the "past" bitrate. To make
the property more UI friendly, updates to these properties are
throttled in a certain way.

The unit is bits per second. OSD formatting turns these values
in kilobits (or megabits, if appropriate), which can be pre‐
vented by using the raw property value, e.g. with
${=video-bitrate}.

Note that the accuracy of these properties is influenced by a
few factors. If the underlying demuxer rewrites the packets on
demuxing (done for some file formats), the bitrate might be
slightly off. If timestamps are bad or jittery (like in
Matroska), even constant bitrate streams might show fluctuating
bitrate.

How exactly these values are calculated might change in the
future.

In earlier versions of mpv, these properties returned a static
(but bad) guess using a completely different method.

packet-video-bitrate, packet-audio-bitrate, packet-sub-bitrate
Old and deprecated properties for video-bitrate, audio-bitrate,
sub-bitrate. They behave exactly the same, but return a value in
kilobits. Also, they don't have any OSD formatting, though the
same can be achieved with e.g. ${=video-bitrate}.

These properties shouldn't be used anymore.

audio-device-list
Return the list of discovered audio devices. This is mostly for
use with the client API, and reflects what --audio-device=help
with the command line player returns.

When querying the property with the client API using MPV_FOR‐
MAT_NODE, or with Lua mp.get_property_native, this will return a
mpv_node with the following contents:

MPV_FORMAT_NODE_ARRAY
MPV_FORMAT_NODE_MAP (for each device entry)
"name" MPV_FORMAT_STRING
"description" MPV_FORMAT_STRING

The name is what is to be passed to the --audio-device option
(and often a rather cryptic audio API-specific ID), while
description is human readable free form text. The description is
an empty string if none was received.

The special entry with the name set to auto selects the default
audio output driver and the default device.

The property can be watched with the property observation mecha‐
nism in the client API and in Lua scripts. (Technically, change
notification is enabled the first time this property is read.)

audio-device (RW)
Set the audio device. This directly reads/writes the
--audio-device option, but on write accesses, the audio output
will be scheduled for reloading.

Writing this property while no audio output is active will not
automatically enable audio. (This is also true in the case when
audio was disabled due to reinitialization failure after a pre‐
vious write access to audio-device.)

This property also doesn't tell you which audio device is actu‐
ally in use.

How these details are handled may change in the future.

current-vo
Current video output driver (name as used with --vo).

current-ao
Current audio output driver (name as used with --ao).

audio-out-detected-device
Return the audio device selected by the AO driver (only imple‐
mented for some drivers: currently only coreaudio).

working-directory
Return the working directory of the mpv process. Can be useful
for JSON IPC users, because the command line player usually
works with relative paths.

protocol-list
List of protocol prefixes potentially recognized by the player.
They are returned without trailing :// suffix (which is still
always required). In some cases, the protocol will not actually
be supported (consider https if ffmpeg is not compiled with TLS
support).

mpv-version
Return the mpv version/copyright string. Depending on how the
binary was built, it might contain either a release version, or
just a git hash.

mpv-configuration
Return the configuration arguments which were passed to the
build system (typically the way ./waf configure ... was
invoked).

options/<name> (RW)
Read-only access to value of option --<name>. Most options can
be changed at runtime by writing to this property. Note that
many options require reloading the file for changes to take
effect. If there is an equivalent property, prefer setting the
property instead.

file-local-options/<name>
Similar to options/<name>, but when setting an option through
this property, the option is reset to its old value once the
current file has stopped playing. Trying to write an option
while no file is playing (or is being loaded) results in an
error.

(Note that if an option is marked as file-local, even options/
will access the local value, and the old value, which will be
restored on end of playback, can not be read or written until
end of playback.)

option-info/<name>
Additional per-option information.

This has a number of sub-properties. Replace <name> with the
name of a top-level option. No guarantee of stability is given
to any of these sub-properties - they may change radically in
the feature.

option-info/<name>/name
Returns the name of the option.

option-info/<name>/type
Return the name of the option type, like String or Inte‐
ger. For many complex types, this isn't very accurate.

option-info/<name>/set-from-commandline
Return yes if the option was set from the mpv command
line, no otherwise. What this is set to if the option is
e.g. changed at runtime is left undefined (meaning it
could change in the future).

option-info/<name>/set-locally
Return yes if the option was set per-file. This is the
case with automatically loaded profiles, file-dir con‐
figs, and other cases. It means the option value will be
restored to the value before playback start when playback
ends.

option-info/<name>/default-value
The default value of the option. May not always be avail‐
able.

option-info/<name>/min, option-info/<name>/max
Integer minimum and maximum values allowed for the
option. Only available if the options are numeric, and
the minimum/maximum has been set internally. It's also
possible that only one of these is set.

option-info/<name>/choices
If the option is a choice option, the possible choices.
Choices that are integers may or may not be included
(they can be implied by min and max). Note that options
which behave like choice options, but are not actual
choice options internally, may not have this info avail‐
able.

property-list
Return the list of top-level properties.

Property Expansion
All string arguments to input commands as well as certain options (like
--term-playing-msg) are subject to property expansion. Note that prop‐
erty expansion does not work in places where e.g. numeric parameters
are expected. (For example, the add command does not do property
expansion. The set command is an exception and not a general rule.)

Example for input.conf

i show-text Filename: ${filename}
shows the filename of the current file when pressing the i
key

Within input.conf, property expansion can be inhibited by putting the
raw prefix in front of commands.

