| User review:
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MPV's a neat program-- it operates as a slightly obtuse CLI video player by default, but if you delve into it you'll see that it also serves as a nearly-complete ffmpeg frontend (including encoding) that can also play/preview the stuff you put through it.
Regarding the player's video quality: if you open the player's OSD, you'll see that the last step before output bilinear scaling; a lot of people seem to interpret this as some kind of smoothing filter. It's actually a no-op; ie, bilinear scaling from a resolution like (1920x1080) to itself (1920x1080 --> 1920x1080) won't actually do anything. Same for any of the "interpolatory" filters, if you feel like Googling something. Comparing unfiltered output from MPV to the unfiltered output of madVR (IE, with no enhancements in either and equivalent settings in both) shows them being fairly similar, as well. They also both more or less align with ImageMagick, which is a good thing since IM is sort of a reference for correct image rendering.
MPV is, however, configured to just use bilinear up/down/chroma scaling by default, which absolutely is rather blurry if you need to watch a video at something other than its native resolution. This brings me to my first problem with the software: while the documentation for mpv is actually astonishingly detailed, in its default configuration it barely has any advantages over anything, and you'll need to rely on the manual (or someone else's interpretation of it) to whip the program into shape.
My *other* criticism, and the reason I don't use mpv on a regular basis, is that it's extremely prone to dropping or mis-timing frames compared to madVR or even the EVR render in MPC-- at least on Windows. (It might be different on Linux, but madVR doesn't even exist to be compared to it there ...) This is unfortunately a deal-breaker for me, and a much bigger issue than simple still-image quality. |
