uoscVLC - hassle-free MPV

A pre-packaged custom fork of uosc that mirrors a VLC-style interface with the enhancements of MPV player.

Features:

• UI elements hide and show based on their proximity to cursor instead of every time mouse moves. This provides 100% control over when you see the UI and when you don't. Click on the preview above to see it in action.
• When timeline is unused, it can minimize itself into a small discrete progress bar.
• Fast and efficient thumbnails with thumbfast integration.
• UIs for:
  • Selecting subtitle/audio/video track.
  • Downloading subtitles from Open Subtitles.
  • Loading external subtitles.
  • Selecting stream quality.
  • Quick directory and playlist navigation.
• All menus are instantly searchable, just start typing.
• Mouse scroll wheel does multiple things depending on what is the cursor hovering over:
  • Timeline: seek by timeline_step seconds per scroll.
  • Volume bar: change volume by volume_step per scroll.
  • Speed bar: change speed by speed_step per scroll.
  • Just hovering video with no UI widget below cursor: your configured wheel bindings from input.conf.
• Right click on volume or speed elements to reset them.
• Transform chapters into timeline ranges (the red portion of the timeline in the preview).

Locate your MPV folder. It is typically located at ~/.config/mpv/ on Linux/MacOS or \%APPDATA%\mpv\ on Windows. See the Files section in mpv's manual for more info.

Extract the contents of the zip file found at Releases into the above-mentioned folder. Just the contents, your folder should look like this:

That's it!

To enable thumbnails in timeline, install thumbfast. No other steps are necessary.

This is not an extensive list; mpv has many more listed at Keyboard Shortcuts. However, these are the custom shortcuts I made to resemble VLC's interface. You can change these however you like by editing the inputs.conf file.

spacebar -------- play/pause
right arrow ----- seek +3
left arrow ------ seek -3
shift+right ----- seek +30
shift+left ------ seek -30
m --------------- mute on/off
up arrow -------- add volume +5
down arrow ------ add volume -5
/ --------------- set volume to 100
[ --------------- playback speed -0.25
] --------------- playback speed +0.25
\ --------------- set playback speed to 1
t --------------- MPV window Stay on Top on/off (if you using Wayland this will not work, use Alt+Space and choose Always on top)
q --------------- quit (MPV default)
f --------------- toggle Fullscreen (MPV default)
right click ----- menu options
left click ------ Play/Pause; can also hold and drag window
double click ---- toggle fullscreen

• Scroll up/down in the middle of the window or over volume UI for volume +/-
• Scroll up/down Playback speed UI to increase/decrease speed
• Scroll left/right in the middle of the window for seek +/-
• Right click over any UI items to reset (volume resets to 100, speed resets to 1)

The below bindings are active when any uoscVLC menu is open (right-click menu, playlist, load/select subtitles,...):

• up, down - Select previous/next item.
• left, right - Back to parent menu or close, activate item.
• enter - Activate item.
• esc - Close menu.
• wheel_up, wheel_down - Scroll menu.
• pgup, pgdwn, home, end - Self explanatory.
• ctrl+f or \ - In case menu_type_to_search is disabled, these two trigger the menu search instead.
• ctrl+enter - Submits a search in menus without instant search.
• ctrl+backspace - Delete search query by word.
• shift+backspace - Clear search query.
• ctrl+up/down - Move selected item in menus that support it (playlist).
• del - Delete selected item in menus that support it (playlist).
• shift+enter, shift+right - Activate item without closing the menu.
• alt+enter, alt+click - In file navigating menus, opens a directory in mpv instead of navigating to its contents.

Click on a faded parent menu to go back to it.

We are limited in what we can do in mpv's lua scripting environment. To work around this, we include a binary tool (one for each platform), that we call to handle stuff we can't do in lua. Currently this means searching & downloading subtitles, accessing clipboard data, and in future might improve self updating, and potentially other things.

Other scripts usually choose to go the route of adding python scripts and requiring users to install the runtime. I don't like this as I want the installation process to be as seamless and as painless as possible. I also don't want to contribute to potential python version mismatch issues, because one tool depends on 2.7, other latest 3, and this one 3.9 only and no newer (real world scenario that happened to me), now have fun reconciling this. Depending on external runtimes can be a mess, and shipping a stable, tiny, and fast binary that users don't even have to know about is imo more preferable than having unstable external dependencies and additional installation steps that force everyone to install and manage hundreds of megabytes big runtimes in global PATH.

Then you wouldn't be able to sync your mpv config between platforms and everything just work.