Posts
- Django, window functions and paginator
- How I discovered MPV
- Pake - wrapping websites
- Accordion with animated height
- Nginx: HTTP and HTTPS on a single port
- NeoMutt: new Thunderbird
- How I solved the dilemma of personal notes
- Django model constraints
- Simple keyboard udev rule
- Kitchen LEDs and Home Assistant
- Home Assistant Nginx proxy server
- Rust and it's ability to insert/replace string into another string onto specific position
- Python HTML table parser without dependencies
- Python defaultdict with data
How I discovered MPV
A while ago I got a new laptop from Tuxedo Computers. It was ~7 years since my last laptop purchase, so I was quite happy. I also decided to advance in my setup and I decided to give the Wayland thing a shot. If it won't work according to my standards, I will roll back to the tearing X11. I knew this change comes with a toll of new apps. For example, I switched from bspwm to Hyprland. Since I don't use many GUI apps, I didn't have to change every app. But one that let me down was my very favorite TUI music player moc. Why moc? No library, no ID3 tags, just folders, files and the player. Exactly what I needed. Well, in the time of the new setup install process, Debian had no moc package for unstable release. Newer and older packages didn't work. Never mind, maybe it's time to try a new app - let's see what's around.
ncmpcpp
Very popular, written in C++ and well maintained. But it's all about music library and tags. That won't work for me since 90% of my library are sets/mixes downloaded from video portals. So no artist names, no song names, no album names, no tags. Never mind, let's see what's next.
cmus
Pretty much the same as ncmpcpp but it's written in C and the maintenance is sparse. Never mind, let's see what's next.
musikcube
C++, well maintained and.... music library-based. Well, it seems like the basic directory-based approach won't work here either.
Frustration
I wish my favorite Midnight Commander could play music.... wait! It can't but it can spawn a player ... a CLI player that can play it for me. Once I exit the player, I end up in the directory structure again. Damn, that's exactly what I'm looking for.
MPV
I used (on my old setup) SMPlayer for years. I already knew some keyboard shortcuts and I had no issue with this software whatsoever. But it cannot play stuff in CLI. Obviously, it's a GUI frontend. Well, maybe it's time to try what's beneath that GUI.
I was very surprised when I opened a music track in MPV and I got... well not a TUI but just some kind of progress bar and track info... and working keyboard shortcuts! I've never seen that in any CLI app for ~20 years. The only keyboard "shortcut" that worked for running commands was Ctrl-C :)
Well, it seems like I did discover the beauty of MPV. I knew
that if I throw a YouTube URL on it, it will play it. If I pass
--no-video parameter I get audio only (battery saver). I can
also give not just a file but a whole directory so I get a queue.
Yes, it worked. Looks like I don't need SMPlayer or moc anymore.
MPV tweaks
Fast-forward 2 week and I discovered this - a theme - because the default one is just ugly. Also I installed this and got timeline thumbnails. Now I was very happy man and I haven't dove into configuration rabbit hole yet. Well maybe I don't need to tweak any stuff since I believe in sane defaults.