The following expansions are supported:

${NAME}
Expands to the value of the property NAME. If retrieving the
property fails, expand to an error string. (Use ${NAME:} with a
trailing : to expand to an empty string instead.) If NAME is
prefixed with =, expand to the raw value of the property (see
section below).

${NAME:STR}
Expands to the value of the property NAME, or STR if the prop‐
erty cannot be retrieved. STR is expanded recursively.

${?NAME:STR}
Expands to STR (recursively) if the property NAME is available.

${!NAME:STR}
Expands to STR (recursively) if the property NAME cannot be
retrieved.

${?NAME==VALUE:STR}
Expands to STR (recursively) if the property NAME expands to a
string equal to VALUE. You can prefix NAME with = in order to
compare the raw value of a property (see section below). If the
property is unavailable, or other errors happen when retrieving
it, the value is never considered equal. Note that VALUE can't
contain any of the characters : or }. Also, it is possible that
escaping with " or % might be added in the future, should the
need arise.

${!NAME==VALUE:STR}
Same as with the ? variant, but STR is expanded if the value is
not equal. (Using the same semantics as with ?.)

$$ Expands to $.

$} Expands to }. (To produce this character inside recursive expan‐
sion.)

$> Disable property expansion and special handling of $ for the
rest of the string.

In places where property expansion is allowed, C-style escapes are
often accepted as well. Example:

· \n becomes a newline character

· \\ expands to \

Raw and Formatted Properties
Normally, properties are formatted as human-readable text, meant to be
displayed on OSD or on the terminal. It is possible to retrieve an
unformatted (raw) value from a property by prefixing its name with =.
These raw values can be parsed by other programs and follow the same
conventions as the options associated with the properties.

Examples

· ${time-pos} expands to 00:14:23 (if playback position is at 14
minutes 23 seconds)

· ${=time-pos} expands to 863.4 (same time, plus 400 milliseconds -
milliseconds are normally not shown in the formatted case)

Sometimes, the difference in amount of information carried by raw and
formatted property values can be rather big. In some cases, raw values
have more information, like higher precision than seconds with
time-pos. Sometimes it is the other way around, e.g. aid shows track
title and language in the formatted case, but only the track number if
it is raw.

ON SCREEN CONTROLLER
The On Screen Controller (short: OSC) is a minimal GUI integrated with
mpv to offer basic mouse-controllability. It is intended to make inter‐
action easier for new users and to enable precise and direct seeking.

The OSC is enabled by default if mpv was compiled with Lua support. It
can be disabled entirely using the --osc=no option.

Using the OSC
By default, the OSC will show up whenever the mouse is moved inside the
player window and will hide if the mouse is not moved outside the OSC
for 0.5 seconds or if the mouse leaves the window.

playlist prev

┌──────────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│left-click │ play previous file in │
│ │ playlist │
├──────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│shift+L-click │ show playlist │
└──────────────┴────────────────────────────┘

title
Displays current media-title or filename

┌────────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│left-click │ show playlist position and │
│ │ length and full title │
├────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│right-click │ show filename │
└────────────┴────────────────────────────┘

playlist next

┌──────────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│left-click │ play next file in playlist │
├──────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│shift+L-click │ show playlist │
└──────────────┴────────────────────────────┘

audio and sub
Displays selected track and amount of available tracks

┌──────────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│left-click │ cycle audio/sub tracks │
│ │ forward │
├──────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│right-click │ cycle audio/sub tracks │
│ │ backwards │
├──────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│shift+L-click │ show available audio/sub │
│ │ tracks │
└──────────────┴────────────────────────────┘

skip back

┌──────────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│left-click │ go to beginning of chapter │
│ │ / previous chapter │
├──────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│shift+L-click │ show chapters │
└──────────────┴────────────────────────────┘

seek back

┌──────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│left-click │ skip back 5 seconds │
├──────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│right-click │ skip back 30 seconds │
├──────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│shift-L-click │ skip back 1 frame │
└──────────────┴──────────────────────┘

play

┌───────────┬───────────────────┐
│left-click │ toggle play/pause │
└───────────┴───────────────────┘

seek frwd

┌──────────────┬─────────────────────────┐
│left-click │ skip forward 10 seconds │
├──────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│right-click │ skip forward 60 seconds │
├──────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│shift-L-click │ skip forward 1 frame │
└──────────────┴─────────────────────────┘

skip frwd

┌──────────────┬────────────────────┐
│left-click │ go to next chapter │
├──────────────┼────────────────────┤
│shift+L-click │ show chapters │
└──────────────┴────────────────────┘

fullscreen

┌───────────┬───────────────────┐
│left-click │ toggle fullscreen │
└───────────┴───────────────────┘

seekbar
Indicates current playback position and position of chapters

┌───────────┬──────────────────┐
│left-click │ seek to position │
└───────────┴──────────────────┘

time passed
Shows current playback position timestamp

┌───────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│left-click │ toggle displaying time‐ │
│ │ codes with milliseconds │
└───────────┴────────────────────────────┘

cache status
Shows current cache fill status (only visible when below 45%)

time remaining
Shows remaining playback time timestamp

┌───────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│left-click │ toggle between total and │
│ │ remaining time │
└───────────┴────────────────────────────┘

Key Bindings
These key bindings are active by default if nothing else is already
bound to these keys. In case of collision, the function needs to be
bound to a different key. See the Script Commands section.

