DSVP — Dead Simple Video Player

WHY? Because I can. And education. And I'm a config-fiddler that wanted to offer a mpv-style player without configs or intimidation factor. Think of DSVP as a middle-man between VLC and mpv. It's not as SOTA as mpv but should be more "user-friendly". Or less, if you don't have a keyboard. Should offer better quality than VLC as it uses more modern FFmpeg libraries. It should play anything you throw at it.

There are portable Windows and Linux builds on the Releases page, and Steam Deck builds you can download and try HERE. The portable tarballs bundle all dependencies including FFmpeg 8.1 — just extract and run. The Steam Deck build (see steamdeck branch) includes VAAPI hardware decode for HEVC.

REQUIRES Visual C++ Redistributable runtime on Windows (vcruntime140.dll). It's probably already on your PC but you can get it here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170

Claude wrote most of this:

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Features

• Reference-quality playback — Lanczos-2 luma scaling (anti-ringing clamp), Catmull-Rom chroma upsampling (siting-corrected), temporal blue noise dithering, faithful color/gamma/framerate
• HDR→SDR tone mapping — BT.2390 EETF with dynamic scene-adaptive peak detection (99.875th percentile histogram, temporal smoothing), adjustable SDR target (203/300/400 nits) and midtone gain
• Dolby Vision — Profile 5 decode with per-frame RPU updates and piecewise polynomial reshaping; Profile 8 falls through to standard HDR10 path
• 10-bit passthrough — YUV420P10LE content uploads as R16_UNORM planar textures with no truncation
• Software decode only — no hardware decode, no driver quirks, bit-exact output
• Supports everything FFmpeg supports — H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9, VC-1, MKV, MP4, and hundreds more
• Multi-threaded decoding — uses all available CPU cores
• Full subtitle support — text (SRT, ASS/SSA), bitmap (PGS, VobSub), CJK fallback fonts, golden yellow with black outline, cycle tracks with S
• Folder navigation — B/N keys to jump between media files in the current folder, with clickable prev/next buttons
• Portable — single folder, no installer, no PATH changes
• Secure — no networking capabilities whatsoever
• Cross-platform — Vulkan on Windows/Linux, Metal on macOS

Controls

Key	Action
O	Open file
Q	Quit / close current file
Space	Pause / resume
F / double-click	Toggle fullscreen
S	Cycle subtitle tracks (off → track 1 → track 2 → off)
A	Cycle audio tracks
← / →	Seek ±5 seconds
↑ / ↓	Volume up / down
B / N	Previous / next file in folder
D	Toggle debug overlay
I	Toggle media info overlay
H	Cycle HDR debug views (normal / comparison / PQ bypass / grayscale)
T	Cycle SDR target nits (203 / 300 / 400)
G	Cycle midtone gain (1.0 / 1.1 / 1.2 / 1.3)

Building from Source

Requirements

• GCC (MSYS2 MinGW64 on Windows, gcc on Linux, clang on macOS)
• FFmpeg 8.0+ shared development libraries
• SDL3 development libraries
• SDL3_ttf development libraries
• SDL3_shadercross 3.0.0 (bundled — not available via package managers)
• zlib (for PGS subtitle decompression)
• GNU Make
• pkg-config

Windows (MSYS2 MinGW64 + git-bash)

1. Install MSYS2 from msys2.org if you don't have it.

2. Install dependencies (from MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit shell):

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-sdl3 mingw-w64-x86_64-sdl3-ttf mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config

FFmpeg 8.0+ shared libraries are also needed via MSYS2:

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-ffmpeg

3. SDL3_shadercross is bundled in deps/SDL3_shadercross-3.0.0-windows-mingw-x64/. No action needed — the Makefile finds it automatically.

4. Configure git-bash (add to ~/.bashrc):

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/c/msys64/mingw64/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
export PATH="/c/msys64/mingw64/bin:$PATH"

5. Build (from git-bash):

mingw32-make

The binary lands in build/dsvp.exe with all required DLLs auto-copied.

6. Package for distribution:

.\package.ps1

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

1. Install system packages:

sudo apt install gcc make pkg-config \
    libsdl3-dev libsdl3-ttf-dev \
    zlib1g-dev fonts-dejavu-core fonts-noto-cjk zenity

FFmpeg 8.0+ required. Debian/Ubuntu may ship an older version (check with ffmpeg -version). If your system FFmpeg is below 8.0, see SETUP.md for instructions on building FFmpeg 8.1 from source into a local prefix. The portable tarball from Releases bundles FFmpeg 8.1 and requires no system FFmpeg.

