MPV

Warning: You are reading an article on the deprecated unofficial wiki. For the up to date version of this article, see https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/MPV.

There are 2 packages that provide an mpv executable:

• mpv
• mpv-unwrapped

mpv is a wrapper for the mpv binary which adds --script= arguments according to the scripts the wrapper was built with.

If you'd like to add scripts to your mpv wrapper, you'll need to create an overlay in ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix or /etc/nixos/configuration.nix (if you are using NixOS):

nixpkgs.overlays = [
  (self: super: {
    mpv = super.mpv.override {
      scripts = [ self.mpvScripts.<your choice> ];
    };
  })
];

All of the scripts for MPV can be found under the mpvScripts attribute. You can search for them by running nix search mpvScripts. The scripts are defined in the following Nixpkgs directory:

pkgs/applications/video/mpv/scripts

So for example, for adding the MPRIS MPV script, use the following in your ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix:

{
  nixpkgs.overlays = [
    (self: super: {
      mpv = super.mpv.override {
        scripts = [ self.mpvScripts.mpris ];
      };
    })
  ];
}

Error, unknown format

If you get the following sort of error, note that mpv currently uses the small ffmpeg version (ffmpeg_5) instead of the full version (ffmpeg_5-full).

$ mpv --log-file=foo.log av://v4l2:/dev/video5
[lavf] Unknown lavf format v4l2
Failed to recognize file format.

Exiting... (Errors when loading file)

To address this problem, you can use the following overlay in your nixpkgs.overlays:

  nixpkgs.overlays = with pkgs; [
    (self: super: {
      mpv-unwrapped = super.mpv-unwrapped.override {
        ffmpeg_5 = ffmpeg_5-full;
      };
    })
  ];