┌────┬────────────────────────────┐
│del │ Hide the OSC permanently │
│ │ until mpv is restarted. │
└────┴────────────────────────────┘

Configuration
The OSC offers limited configuration through a config file lua-set‐
tings/osc.conf placed in mpv's user dir and through the --script-opts
command-line option. Options provided through the command-line will
override those from the config file.

Config Syntax
The config file must exactly follow the following syntax:

# this is a comment
optionA=value1
optionB=value2

# can only be used at the beginning of a line and there may be no spa‐
ces around the = or anywhere else.

Command-line Syntax
To avoid collisions with other scripts, all options need to be prefixed
with osc-.

Example:

--script-opts=osc-optionA=value1,osc-optionB=value2

Configurable Options
showwindowed
Default: yes
Enable the OSC when windowed

showfullscreen
Default: yes
Enable the OSC when fullscreen

scalewindowed
Default: 1.0
Scale factor of the OSC when windowed

scalefullscreen
Default: 1.0
Scale factor of the OSC when fullscreen

scaleforcedwindow
Default: 2.0
Scale factor of the OSC when rendered on a forced (dummy) window

vidscale
Default: yes
Scale the OSC with the video
no tries to keep the OSC size constant as much as the window size allows

valign
Default: 0.8
Vertical alignment, -1 (top) to 1 (bottom)

halign
Default: 0.0
Horizontal alignment, -1 (left) to 1 (right)

boxalpha
Default: 80
Alpha of the background box, 0 (opaque) to 255 (fully transparent)

hidetimeout
Default: 500
Duration in ms until the OSC hides if no mouse movement, negative value
disables auto-hide

fadeduration
Default: 200
Duration of fade out in ms, 0 = no fade

deadzonesize
Default: 0
Size of the deadzone. The deadzone is an area that makes the mouse act
like leaving the window. Movement there won't make the OSC show up and
it will hide immediately if the mouse enters it. The deadzone starts
at the window border opposite to the OSC and the size controls how much
of the window it will span. Values between 0 and 1.

minmousemove
Default: 3
Minimum amount of pixels the mouse has to move between ticks to make
the OSC show up

layout
Default: box
The layout for the OSC. Currently available are: box, slimbox,
bottombar and topbar.

seekbarstyle
Default: slider
Sets the style of the seekbar, slider (diamond marker) or bar (fill)

timetotal
Default: no
Show total time instead of time remaining

timems
Default: no
Display timecodes with milliseconds

Script Commands
The OSC script listens to certain script commands. These commands can
bound in input.conf, or sent by other scripts.

enable-osc
Undoes disable-osc or the effect of the del key.

disable-osc
Hide the OSC permanently. This is also what the del key does.

osc-message
Show a message on screen using the OSC. First argument is the
message, second the duration in seconds.

Example

You could put this into input.conf to hide the OSC with the a key and
to unhide it with b:

a script_message disable-osc
b script_message enable-osc

LUA SCRIPTING
mpv can load Lua scripts. Scripts passed to the --script option, or
found in the scripts subdirectory of the mpv configuration directory
(usually ~/.config/mpv/scripts/) will be loaded on program start. mpv
also appends the scripts subdirectory to the end of Lua's path so you
can import scripts from there too. Since it's added to the end, don't
name scripts you want to import the same as Lua libraries because they
will be overshadowed by them.

mpv provides the built-in module mp, which contains functions to send
commands to the mpv core and to retrieve information about playback
state, user settings, file information, and so on.

These scripts can be used to control mpv in a similar way to slave
mode. Technically, the Lua code uses the client API internally.

Example
A script which leaves fullscreen mode when the player is paused:

function on_pause_change(name, value)
if value == true then
mp.set_property("fullscreen", "no")
end
end
mp.observe_property("pause", "bool", on_pause_change)

Details on the script initialization and lifecycle
Your script will be loaded by the player at program start from the
scripts configuration subdirectory, or from a path specified with the
--script option. Some scripts are loaded internally (like --osc). Each
script runs in its own thread. Your script is first run "as is", and
once that is done, the event loop is entered. This event loop will dis‐
patch events received by mpv and call your own event handlers which you
have registered with mp.register_event, or timers added with
mp.add_timeout or similar.

When the player quits, all scripts will be asked to terminate. This
happens via a shutdown event, which by default will make the event loop
return. If your script got into an endless loop, mpv will probably
behave fine during playback (unless the player is suspended, see
mp.suspend), but it won't terminate when quitting, because it's waiting
on your script.

Internally, the C code will call the Lua function mp_event_loop after
loading a Lua script. This function is normally defined by the default
prelude loaded before your script (see player/lua/defaults.lua in the
mpv sources). The event loop will wait for events and dispatch events
registered with mp.register_event. It will also handle timers added
with mp.add_timeout and similar (by waiting with a timeout).

Since mpv 0.6.0, the player will wait until the script is fully loaded
before continuing normal operation. The player considers a script as
fully loaded as soon as it starts waiting for mpv events (or it exits).
In practice this means the player will more or less hang until the
script returns from the main chunk (and mp_event_loop is called), or
the script calls mp_event_loop or mp.dispatch_events directly. This is
done to make it possible for a script to fully setup event handlers
etc. before playback actually starts. In older mpv versions, this hap‐
pened asynchronously.

mp functions
The mp module is preloaded, although it can be loaded manually with
require 'mp'. It provides the core client API.

mp.command(string)
Run the given command. This is similar to the commands used in
input.conf. See List of Input Commands.

