MPV maintainer Martin Herkt has introduced today, July 10, 2016, a new point release of the MPV 0.18.x series, bringing a handful of new features, small improvements to options and commands, and many bug fixes.

However, there's one major change in the MPV 0.18.1 that would interest many OS vendors, namely the fact that MPV now requires the versions of the FFMpeg or Libav libraries with which the open-source, MPlayer-based video player application was compiled.

Of course, this translates to the fact that if MPV 0.18.1 was compiled against FFmpeg 3.1.1 "Laplace," which is the latest version at the moment of writing this article, the maintainers of the GNU/Linux distribution you're using will need to update the FFmpeg package as well when they are adding MPV 0.18.1 to their repositories.

"Running mpv with different versions of the FFmpeg/Libav libraries than it was compiled with is no longer supported," says Martin Herkt in the release notes. "Instead, mpv will exit with an error when such a situation is detected. This simply means that mpv needs to be rebuilt whenever FFmpeg libraries change."

MPV 0.18.1 now available for all GNU/Linux distros

As mentioned before, MPV 0.18.1 is here to add various small improvements to the MPV 0.18.0 release announced two weeks ago, such as the implementation of the Panasonic V-Log function to vo_opengl, screenshots support for the "--hwdec=d3d11va" parameter, along with deprecation of the "--heartbeat-cmd" and "--softvol" options.

Those interested to know what other issues have been changed in this release need to take a look at the changelog attached below. MPV 0.18.1 is now available for all GNU/Linux distributions, and you can download the source archive right now via our website. However, we recommend that you wait until it lands in the main repos of your OS.