Watching TV and films on computers running Linux is commonplace. Most Linux distributions ship at least one media player. But there are lots of high quality alternatives out there.
Wondering which media player we recommend? Here’s our verdict on mpv frontends. To avoid bamboozling readers, we’ve kept the number of featured media players to a sizeable number.
mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line. It supports a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.
Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. All the frontends are published under an open source license.
Click the links in the table below to learn more about each frontend.
| mpv front-ends | |
|---|---|
| Haruna | Admirable media player and a capable front-end for mpv |
| Kawaii-Player | Player, media library manager and portable media server |
| Celluloid | Simple GTK+ frontend for mpv |
| Kylin Video | mpv and MPlayer front-ends using Qt |
| Memento | mpv-based video player for studying Japanese |
| MoonPlayer | Built using Qt and uses libmpv ffmpeg, and youtube-dl |
| Deepin Movie | Billed as a full featured video player |
| Baka MPlayer | Simple design reflects the idea for an uncluttered and enjoyable environment |
This article has been revamped in line with our recent announcement.
If you don’t want a frontend to mpv, we cover our favorite media players in this article.
Linux has tons of quality open source audio players which we cover separately in these articles: Graphical Music Players and Terminal-Based Music Players.
We don’t include media centers in this article as they are covered in this roundup: Best Free and Open Source Media Centers.
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |
smplayer is the best, IMO.
SMPlayer is a front-end for MPlayer not mpv.
SMPlayer supports MPV
Our anti-spam system stops all external links in Comments by default.
SMPlayer is already featured in our media players roundup scoring a credible 7.5 out of 10. But equally it’s true that SMPlayer does support mpv. And it has for some years. We will look at updating the article accordingly. Thanks Vedun.
I had problems using mpv as the engine with SMPlayer. Might be something to do with my GNOME desktop and distro, but there are others who have similar issues.
It seems you’ve only written a review for Haruna. Why???
Because we have finite resources.