By default, this will show something on the OSD (depending on
the command), as if it was used in input.conf. See Input Command
Prefixes how to influence OSD usage per command.

Returns true on success, or nil, error on error.

mp.commandv(arg1, arg2, ...)
Similar to mp.command, but pass each command argument as sepa‐
rate parameter. This has the advantage that you don't have to
care about quoting and escaping in some cases.

Example:

mp.command("loadfile " .. filename .. " append")
mp.commandv("loadfile", filename, "append")

These two commands are equivalent, except that the first version
breaks if the filename contains spaces or certain special char‐
acters.

Note that properties are not expanded. You can use either
mp.command, the expand-properties prefix, or the mp.get_property
family of functions.

Unlike mp.command, this will not use OSD by default either
(except for some OSD-specific commands).

mp.command_native(table [,def])
Similar to mp.commandv, but pass the argument list as table.
This has the advantage that in at least some cases, arguments
can be passed as native types.

Returns a result table on success (usually empty), or def, error
on error. def is the second parameter provided to the function,
and is nil if it's missing.

mp.get_property(name [,def])
Return the value of the given property as string. These are the
same properties as used in input.conf. See Properties for a list
of properties. The returned string is formatted similar to
${=name} (see Property Expansion).

Returns the string on success, or def, error on error. def is
the second parameter provided to the function, and is nil if
it's missing.

mp.get_property_osd(name [,def])
Similar to mp.get_property, but return the property value for‐
matted for OSD. This is the same string as printed with ${name}
when used in input.conf.

Returns the string on success, or def, error on error. def is
the second parameter provided to the function, and is an empty
string if it's missing. Unlike get_property(), assigning the
return value to a variable will always result in a string.

mp.get_property_bool(name [,def])
Similar to mp.get_property, but return the property value as
Boolean.

Returns a Boolean on success, or def, error on error.

mp.get_property_number(name [,def])
Similar to mp.get_property, but return the property value as
number.

Note that while Lua does not distinguish between integers and
floats, mpv internals do. This function simply request a double
float from mpv, and mpv will usually convert integer property
values to float.

Returns a number on success, or def, error on error.

mp.get_property_native(name [,def])
Similar to mp.get_property, but return the property value using
the best Lua type for the property. Most time, this will return
a string, Boolean, or number. Some properties (for example chap‐
ter-list) are returned as tables.

Returns a value on success, or def, error on error. Note that
nil might be a possible, valid value too in some corner cases.

mp.set_property(name, value)
Set the given property to the given string value. See
mp.get_property and Properties for more information about prop‐
erties.

Returns true on success, or nil, error on error.

mp.set_property_bool(name, value)
Similar to mp.set_property, but set the given property to the
given Boolean value.

mp.set_property_number(name, value)
Similar to mp.set_property, but set the given property to the
given numeric value.

Note that while Lua does not distinguish between integers and
floats, mpv internals do. This function will test whether the
number can be represented as integer, and if so, it will pass an
integer value to mpv, otherwise a double float.

mp.set_property_native(name, value)
Similar to mp.set_property, but set the given property using its
native type.

Since there are several data types which can not represented
natively in Lua, this might not always work as expected. For
example, while the Lua wrapper can do some guesswork to decide
whether a Lua table is an array or a map, this would fail with
empty tables. Also, there are not many properties for which it
makes sense to use this, instead of set_property, set_prop‐
erty_bool, set_property_number. For these reasons, this func‐
tion should probably be avoided for now, except for properties
that use tables natively.

mp.get_time()
Return the current mpv internal time in seconds as a number.
This is basically the system time, with an arbitrary offset.

mp.add_key_binding(key, name|fn [,fn [,flags]])
Register callback to be run on a key binding. The binding will
be mapped to the given key, which is a string describing the
physical key. This uses the same key names as in input.conf, and
also allows combinations (e.g. ctrl+a).

After calling this function, key presses will cause the function
fn to be called (unless the user remapped the key with another
binding).

The name argument should be a short symbolic string. It allows
the user to remap the key binding via input.conf using the
script-message command, and the name of the key binding (see
below for an example). The name should be unique across other
bindings in the same script - if not, the previous binding with
the same name will be overwritten. You can omit the name, in
which case a random name is generated internally.

The last argument is used for optional flags. This is a table,
which can have the following entries:

repeatable
If set to true, enables key repeat for this specific
binding.

complex
If set to true, then fn is called on both key up and
down events (as well as key repeat, if enabled), with
the first argument being a table. This table has an
event entry, which is set to one of the strings down,
repeat, up or press (the latter if key up/down can't
be tracked). It further has an is_mouse entry, which
tells whether the event was caused by a mouse button.

Internally, key bindings are dispatched via the script-mes‐
sage-to or script-binding input commands and mp.regis‐
ter_script_message.

Trying to map multiple commands to a key will essentially prefer
a random binding, while the other bindings are not called. It is
guaranteed that user defined bindings in the central input.conf
are preferred over bindings added with this function (but see
mp.add_forced_key_binding).

Example:

function something_handler()
print("the key was pressed")
end
mp.add_key_binding("x", "something", something_handler)

This will print the message the key was pressed when x was
pressed.

