Optimizing MPV for Wayland and Nvidia

I. What is it?

MPV is my favorite open source media player. On Fedora 42, the default display manager is Wayland (as a replacement for X11). MPV does not play well with Wayland, playing videos is delay/lagging. In addition, I am using an NVIDIA graphic card 3080. it could be a reason that my video playing is delay.

This post is all about customize mpv’s flags to work with Wayland and NVIDIA graphic card.

II. How to do?

Go to ~/.local/share/applications and create a new file named mpvfast.desktop.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=mpv (Fast Mode)
Exec=mpv --gpu-context=wayland -vo=gpu --video-sync=display-resample --profile=gpu-hq --hwdec=auto --demuxer-max-bytes=8G %U
Icon=mpv
Terminal=false
Categories=AudioVideo;Player;Video;
MimeType=video/x-matroska;video/mp4;video/x-msvideo;video/webm;audio/mpeg;audio/x-flac;audio/x-wav;

• --gpu-context=wayland: Tells mpv to create its GPU rendering context using Wayland APIs instead of X11, SDL, or other backends.
• -vo=gpu: select GPU as video output
• --video-sync=display-resample: Syncs video playback to the display refresh rate and dynamically resamples audio to keep A/V in perfect sync.
• --profile=gpu-hq: GPU high quality — enables higher-quality scaling algorithms
• --hwdec=auto: Enables automatic hardware video decoding if available.
• --demuxer-max-bytes=8G: The demuxer buffer is where mpv stores pre-read data from a file/network before decoding.

Then execute update-desktop-database to update desktop.

$ update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

III. Credit

Thank for ChatGPT, it helps me so much! I can’t understand all 1250 options of MPV.