Protocols

mpv://...

mpv protocol. This is used for starting mpv from URL handler. The protocol is stripped and the rest is passed to the player as a normal open argument. Only safe network protocols are allowed to be opened this way.

http://..., https://, ...

Many network protocols are supported, but the protocol prefix must always be specified. mpv will never attempt to guess whether a filename is actually a network address. A protocol prefix is always required.

Note that not all prefixes are documented here. Undocumented prefixes are either aliases to documented protocols, or are just redirections to protocols implemented and documented in FFmpeg.

data: is supported, but needs to be in the format data://. This is done to avoid ambiguity with filenames. You can also prefix it with lavf:// or ffmpeg://.

ytdl://...

By default, the youtube-dl hook script only looks at http(s) URLs. Prefixing an URL with ytdl:// forces it to be always processed by the script. This can also be used to invoke special youtube-dl functionality like playing a video by ID or invoking search.

Keep in mind that you can't pass youtube-dl command line options by this, and you have to use --ytdl-raw-options instead.

-

Play data from stdin.

smb://PATH

Play a path from Samba share. (Requires FFmpeg support.)

bd://[title][/device] --bluray-device=PATH

Play a Blu-ray disc. Since libbluray 1.0.1, you can read from ISO files by passing them to --bluray-device.

title can be: longest or first (selects the default playlist); mpls/<number> (selects \<number>.mpls playlist); <number> (select playlist with the same index). mpv will list the available playlists on loading.

bluray:// is an alias.

dvd://[title][/device] --dvd-device=PATH

Play a DVD. DVD menus are not supported. If no title is given, the longest title is auto-selected. Without --dvd-device, it will probably try to open an actual optical drive, if available and implemented for the OS.

dvdnav:// is an old alias for dvd:// and does exactly the same thing.

dvb://[cardnumber@]channel --dvbin-...

Digital TV via DVB. (Linux only.)

mf://[@listfile|filemask|glob|printf-format] --mf-...

Play a series of images as video.

If the URL path begins with @, it is interpreted as the path to a file containing a list of image paths separated by newlines. If the URL path contains ,, it is interpreted as a list of image paths separated by ,. If the URL path does not contain % and if on POSIX platforms, is interpreted as a glob, and * is automatically appended if it was not specified. Otherwise, the printf sequences %[.][NUM]d, where NUM is one, two, or three decimal digits, and %% and are interpreted. For example, mf://image-%d.jpg plays files like image-1.jpg, image-2.jpg and image-10.jpg, provided that there are no big gaps between the files.

cdda://[device] --cdda-device=PATH

Play CD. You can select a specific range of tracks to play by using the --start and --end options and specifying chapters. Navigating forwards and backwards through tracks can also be done by navigating through chapters (PGUP and PGDOWN in the default keybinds).

Example

mpv cdda:// --start=#4 --end=#6

This will start from track 4, play track 5, and then end.

lavf://...

Access any FFmpeg libavformat protocol. Basically, this passed the string after the // directly to libavformat.

av://type:options

This is intended for using libavdevice inputs. type is the libavdevice demuxer name, and options is the (pseudo-)filename passed to the demuxer.

Example

mpv av://v4l2:/dev/video0 --profile=low-latency --untimed

This plays video from the first v4l input with nearly the lowest latency possible. It's a good replacement for the removed tv:// input. Using --untimed is a hack to output a captured frame immediately, instead of respecting the input framerate. (There may be better ways to handle this in the future.)

avdevice:// is an alias.

file://PATH

A local path as URL. Might be useful in some special use-cases. Note that PATH itself should start with a third / to make the path an absolute path.

appending://PATH

Play a local file, but assume it's being appended to. This is useful for example for files that are currently being downloaded to disk. This will block playback, and stop playback only if no new data was appended after a timeout of about 2 seconds.

Using this is still a bit of a bad idea, because there is no way to detect if a file is actually being appended, or if it's still written. If you're trying to play the output of some program, consider using a pipe (something | mpv -). If it really has to be a file on disk, use tail to make it wait forever, e.g. tail -f -c +0 file.mkv | mpv -.

fd://123

Read data from the given file descriptor (for example 123). This is similar to piping data to stdin via -, but can use an arbitrary file descriptor. mpv may modify some file descriptor properties when the stream layer "opens" it.

fdclose://123

Like fd://, but the file descriptor is closed after use. When using this you need to ensure that the same fd URL will only be used once.

edl://[edl specification as in edl-mpv.rst]

Stitch together parts of multiple files and play them.

slice://start[-end]@URL

Read a slice of a stream.

start and end represent a byte range and accept suffixes such as KiB and MiB. end is optional.

if end starts with +, it is considered as offset from start.

Only works with seekable streams.

Examples:

mpv slice://1g-2g@cap.ts

This starts reading from cap.ts after seeking 1 GiB, then
reads until reaching 2 GiB or end of file.

mpv slice://1g-+2g@cap.ts

This starts reading from cap.ts after seeking 1 GiB, then
reads until reaching 3 GiB or end of file.

mpv slice://100m@appending://cap.ts

This starts reading from cap.ts after seeking 100MiB, then
reads until end of file.

null://

Simulate an empty file. If opened for writing, it will discard all data. The null demuxer will specifically pass autoprobing if this protocol is used (while it's not automatically invoked for empty files).

memory://data

Use the data part as source data.

hex://data

Like memory://, but the string is interpreted as hexdump.