The user can remap these key bindings. Then the user has to put
the following into his input.conf to remap the command to the y
key:

y script-binding something

This will print the message when the key y is pressed. (x will
still work, unless the user remaps it.)

You can also explicitly send a message to a named script only.
Assume the above script was using the filename fooscript.lua:

y script-binding fooscript.something

mp.add_forced_key_binding(...)
This works almost the same as mp.add_key_binding, but registers
the key binding in a way that will overwrite the user's custom
bindings in his input.conf. (mp.add_key_binding overwrites
default key bindings only, but not those by the user's
input.conf.)

mp.remove_key_binding(name)
Remove a key binding added with mp.add_key_binding or
mp.add_forced_key_binding. Use the same name as you used when
adding the bindings. It's not possible to remove bindings for
which you omitted the name.

mp.register_event(name, fn)
Call a specific function when an event happens. The event name
is a string, and the function fn is a Lua function value.

Some events have associated data. This is put into a Lua table
and passed as argument to fn. The Lua table by default contains
a name field, which is a string containing the event name. If
the event has an error associated, the error field is set to a
string describing the error, on success it's not set.

If multiple functions are registered for the same event, they
are run in registration order, which the first registered func‐
tion running before all the other ones.

Returns true if such an event exists, false otherwise.

See Events and List of events for details.

mp.unregister_event(fn)
Undo mp.register_event(..., fn). This removes all event handlers
that are equal to the fn parameter. This uses normal Lua == com‐
parison, so be careful when dealing with closures.

mp.observe_property(name, type, fn)
Watch a property for changes. If the property name is changed,
then the function fn(name) will be called. type can be nil, or
be set to one of none, native, bool, string, or number. none is
the same as nil. For all other values, the new value of the
property will be passed as second argument to fn, using
mp.get_property_<type> to retrieve it. This means if type is for
example string, fn is roughly called as in fn(name, mp.get_prop‐
erty_string(name)).

If possible, change events are coalesced. If a property is
changed a bunch of times in a row, only the last change triggers
the change function. (The exact behavior depends on timing and
other things.)

In some cases the function is not called even if the property
changes. Whether this can happen depends on the property.

If the type is none or nil, sporadic property change events are
possible. This means the change function fn can be called even
if the property doesn't actually change.

mp.unobserve_property(fn)
Undo mp.observe_property(..., fn). This removes all property
handlers that are equal to the fn parameter. This uses normal
Lua == comparison, so be careful when dealing with closures.

mp.add_timeout(seconds, fn)
Call the given function fn when the given number of seconds has
elapsed. Note that the number of seconds can be fractional. For
now, the timer's resolution may be as low as 50 ms, although
this will be improved in the future.

This is a one-shot timer: it will be removed when it's fired.

Returns a timer object. See mp.add_periodic_timer for details.

mp.add_periodic_timer(seconds, fn)
Call the given function periodically. This is like mp.add_time‐
out, but the timer is re-added after the function fn is run.

Returns a timer object. The timer object provides the following
methods:

stop() Disable the timer. Does nothing if the timer is
already disabled. This will remember the current
elapsed time when stopping, so that resume()
essentially unpauses the timer.

kill() Disable the timer. Resets the elapsed time.
resume() will restart the timer.

resume()
Restart the timer. If the timer was disabled with
stop(), this will resume at the time it was
stopped. If the timer was disabled with kill(), or
if it's a previously fired one-shot timer (added
with add_timeout()), this starts the timer from
the beginning, using the initially configured
timeout.

timeout (RW)
This field contains the current timeout period.
This value is not updated as time progresses. It's
only used to calculate when the timer should fire
next when the timer expires.

If you write this, you can call t:kill() ;
t:resume() to reset the current timeout to the new
one. (t:stop() won't use the new timeout.)

oneshot (RW)
Whether the timer is periodic (false) or fires
just once (true). This value is used when the
timer expires (but before the timer callback func‐
tion fn is run).

Note that these are method, and you have to call them using :
instead of . (Refer to
http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#3.4.9 .)

Example:

seconds = 0
timer = mp.add_periodic_timer(1, function()
print("called every second")
# stop it after 10 seconds
seconds = seconds + 1
if seconds >= 10 then
timer:kill()
end
end)

mp.get_opt(key)
Return a setting from the --script-opts option. It's up to the
user and the script how this mechanism is used. Currently, all
scripts can access this equally, so you should be careful about
collisions.

mp.get_script_name()
Return the name of the current script. The name is usually made
of the filename of the script, with directory and file extension
removed. If there are several scripts which would have the same
name, it's made unique by appending a number.

Example

The script /path/to/fooscript.lua becomes fooscript.

mp.osd_message(text [,duration])
Show an OSD message on the screen. duration is in seconds, and
is optional (uses --osd-duration by default).

Advanced mp functions
These also live in the mp module, but are documented separately as they
are useful only in special situations.

mp.suspend()
Suspend the mpv main loop. There is a long-winded explanation of
this in the C API function mpv_suspend(). In short, this pre‐
vents the player from displaying the next video frame, so that
you don't get blocked when trying to access the player.

This is automatically called by the event handler.

mp.resume()
Undo one mp.suspend() call. mp.suspend() increments an internal
counter, and mp.resume() decrements it. When 0 is reached, the
player is actually resumed.

mp.resume_all()
This resets the internal suspend counter and resumes the player.
(It's like calling mp.resume() until the player is actually
resumed.)

