Environment variables

There are a number of environment variables that can be used to control the behavior of mpv.

HOME, XDG_CONFIG_HOME

Used to determine mpv config directory. If XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set, $HOME/.config/mpv is used.

$HOME/.mpv is always added to the list of config search paths with a lower priority.

MPV_HOME

Directory where mpv looks for user settings. Overrides HOME, and mpv will try to load the config file as $MPV_HOME/mpv.conf.

MPV_VERBOSE (see also -v and --msg-level)

Set the initial verbosity level across all message modules (default: 0). This is an integer, and the resulting verbosity corresponds to the number of --v options passed to the command line.

MPV_LEAK_REPORT

If set to 1, enable internal talloc leak reporting. If set to another value, disable leak reporting.

LADSPA_PATH

Specifies the search path for LADSPA plugins. If it is unset, fully qualified path names must be used.

DISPLAY

Standard X11 display name to use.

FFmpeg:

This library accesses various environment variables. However, they are not centrally documented, and documenting them is not our job. Therefore, this list is incomplete.

Notable environment variables:

http_proxy

URL to proxy for http:// and https:// URLs.

no_proxy

List of domain patterns for which no proxy should be used. List entries are separated by ,. Patterns can include *.

libdvdcss:

DVDCSS_CACHE

Specify a directory in which to store title key values. This will speed up descrambling of DVDs which are in the cache. The DVDCSS_CACHE directory is created if it does not exist, and a subdirectory is created named after the DVD's title or manufacturing date. If DVDCSS_CACHE is not set or is empty, libdvdcss will use the default value which is ${HOME}/.dvdcss/ under Unix and the roaming application data directory (%APPDATA%) under Windows. The special value "off" disables caching.

DVDCSS_METHOD

Sets the authentication and decryption method that libdvdcss will use to read scrambled discs. Can be one of title, key or disc.

key

is the default method. libdvdcss will use a set of calculated player keys to try to get the disc key. This can fail if the drive does not recognize any of the player keys.

disc

is a fallback method when key has failed. Instead of using player keys, libdvdcss will crack the disc key using a brute force algorithm. This process is CPU intensive and requires 64 MB of memory to store temporary data.

title

is the fallback when all other methods have failed. It does not rely on a key exchange with the DVD drive, but rather uses a crypto attack to guess the title key. On rare cases this may fail because there is not enough encrypted data on the disc to perform a statistical attack, but on the other hand it is the only way to decrypt a DVD stored on a hard disc, or a DVD with the wrong region on an RPC2 drive.

DVDCSS_RAW_DEVICE

Specify the raw device to use. Exact usage will depend on your operating system, the Linux utility to set up raw devices is raw(8) for instance. Please note that on most operating systems, using a raw device requires highly aligned buffers: Linux requires a 2048 bytes alignment (which is the size of a DVD sector).

DVDCSS_VERBOSE

Sets the libdvdcss verbosity level.

0

Outputs no messages at all.

1

Outputs error messages to stderr.

2

Outputs error messages and debug messages to stderr.

DVDREAD_NOKEYS

Skip retrieving all keys on startup. Currently disabled.

HOME

FIXME: Document this.