mpv launcher

December 23, 2014

04/06/2015 update:

I just noticed that daemonize doesn't play too well with the OS; in particular, when you use dark menu bar on OS X Yosemite, apps launched with daemonize won't conform to that. So a native shell solution would be using /bin/zsh and run

mpv $@ &>/dev/null </dev/null &!

instead.

mpv is a nice simplistic video player (fork of MPlayer and mplayer2). The CLI is flawless (and you can run as many instances as you want), but when it comes to the OS X application bundle, there's one major annoyance. Each app bundle could only have one running instance (unless open -n’ed, which is not how sane people use app bundles), and one instance of mpv only supports one video. So, say I'm playing one video with the app bundle, and unsuspectingly opens another in Finder (which is associated to mpv.app by default), then the latter video immediately takes over, and the position in the first video is lost. That happens a lot.

Today I finally gave this issue some serious thought (I've been on a bug report/enhancement request spree these days so it's natural for me to start thinking about enhancements). Turns out that there's a pretty simple workaround. I created an automator app mpv-launcher.app that does one thing: "Run Shell Script" (pass input as arguments)

daemonize /usr/local/bin/mpv "$@"

in the shell of your choice (for me the shell of choice is zsh since the env would be readily available from my zshenv). daemonize, as the name suggests, daemonizes the process so that the process doesn't block; this way, mpv-launcher.app immediately quits after launching, making multiple "instances" possible. (daemonize can be installed via brew install daemonize; note that you need to specify the full path of the command to daemonize, which in my case is /usr/local/bin/mpv). And there you go. Associate your video files to mpv-launcher.app. Launch as many instances as you want. Enjoy.

By the way, I also filed an enhancement request with mpv-player/mpv. We'll see what the developers can do. Hopefully the app bundle will support multiple videos out of box in the future.