You might want to call this if you're about to do something that
takes a long time, but doesn't really need access to the player
(like a network operation). Note that you still can access the
player at any time.

mp.get_wakeup_pipe()
Calls mpv_get_wakeup_pipe() and returns the read end of the
wakeup pipe. (See client.h for details.)

mp.get_next_timeout()
Return the relative time in seconds when the next timer
(mp.add_timeout and similar) expires. If there is no timer,
return nil.

mp.dispatch_events([allow_wait])
This can be used to run custom event loops. If you want to have
direct control what the Lua script does (instead of being called
by the default event loop), you can set the global variable
mp_event_loop to your own function running the event loop. From
your event loop, you should call mp.dispatch_events() to dequeue
and dispatch mpv events.

If the allow_wait parameter is set to true, the function will
block until the next event is received or the next timer
expires. Otherwise (and this is the default behavior), it
returns as soon as the event loop is emptied. It's strongly rec‐
ommended to use mp.get_next_timeout() and mp.get_wakeup_pipe()
if you're interested in properly working notification of new
events and working timers.

This function calls mp.suspend() and mp.resume_all() on its own.

mp.enable_messages(level)
Set the minimum log level of which mpv message output to
receive. These messages are normally printed to the terminal. By
calling this function, you can set the minimum log level of mes‐
sages which should be received with the log-message event. See
the description of this event for details. The level is a
string, see msg.log for allowed log levels.

mp.register_script_message(name, fn)
This is a helper to dispatch script_message or script_message_to
invocations to Lua functions. fn is called if script_message or
script_message_to (with this script as destination) is run with
name as first parameter. The other parameters are passed to fn.
If a message with the given name is already registered, it's
overwritten.

Used by mp.add_key_binding, so be careful about name collisions.

mp.unregister_script_message(name)
Undo a previous registration with mp.register_script_message.
Does nothing if the name wasn't registered.

mp.msg functions
This module allows outputting messages to the terminal, and can be
loaded with require 'mp.msg'.

msg.log(level, ...)
The level parameter is the message priority. It's a string and
one of fatal, error, warn, info, v, debug. The user's settings
will determine which of these messages will be visible. Nor‐
mally, all messages are visible, except v and debug.

The parameters after that are all converted to strings. Spaces
are inserted to separate multiple parameters.

You don't need to add newlines.

msg.fatal(...), msg.error(...), msg.warn(...), msg.info(...), msg.ver‐
bose(...), msg.debug(...)
All of these are shortcuts and equivalent to the corresponding
msg.log(level, ...) call.

mp.options functions
mpv comes with a built-in module to manage options from config-files
and the command-line. All you have to do is to supply a table with
default options to the read_options function. The function will over‐
write the default values with values found in the config-file and the
command-line (in that order).

options.read_options(table [, identifier])
A table with key-value pairs. The type of the default values is
important for converting the values read from the config file or
command-line back. Do not use nil as a default value!

The identifier is used to identify the config-file and the com‐
mand-line options. These needs to unique to avoid collisions
with other scripts. Defaults to mp.get_script_name().

Example implementation:

require 'mp.options'
local options = {
optionA = "defaultvalueA",
optionB = -0.5,
optionC = true,
}
read_options(options, "myscript")
print(options.optionA)

The config file will be stored in lua-settings/identifier.conf in mpv's
user folder. Comment lines can be started with # and stray spaces are
not removed. Boolean values will be represented with yes/no.

Example config:

# comment
optionA=Hello World
optionB=9999
optionC=no

Command-line options are read from the --script-opts parameter. To
avoid collisions, all keys have to be prefixed with identifier-.

Example command-line:

--script-opts=myscript-optionA=TEST,myscript-optionB=0,myscript-optionC=yes

mp.utils options
This built-in module provides generic helper functions for Lua, and
have strictly speaking nothing to do with mpv or video/audio playback.
They are provided for convenience. Most compensate for Lua's scarce
standard library.

Be warned that any of these functions might disappear any time. They
are not strictly part of the guaranteed API.

utils.getcwd()
Returns the directory that mpv was launched from. On error, nil,
error is returned.

utils.readdir(path [, filter])
Enumerate all entries at the given path on the filesystem, and
return them as array. Each entry is a directory entry (without
the path). The list is unsorted (in whatever order the operat‐
ing system returns it).

If the filter argument is given, it must be one of the following
strings:

files List regular files only. This excludes directories,
special files (like UNIX device files or FIFOs), and
dead symlinks. It includes UNIX symlinks to regular
files.

dirs List directories only, or symlinks to directories. .
and .. are not included.

normal Include the results of both files and dirs. (This is
the default.)

all List all entries, even device files, dead symlinks,
FIFOs, and the . and .. entries.

On error, nil, error is returned.

utils.split_path(path)
Split a path into directory component and filename component,
and return them. The first return value is always the directory.
The second return value is the trailing part of the path, the
directory entry.

utils.join_path(p1, p2)
Return the concatenation of the 2 paths. Tries to be clever. For
example, if `p2 is an absolute path, p2 is returned without
change.

utils.subprocess(t)
Runs an external process and waits until it exits. Returns
process status and the captured output.

The parameter t is a table. The function reads the following
entries:

args Array of strings. The first array entry is the exe‐
cutable. This can be either an absolute path, or a
filename with no path components, in which case the
PATH environment variable is used to resolve the exe‐
cutable. The other array elements are passed as com‐
mand line arguments.

cancellable
Optional. If set to true (default), then if the user
stops playback or goes to the next file while the
process is running, the process will be killed.

max_size
Optional. The maximum size in bytes of the data that
can be captured from stdout. (Default: 16 MB.)

