why does mplayer play HEVC files with weird colors? [SOLVED]

[ExecutorElassus]

I'm about four years behind the trends, it seems, but I keep running across videos encoded with HEVC/x265, and on my version of mplayer the colors come out weird (lots of purple and teal).

[Ionen]

I see mpv in your output, do you mean mpv is doing the same thing? Generally mpv tries hard to get colors correct and mostly keeps up with quirks of modern hardware and file formats. If so, didn't sound like it but are these hevc files from the same group/person? (it's possible they've been encoded wrong too).

I'd be less surprised if mplayer is doing something odd, it was great back in the days but I find it hard to recommend over mpv nowadays unless you need support for some old thing that mpv dropped support of.

Edit: if mpv looks wrong too, fwiw may want to try --vo=gpu-next --gpu-api=vulkan on mpv. Will eventually replace the default in a future version (mpv-9999 already defaults to vulkan, but not gpu-next yet), and has bit different handling for colors.

Edit2: just noticed that have USE=xv enabled on mpv (disabled by default), if you're using `-vo xv` on either mpv or mplayer (maybe mplayer uses it by default, I haven't checked recently, mpv doesn't), note that it has rather limited color spaces support and can lead to washed out colors or potentially other issues when the files support something better. GL, Vulkan and most other modern output methods don't have that problem.

[ExecutorElassus]

Hi Ionen,

I don't actually know what engine mplayer uses for its playback (I thought it used mpv as a backend). Is that not the case? Should I build mpv without the xv USE-flag enabled?

To answer your general questions: no, these are videos from different sources, but they all use HEVC. It might be the case that they use one of Dolby Video's proprietary encodings, but I honestly don't know.

I use mplayer for video playback because it's relatively lightweight and VLC kept lagging out with larger video files (ie, the video would pause every few seconds while it buffered again). I was using xine for the longest time, but got tired of its very rudimentary UI. Is there some better video player I should be using?

Edit: in mplayer's settings I have "vdpau" as the output driver and "mpv" as its multimedia engine. I'll try setting it to gpu-next and mplayer, respectively, and see what happens.
Edit2: so gpu-next isn't available if mplayer is the engine, but it is if I use mpv. So I set it to use mpv as the engine and gpu-next as the output driver, and now the colors are correct (and much nicer). So is this "solved"?

Cheers,

EE

[Ionen]

mpv is an alternative to mplayer, and was in fact forked from mplayer2 which itself is a fork of mplayer. You'll find mpv to be rather similar even if it does not share much of the original code base anymore. So... they not use each others, both are standalone players (like e.g. VLC) that mostly just use ffmpeg to handle the different video formats.

I can't really help with mplayer anyhow, been years since I've last used it since I moved on to mpv instead. Was mostly wondering if you were having the same color issues with mpv as well, thought you had tried it given listed it.

[ExecutorElassus]

I realize now that I'd been confusing mplayer (the backend) with SMplayer (the frontend). I had SMplayer configured to use mpv, but didn't have those two options set (ie, gpu-next and vulkan). Now that I do, the colors work as desired. Cheers.