We need a clean and streamlined frontend for Windows
Hot take: Setting up a clean, modern UI on desktop mpv without having to do rocket science is way more tedious than it has any right to be.
mpv is easily the best video engine out there, but getting a simple and feature-rich "out-of-the-box" setup on Windows is such a headache. You're basically forced into three choices:
- Spend hours messing around with Lua scripts, tweaking
.conffiles, and fixing broken directory paths. - Stick with the stock interface that looks like it hasn't been updated in fifteen years.
- Try popular UI scripts or wrappers, but accept major trade-offs. Like for example: ModernZ looks pretty clean for me, but its in-app settings are super barebones without doing the coding stuff, while uosc is loaded with features, but the UI just feels chunky and heavy out of the box for me atleast.
I know building a solid GUI for Windows with proper display scaling and window management is probably harder to get right than on mobile, but still...
>The crazy thing is that Android already has this. Apps like mpvEx and mpvRx use libmpv as the playback engine under the hood, but they actually built a clean, native UI around it with zero config file editing required for the average Joe.
I get that mpv's core design goal is to stay a lightweight CLI tool, but it feels like the desktop side is completely stuck relying on hacky OSD scripts instead of someone actually building a modern frontend that just works.
In Short: We need a streamlined, feature-rich, and user-friendly Interface of mpv for Windows.
Also, I'm only speaking for Windows and Android because those are the only ones I've used. Also, all of this could just be me. I'm not techy at all, above average at best so this might just be a Dunning-Kruger effect.