The function returns a table as result with the following
entries:

status The raw exit status of the process. It will be nega‐
tive on error.

stdout Captured output stream as string, limited to max_size.

error nil on success. The string killed if the process was
terminated in an unusual way. The string init if the
process could not be started.

On Windows, killed is only returned when the process
has been killed by mpv as a result of cancellable
being set to true.

killed_by_us
Set to true if the process has been killed by mpv as a
result of cancellable being set to true.

In all cases, mp.resume_all() is implicitly called.

utils.parse_json(str [, trail])
Parses the given string argument as JSON, and returns it as a
Lua table. On error, returns nil, error. (Currently, error is
just a string reading error, because there is no fine-grained
error reporting of any kind.)

The returned value uses similar conventions as mp.get_prop‐
erty_native() to distinguish empty objects and arrays.

If the trail parameter is true (or any value equal to true),
then trailing non-whitespace text is tolerated by the function,
and the trailing text is returned as 3rd return value. (The 3rd
return value is always there, but with trail set, no error is
raised.)

utils.format_json(v)
Format the given Lua table (or value) as a JSON string and
return it. On error, returns nil, error. (Errors usually only
happen on value types incompatible with JSON.)

The argument value uses similar conventions as mp.set_prop‐
erty_native() to distinguish empty objects and arrays.

utils.to_string(v)
Turn the given value into a string. Formats tables and their
contents. This doesn't do anything special; it is only needed
because Lua is terrible.

Events
Events are notifications from player core to scripts. You can register
an event handler with mp.register_event.

Note that all scripts (and other parts of the player) receive events
equally, and there's no such thing as blocking other scripts from
receiving events.

Example:

function my_fn(event)
print("start of playback!")
end

mp.register_event("file-loaded", my_fn)

List of events
start-file
Happens right before a new file is loaded. When you receive
this, the player is loading the file (or possibly already done
with it).

end-file
Happens after a file was unloaded. Typically, the player will
load the next file right away, or quit if this was the last
file.

The event has the reason field, which takes one of these values:

eof The file has ended. This can (but doesn't have to)
include incomplete files or broken network connections
under circumstances.

stop Playback was ended by a command.

quit Playback was ended by sending the quit command.

error An error happened. In this case, an error field is
present with the error string.

redirect
Happens with playlists and similar. Details see
MPV_END_FILE_REASON_REDIRECT in the C API.

unknown
Unknown. Normally doesn't happen, unless the Lua API is
out of sync with the C API. (Likewise, it could happen
that your script gets reason strings that did not exist
yet at the time your script was written.)

file-loaded
Happens after a file was loaded and begins playback.

seek Happens on seeking. (This might include cases when the player
seeks internally, even without user interaction. This includes
e.g. segment changes when playing ordered chapters Matroska
files.)

playback-restart
Start of playback after seek or after file was loaded.

idle Idle mode is entered. This happens when playback ended, and the
player was started with --idle or --force-window. This mode is
implicitly ended when the start-file or shutdown events happen.

tick Called after a video frame was displayed. This is a hack, and
you should avoid using it. Use timers instead and maybe watch
pausing/unpausing events to avoid wasting CPU when the player is
paused.

shutdown
Sent when the player quits, and the script should terminate.
Normally handled automatically. See Details on the script ini‐
tialization and lifecycle.

log-message
Receives messages enabled with mp.enable_messages. The message
data is contained in the table passed as first parameter to the
event handler. The table contains, in addition to the default
event fields, the following fields:

prefix The module prefix, identifies the sender of the message.
This is what the terminal player puts in front of the
message text when using the --v option, and is also what
is used for --msg-level.

level The log level as string. See msg.log for possible log
level names. Note that later versions of mpv might add
new levels or remove (undocumented) existing ones.

text The log message. The text will end with a newline charac‐
ter. Sometimes it can contain multiple lines.

Keep in mind that these messages are meant to be hints for
humans. You should not parse them, and prefix/level/text of mes‐
sages might change any time.

get-property-reply
Undocumented (not useful for Lua scripts).

set-property-reply
Undocumented (not useful for Lua scripts).

command-reply
Undocumented (not useful for Lua scripts).

client-message
Undocumented (used internally).

video-reconfig
Happens on video output or filter reconfig.

audio-reconfig
Happens on audio output or filter reconfig.

The following events also happen, but are deprecated: tracks-changed,
track-switched, pause, unpause, metadata-update, chapter-change. Use
mp.observe_property() instead.

Extras
This documents experimental features, or features that are "too spe‐
cial" to guarantee a stable interface.

mp.add_hook(type, priority, fn)
Add a hook callback for type (a string identifying a certain
kind of hook). These hooks allow the player to call script func‐
tions and wait for their result (normally, the Lua scripting
interface is asynchronous from the point of view of the player
core). priority is an arbitrary integer that allows ordering
among hooks of the same kind. Using the value 50 is recommended
as neutral default value. fn is the function that will be called
during execution of the hook.

See Hooks for currently existing hooks and what they do - only
the hook list is interesting; handling hook execution is done by
the Lua script function automatically.

