mpv 4.20 adds support soft DVD & Blu-Ray menus, Wayland HDR

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A new version of mpv, the open-source command line media player is out.

mpv v0.42 is now able to navigate DVD menus, and the two menu systems that Blu-ray discs use, HDMV and BD-J (the latter requires Java). DVD-Audio support was also added, a nich format that offers higher-resolution audio.

Plus, if you have any .iso backups of DVDs or Blu-ray Discs, mpv 0.42 can play those directly – no need to mount them first, which is neat.

Elsewhere, a new libcurl based network backend was added, offering HTTP/2, HTTP/3 and connection reuse. Depending on the stream source and type, it could see streams start faster or run more smoothly.

Wayland session management is plumbed in. On compatible compositors, mpv registers its window, which can be manually named with --wayland-session=, with later windows able to replace an existing session if they have the same name.

The update also brings colour management to Wayland without relying on Vulkan APIs, and improves HDR colour-space signalling for Linux’s DRM output (the kernel’s graphics and display subsystem, not digital rights management).

Other notable changes inside mpv 4.20.0 include:

  • SRV3 (YouTube) subtitles support via subrandr library
  • gpu-next support for Dolby Vision Profile 7 enhancement layer
  • MPEG-TS programs and HLS quality variants selectable as editions
  • Floating OSC layout using Microsoft’s Fluent icons
  • Right-click context menu pulls from new menu.conf
  • Reworked terminal video outputs for sixel, kitty & tct
  • D3D11 render API backend for libmpv
  • AMD Frame Rate Conversion filter
  • Display-sync audio drift compensation was rewritten
  • --tls-verify is enabled by default

More besides that, including fixes, performance tweaks and a slew of new commands and configuration options. More details, and links to download binaries for various platforms, can be found on the mpv GitHub.

For Linux packagers, mpv 4.20 requires FFmpeg 6.1 and libplacebo 7.387.0 or newer.

Expect to see many of the new features and capabilities exposed or surfaced in updates to mpv frontends, like Celluloid and Haruna, in the coming months.