2. SDL3_shadercross is bundled in shadercross/SDL3_shadercross-3.0.0-linux-x64/. No action needed — the Makefile finds it automatically.

Note: If you see linker errors about missing .so files, the soname symlinks may not have survived cloning (some Git/OS combinations don't preserve symlinks). Recreate them with:

cd shadercross/SDL3_shadercross-3.0.0-linux-x64/lib
ln -sf libSDL3_shadercross.so.0.0.0 libSDL3_shadercross.so.0
ln -sf libSDL3_shadercross.so.0.0.0 libSDL3_shadercross.so
ln -sf libspirv-cross-c-shared.so.0.64.0 libspirv-cross-c-shared.so.0
ln -sf libspirv-cross-c-shared.so.0.64.0 libspirv-cross-c-shared.so
ln -sf libvkd3d.so.1.19.0 libvkd3d.so.1
ln -sf libvkd3d.so.1.19.0 libvkd3d.so
ln -sf libvkd3d-shader.so.1.17.0 libvkd3d-shader.so.1
ln -sf libvkd3d-shader.so.1.17.0 libvkd3d-shader.so

3. Build:

make

Binary: build/dsvp

4. Package for distribution:

./package.sh

macOS (untested as of 3/16/26)

brew install ffmpeg sdl3 sdl3_ttf pkg-config

SDL3_shadercross must be built from source or obtained from CI artifacts. macOS uses the Metal GPU backend via SDL_SetHint.

make

Project Structure

DSVP/
  src/
    dsvp.h       ← Central state struct, GPU uniforms, constants, declarations
    main.c       ← SDL init, event loop, frame pacing, hotkey handling
    player.c     ← Demux thread, video decode/display, GPU pipelines, HLSL shaders, seeking, media info
    audio.c      ← Audio decode, resample, SDL3 audio stream, A/V clock, track cycling
    subtitle.c   ← Subtitle detection, decode, SDL3_ttf rendering, CJK fallback fonts
    overlay.c    ← GPU-composited overlays: bitmap font, seek bar, debug/info panels, OSD, subtitles
    log.c        ← Crash-safe unbuffered file logger
  Makefile       ← Cross-platform build (sources from src/, output in build/)
  package.ps1    ← Windows portable packaging script
  package.sh     ← Linux/macOS packaging script

Technical Details

DSVP uses a custom GPU rendering pipeline built on SDL_GPU with HLSL shaders cross-compiled to SPIR-V via SDL3_shadercross 3.0.0. The fragment shader performs Lanczos-2 resampling on luma (16-tap windowed sinc with anti-ringing clamp at 0.8), Catmull-Rom bicubic interpolation on chroma (16-tap with sub-texel siting correction), limited→full range expansion, BT.601/BT.709/BT.2020 color matrix conversion, and temporal blue noise dithering (64×64 void-and-cluster texture, per-frame offset) — all in a single pass. YUV420P and YUV420P10LE formats bypass swscale entirely; raw decoded planes upload directly to GPU textures.

For HDR10 content, the shader applies PQ EOTF, BT.2390 tone mapping with scene-adaptive dynamic peak detection (CPU-side histogram scan with temporal smoothing), BT.2020→BT.709 gamut mapping, and configurable midtone gain. Dolby Vision Profile 5 content goes through a per-frame RPU-driven piecewise polynomial reshape before tone mapping. Profile 8 uses the standard HDR10 path via its backward-compatible base layer.

The GPU backend is Vulkan on Windows and Linux, Metal on macOS (untested). Audio is the master clock with adaptive bias correction (EMA α=0.05) for OS audio pipeline latency. At 1:1 content/display framerate (≥50fps), VSync is the sole pacing source with frame drops and delay correction bypassed.

Debug Build

make debug          # Linux/macOS
mingw32-make debug  # Windows

Enables GPU validation layers, console output, verbose FFmpeg logging, and debug symbols. A dsvp.log file is written to the working directory.

License

GPL v3 — see LICENSE.

A commercial license is available for proprietary use — see COMMERCIAL_LICENSE.md.