The Next MPV Player Release Will Offer Much Better Vulkan Support

With the Christmas weekend release of the MPlayer-forked MPV Player 0.28, it's the first video player we are aware of supporting the Vulkan graphics API for video presentation. This release has just basic Vulkan support but it will be much better in the next release.

Immediately following the MPV 0.28 release, the Vulkan "Revision 2" support was merged to MPV Git master.

With the current v0.28 release, the Vulkan support is considered "slow and limited" but is working with all the important drivers/platforms/hardware and serves as the building blocks for this expanded support. The "Rev 2" work now in master has full support for asynchronous transfers, asynchronous compute, multi-command queueing, event-based image barriers, safe invalidation of fragment buffer objects, better transitions and other improvements.

Some of the changes are quite small but can yield a significant performance improvement when using this vo_gpu Vulkan video output with MPV.

This MPV Vulkan support has been led by German free software developer Niklas Haas over the past few months.

When the next MPV release occurs, you can surely read about it on Phoronix.