MPV

240-MP utilizes MPV for all of its video playback and I am very grateful to the MPV team for creating a simple, extensible and cross platform media player, thank you.

Setup

• On Raspberry Pi
  • The install script will handle downloading and installing the latest version of MPV for Raspberry Pi OS
• On MacOS
  • If you already have MPV installed than 240-MP will find it on your path automatically however if you don't have it installed you can do that by simply running brew install mpv
• On SteamOS/Linux x86_64
  • The appimage comes bundled with MPV directly so it runs on immutable distros like SteamOS with no package-install step

Once MPV is installed you can access it directly via terminal with standard MPV commands (e.g. mpv [filename] [params]

This is sometimes helpful when trying to check playback differences between MPV launched via 240-MP vs MPV launched directly and because its a direct install you can utilize mpv.conf to set your own customizations.

Customizations

MPV provides an excellent and in-depth manual on their site here: https://mpv.io/manual/stable/

Their docs include extensive info on the parameters that can be set when running MPV and how you can define them via a user created mpv.conf file.

These customizations are intentionally kept separate from 240-MP for 2 main reasons...

1. its cleaner in the long term to "let MPV be MPV" and not try to keep 240-MP in sync with settings changes directly
2. the amount of customization is extensive enough where creating a UI for it I think would be overwhelming on a CRT tv

Plus most of these settings are usually "set once and use globally" as well. And they are settings you'll want to tune for your preferences so my thinking is its easy enough to define them in the standard way that MPV expects (e.g. via mpv.conf) and that way it keeps the set up between 240-MP and MPV as simple as possible.

Options that may be helpful for your set up:

Below are a subset of parameters that others have found helpful in their set ups.

Please keep in mind though that 240-MP is focused on tinkering and its not guaranteed that these will work for your set up and content.

So please experiment and tune your set up directly while trying options from MPV's manual.

# for CRT use... tell MPV its not working with a 1:1 pixel screen.  this can gives you something much closer to an original broadcast standard of 720x480
monitorpixelaspect=0.888889

# Disable frame blending / interpolation (stops double lines & ghosting)
interpolation=no

# Sync video frame rate directly to the CRT display refresh rate
video-sync=display-resample

# Automatically enable deinterlacing for interlaced content (e.g., 50i PAL)
deinterlace=auto

# Control which audio channels are output (e.g. surround vs. stereo)
audio-channels=stereo