The open-source media player mpv has just released version 0.41, nearly 9 months after its last update, introducing one of the most significant internal changes in recent versions.

The most visible change is the switch to libplacebo-based gpu-next as the default video output, replacing the long-standing gpu backend. This move improves color accuracy, HDR handling, and future extensibility, while aligning mpv more closely with modern graphics APIs.

As part of this transition, Vulkan hardware decoding is now preferred when available, ahead of other decoding backends.

Wayland support has seen extensive work in this release. mpv 0.41.0 adds support for the wp-color-representation-v1 and color-management-v1 (v2) protocols, improving color handling on Wayland compositors.

Tablet input is now supported, clipboard writing is available via a new Wayland backend, and geometry handling for rotated outputs has been corrected. A corresponding clipboard backend has also been added for X11, bringing feature parity between display servers closer than before.

Color management and HDR behavior have been refined throughout gpu-next. The renderer now respects ICC profile color spaces over embedded metadata, linearizes sRGB using a fixed 2.2 transfer function, improves tone-mapping behavior, and adds more precise controls over output colorspace metadata. New options allow finer control over subtitle brightness in HDR output, background rendering, and reference white levels.

On Linux systems, mpv can now respond to ambient light information exposed via the ALS sysfs interface, enabling dynamic behavior based on environmental lighting. On Android, a new native AAudio backend replaces older approaches, providing JNI-free audio output on modern devices. Windows users benefit from new built-in helpers that simplify registering and unregistering mpv as a media application.

The release also introduces several user-facing features and usability improvements. A new context_menu.lua script adds right-click context menus, while updates to bundled scripts improve configuration editing and on-screen feedback. Buffering and loading indicators are now visible in the OSC, and subtitle rendering avoids unnecessary redraws when the content hasn’t changed.

Under the hood, mpv 0.41 includes numerous fixes and refinements across demuxers, video outputs, scripting, and platform backends. These address memory leaks, race conditions, decoding edge cases, HDR metadata handling, and rendering correctness across Wayland, macOS, Windows, and Linux.

For a complete list of changes, refer to the changelog or visit the project’s website for detailed information.

mpv 0.41 requires FFmpeg 6.1 or newer and libplacebo 6.338.2 or newer. Users building from source or packaging mpv should ensure these dependencies are updated accordingly.