‘mpv’ is a powerful multimedia player that is based on MPLayer and mplayer2 projects. It also contains new features of its own (according to the developers) and supports hardware (GPU) based video decoding (through VDPAU, VAAPI and VDA APIs) as well.
It comes with a built-in GUI but it is a very simple looking one, and by default it won’t give you access to (useful) features like audio/video sync, volume gain, changing aspect ratio etc. You can however, use the keyboard shortcuts for controlling a number of advanced features, including the ones mentioned above. If you require access to even more advanced options (adding post-processing filters for instance), then you can do so by using the command-line.
But, when all is said and done, with the help of its built-in keyboard shortcuts & the simple GUI, it is a clean looking, easy to use, powerful multimedia player that supports playing wide variety of multimedia codecs.
It is not included in the default Fedora 21 repositories, but you can easily install it after adding the ‘RPM Fusion’ repository to you software sources. You can do this using both the GUI or the command-line, but the command-line method is pretty easy thus I’ll be using the command-line for this demonstration.
As usual, first open a terminal window and enter the below command to enable the first repository:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-21.noarch.rpm
Also enter the next command to enable the second repository:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-21.noarch.rpm
Now we’re done adding the two repositories, all that is left is to actually install ‘mpv’. For that, use the below commands:
yum install mpv
That’s it! (if you’re using the main Gnome3 Fedora 21 spin, then you can easily make ‘mpv’ the default media player for video files from: All Settings -> Details -> Default Applications -> Video). You can read about its keyboard shortcuts and other advanced command-line options, from its manual page. Please use the below command to access it:
man mpv
‘mpv’ is also available for many other GNU/Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Please visit this page for the installation instructions.
