mpv

mpv is a media player built around a small core and a large set of options. It has no conventional application window full of menus: playback opens in a bare window with an on-screen controller that appears on mouse movement, and nearly everything else is driven from the keyboard, the command line, or configuration files. Options live in mpv.conf, key bindings in input.conf, and both accept profiles that apply per format or per file.

Decoding and filtering go through the FFmpeg libraries, so the range of containers, codecs and subtitle formats follows what FFmpeg supports, with hardware decoding available through the platform video APIs. The GPU renderer handles scaling, colour management, high dynamic range tone mapping and frame timing, and accepts user-written shaders for scaling or post-processing.

The player can be scripted in Lua or JavaScript, and the same engine is available to other programs as the libmpv library, which is how several graphical front-ends are built. That suits people who want to configure a player precisely, and less those who prefer a settings dialog.