The open-source media player MPV has released version 0.41, introducing enhanced support for Wayland and other features for Linux users. This update, arriving nine months after version 0.40, prioritizes Vulkan hardware decoding and adds ambient light support. It aims to improve performance and compatibility across various platforms.
MPV 0.41, a free and open-source media player supporting a wide range of formats, became available for download following its release on December 21, 2025. Developed as a lightweight alternative to more resource-heavy players, this version focuses on refining Linux integration, particularly with Wayland compositors.
Key enhancements include tablet input support, color representation protocol, and clipboard writing for Wayland, alongside ambient light support via sysfs ALS on Linux. Developers also added a clipboard backend for X11 and a new context_menu.lua script enabling right-click context menus. Vulkan hardware decoding is now preferred over other APIs, and libplacebo-based gpu-next serves as the default renderer instead of the older gpu option.
For Android users, a native AAudio backend provides modern, low-latency audio output without JNI dependencies. Other changes revert the --prefetch-playlist option's default to 'no', reduce default swapchain-depth to 2, and add osd and scaled flags to screenshot commands. Hardware-accelerated FFV1 decoding is enabled by default, and a new auto-multiplexer-passthrough option streamlines audio handling.
Additional features encompass --desktop path expansion, precise control over output colorspace metadata in vo_gpu_next, built-in helpers for registering MPV as a Windows media app, and progress percentage display for --stream-dump. Minor updates improve video flipping based on displaymatrix, selective loading of hardware decoding drivers for vo=dmabuf-wayland, HDR support on Wayland, and enforcement of DVB-S/T formats in channels.conf files.
Users can download the source tarball from the project's GitHub page, with packages expected in stable GNU/Linux repositories soon. These updates enhance MPV's versatility for desktop and mobile environments, emphasizing efficiency and modern hardware compatibility.
