A script for the MPV media player that allows you to view PDFs by way of ImageMagick. To improve load times and keep mpv responsive, pages are pre-rendered asynchronously and by default, only two pages ahead of the current page are pre-rendered.

• MacOS, Linux, *BSD, etc (Windows is NOT currently supported, but PRs are welcome)
• ImageMagick
• pdfinfo

(Install ImageMagick and pdfinfo using your package manager. convert, provided by ImageMagick, should be in your $PATH.)

make install

or

cp pdf_hook.lua ~/.config/mpv/scripts/
cp pdf_hook-worker.lua ~/.config/mpv/scripts/pdf_hook-worker-1.lua
cp pdf_hook-worker.lua ~/.config/mpv/scripts/pdf_hook-worker-2.lua
[...]

NOTE:

For every additional copy of pdf_hook-worker.lua you copy into ~/.config/mpv/scripts, mpv-pdf will render an additional page ahead of the current page. E.g. 10 copies of pdf_hook-worker.lua will have mpv-pdf render 10 pages ahead.

It's highly recommended that mpv-pdf be used in conjunction with mpv-image-viewer or a similar userscript. This will allow panning, zooming, etc of PDF pages (which are displayed through mpv as jpgs.)

mpv-pdf displays a PDF page by first using ImageMagick's convert to render it as a jpg.

It accomplishes this by first reading the number of pages from the pdf using pdfinfo, then for each page it generates a playlist entry of the form pdf:https://path/to/your.pdf[page]. These pdf page playlist entries are also handled by pdf_hook.lua, which dispatches an asynchronous rendering task for each to one of the pdf_hook-worker's. To keep things responsive and to avoid rendering pages unnecessarily, an async rendering task is dispatched for the current page, and an additional rendering task is dispatched for each additional pdf_hook-worker script you've installed.

Until an asynchronous task returns, a placeholder image is shown. This code is subject to future change but currently the placeholder image is generated using ImageMagick as a blank white jpg with the pixel dimensions of the PDF, as computed from pdfinfo.

jpgs produced by mpv-pdf are located in /tmp/mpv-pdf/. If your OS doesn't periodically clean /tmp/, this could get large...

• Asynchronous generation of pages
• Use LibASS to generate the page placeholder
• Spawn asynchronous sub-scripts programmatically
• Use pandoc to support more file formats (e.g. docx)
• Support text search of the PDF
• Use text-to-speech to generate sound files for each page.
• Re-render PDF pages at different DPI's depending on the zoom setting.