MPV, the popular free open-source Linux media player, released version 0.39.0 last week. Here are the new features and Ubuntu PPA for Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 users.

The new MPV 0.39.0 introduced Video Super Resolution scaling support with Intel and NVIDIA RTX GPUs. It’s a technology that can use your GPU to upscale low resolution video to higher resolutions. For AMD GPUs, the feature will be integrated into the FFmpeg library.

According to the official release note, the feature is implemented through the d3d11va filter, meaning that it’s Windows only. To enable it, either use vf set d3d11vpp=scale=nvidia:scale-target in your mpv.conf file or see the official documentation for the command line options.

MPV media player

The new release also introduced multi-touch support for Windows and Linux on Wayland. For Windows, --native-touch is required to be set to yes for multi-touch. And with the feature enabled, --input-touch-emulate-mouse (default yes) is available to control whether to emulate mouse move and button presses for the touch events.

MPV 0.39.0 also added new --autocreate-playlist option as a native replacement for autoload.lua script. When opening a local file, it automatically creates a playlist from the parent directory with files matching, either --directory-filter-types or the same category as the currently loaded file.

There’s also a new select.lua script, allowing users to easily choose files from playlists, tracks, chapters, output devices, and more.

Other changes in the new release include:

• Media controls support for Windows.
• A new fifth page added to stats.lua.
• Significant improvements on dmabuf-wayland compatibility.
• Allow changing GPU API options at runtime
• Add support for ITU T.35 metadata in Matroska
• Support VVC Matroska demux.
• New options/commands, including:
  • --sub-ass-video-aspect-override
  • KP_ADD/SUBTRACT/MULTIPLY/DIVIDE keycodes
  • --video-exts, --audio-exts, --image-exts.
  • --osd-playlist-entry

How to Install MPV 0.39.0:

The mpv website provides the links to binary packages for Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

For Ubuntu, it refers to the Fruit’s APT repository, which now only builds .deb packages for Debian users. As workarounds, user can choose to install the Snap package from App Center (or Ubuntu Software), though it’s still at v0.38.0 at the moment of writing.

For choice, you may install the Flatpak package which runs in sandbox environment. Or, use this unofficial PPA so far supports Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04, and beginners can see this step by step guide to add PPA & install the package.