JSON IPC
mpv can be controlled by external programs using the JSON-based IPC
protocol. It can be enabled by specifying the path to a unix socket
using the option --input-unix-socket. Clients can connect to this
socket and send commands to the player or receive events from it.

WARNING:
This is not intended to be a secure network protocol. It is explic‐
itly insecure: there is no authentication, no encryption, and the
commands themselves are insecure too. For example, the run command
is exposed, which can run arbitrary system commands. The use-case is
controlling the player locally. This is not different from the
MPlayer slave protocol.

Socat example
You can use the socat tool to send commands (and receive reply) from
the shell. Assuming mpv was started with:

mpv file.mkv --input-unix-socket=/tmp/mpvsocket

Then you can control it using socat:

> echo '{ "command": ["get_property", "playback-time"] }' | socat - /tmp/mpvsocket
{"data":190.482000,"error":"success"}

In this case, socat copies data between stdin/stdout and the mpv socket
connection.

See the --idle option how to make mpv start without exiting immediately
or playing a file.

It's also possible to send input.conf style text-only commands:

> echo 'show_text ${playback-time}' | socat - /tmp/mpvsocket

But you won't get a reply over the socket. (This particular command
shows the playback time on the player's OSD.)

Protocol
Clients can execute commands on the player by sending JSON messages of
the following form:

{ "command": ["command_name", "param1", "param2", ...] }

where command_name is the name of the command to be executed, followed
by a list of parameters. Parameters must be formatted as native JSON
values (integers, strings, booleans, ...). Every message must be termi‐
nated with \n. Additionally, \n must not appear anywhere inside the
message. In practice this means that messages should be minified before
being sent to mpv.

mpv will then send back a reply indicating whether the command was run
correctly, and an additional field holding the command-specific return
data (it can also be null).

{ "error": "success", "data": null }

mpv will also send events to clients with JSON messages of the follow‐
ing form:

{ "event": "event_name" }

where event_name is the name of the event. Additional event-specific
fields can also be present. See List of events for a list of all sup‐
ported events.

Because events can occur at any time, it may be difficult at times to
determine which response goes with which command. Commands may option‐
ally include a request_id which, if provided in the command request,
will be copied verbatim into the response. mpv does not intrepret the
request_id in any way; it is solely for the use of the requester.

For example, this request:

{ "command": ["get_property", "time-pos"], "request_id": 100 }

Would generate this response:

{ "error": "success", "data": 1.468135, "request_id": 100 }

All commands, replies, and events are separated from each other with a
line break character (\n).

If the first character (after skipping whitespace) is not {, the com‐
mand will be interpreted as non-JSON text command, as they are used in
input.conf (or mpv_command_string() in the client API). Additionally,
line starting with # and empty lines are ignored.

Currently, embedded 0 bytes terminate the current line, but you should
not rely on this.

Commands
In addition to the commands described in List of Input Commands, a few
extra commands can also be used as part of the protocol:

client_name
Return the name of the client as string. This is the string
ipc-N with N being an integer number.

get_time_us
Return the current mpv internal time in microseconds as a num‐
ber. This is basically the system time, with an arbitrary off‐
set.

get_property
Return the value of the given property. The value will be sent
in the data field of the replay message.

Example:

{ "command": ["get_property", "volume"] }
{ "data": 50.0, "error": "success" }

get_property_string
Like get_property, but the resulting data will always be a
string.

Example:

{ "command": ["get_property_string", "volume"] }
{ "data": "50.000000", "error": "success" }

set_property
Set the given property to the given value. See Properties for
more information about properties.

Example:

{ "command": ["set_property", "pause", true] }
{ "error": "success" }

set_property_string
Like set_property, but the argument value must be passed as
string.

Example:

{ "command": ["set_property_string", "pause", "yes"] }
{ "error": "success" }

observe_property
Watch a property for changes. If the given property is changed,
then an event of type property-change will be generated

Example:

{ "command": ["observe_property", 1, "volume"] }
{ "error": "success" }
{ "event": "property-change", "id": 1, "data": 52.0, "name": "volume" }

observe_property_string
Like observe_property, but the resulting data will always be a
string.

Example:

{ "command": ["observe_property_string", 1, "volume"] }
{ "error": "success" }
{ "event": "property-change", "id": 1, "data": "52.000000", "name": "volume" }

unobserve_property
Undo observe_property or observe_property_string. This requires
the numeric id passed to the observed command as argument.

Example:

{ "command": ["unobserve_property", 1] }
{ "error": "success" }

request_log_messages
Enable output of mpv log messages. They will be received as
events. The parameter to this command is the log-level (see
mpv_request_log_messages C API function).

Log message output is meant for humans only (mostly for debug‐
ging). Attempting to retrieve information by parsing these mes‐
sages will just lead to breakages with future mpv releases.
Instead, make a feature request, and ask for a proper event that
returns the information you need.

enable_event, disable_event
Enables or disables the named event. Mirrors the
mpv_request_event C API function. If the string all is used
instead of an event name, all events are enabled or disabled.

By default, most events are enabled, and there is not much use
for this command.

suspend
Suspend the mpv main loop. There is a long-winded explanation of
this in the C API function mpv_suspend(). In short, this pre‐
vents the player from displaying the next video frame, so that
you don't get blocked when trying to access the player.

resume Undo one suspend call. suspend increments an internal counter,
and resume decrements it. When 0 is reached, the player is actu‐
ally resumed.

get_version
Returns the client API version the C API of the remote mpv
instance provides.