Pseudo GUI mode

mpv has no official GUI, other than the OSC (ON SCREEN CONTROLLER), which is not a full GUI and is not meant to be. However, to compensate for the lack of expected GUI behavior, mpv will in some cases start with some settings changed to behave slightly more like a GUI mode.

Currently this happens only in the following cases:

• if started using the mpv.desktop file on Linux (e.g. started from menus or file associations provided by desktop environments)
• if started from explorer.exe on Windows (technically, if it was started on Windows, and all of the stdout/stderr/stdin handles are unset)
• started out of the bundle on macOS
• if you manually use --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui on the command line

This mode applies options from the builtin profile builtin-pseudo-gui, but only if these haven't been set in the user's config file or on the command line, which is the main difference to using --profile=builtin-pseudo-gui.

The profile is currently defined as follows:

[builtin-pseudo-gui]
terminal=no
force-window=yes
idle=once
screenshot-directory=~~desktop/

The pseudo-gui profile exists for compatibility. The options in the pseudo-gui profile are applied unconditionally. In addition, the profile makes sure to enable the pseudo-GUI mode, so that --profile=pseudo-gui works like in older mpv releases:

[pseudo-gui]
player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui