mpv-natives

Self-built libmpv native binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows. The binaries are plain library files with no language-specific content, so they can be loaded from any language or binding (FFI, JNA, ctypes, …). The repository started as the native provider for jlibmpv, the Java/JNA wrapper library.

Why this repository exists

The official mpv releases do not ship a standalone libmpv — it is only embedded in the platform packages — and the community daily builds ship rolling versions with debug symbols intact (the Windows libmpv-2.dll alone is ~220 MB, versus ~35 MB stripped here). For a library that applications can pin as a dependency, this repository provides a pinned, stripped, self-contained libmpv, reproducible from its tag alone.

The artifacts target mpv's LGPL-2.1-or-later license path (-Dgpl=false, ffmpeg without --enable-gpl), so the resulting libmpv can be embedded into arbitrary — including closed-source — applications that load it in-process, without the GPL's copyleft obligations reaching into their code.

• Pinned version: mpv v0.41.0 (client API 131077) — the exact, stable revision every release asset is built from. A libmpv update means bumping MPV_REF (and the affected dependency pins) in ci/versions.env — the single source of truth for every version in this repository.
• Build source: the mpv source tree is checked out at that tag by GitHub Actions and built with the vendored scripts in ci/ (build-libmpv-mingw64.sh, build-libmpv-macos.sh, build-libmpv-linux.sh). No mpv source or third-party binaries are stored in this repository.

Releases

Each platform produces a single self-contained library file plus a combined checksums.txt (SHA-256) for verification. Assets are published by pushing a tag of the form v<mpv-version> (e.g. v0.41.0), which triggers release.yml:

Asset	Contents	Size
mpv-natives-windows-x86_64-<ver>.dll	libmpv-2.dll (all dependencies statically linked, mingw64 build)	~35 MB
mpv-natives-macos-universal-<ver>.dylib	libmpv.dylib (universal arm64 + x86_64, all dependencies statically linked)	~68 MB
mpv-natives-linux-x86_64-<ver>.so	libmpv.so (all dependencies statically linked, native x86_64 build)	~35 MB

Per-asset download counts of the latest release (the release page only shows a combined total):

Each native is fully self-contained: every dependency (ffmpeg, libass, libplacebo, harfbuzz, freetype, fribidi, …) is statically linked into the single library together with the C/C++ runtime where needed. The library depends only on the platform's system libraries, so there is no dependency closure to ship alongside it. Consumers load the library at runtime and never compile against it, so no public headers are shipped.

Audio is the one area deliberately left to the OS stack: on Linux the PipeWire / Pulse / ALSA libraries are linked dynamically (mirroring CoreAudio on macOS and WASAPI on Windows), and mpv auto-probes them in the order pipewire → pulse → alsa. On Linux the self-built libmpv.so additionally removes the need for the distribution package (libmpv1), which lags behind in codec support (dav1d/AV1, x264/x265): the pinned ffmpeg 8.0.1 guarantees the full codec set on any recent glibc distribution.

Using the release assets

Use the release asset for your platform (a single library file) directly, or fetch it programmatically — the download URL is deterministic from (platform, mpv version):

https://github.com/kirbylink/mpv-natives/releases/download/v<ver>/mpv-natives-<platform>-<ver>.<ext>

where <platform> is windows-x86_64 / macos-universal / linux-x86_64 and <ext> is dll / dylib / so respectively.

Building

Builds run on GitHub Actions. There is nothing to build locally.

• A pull request runs the three per-platform builds as the check.
• A v* tag builds all three and publishes the GitHub Release.
• Manual runs are available in the Actions tab.

License

The release artifacts are built from mpv on its LGPL-2.1-or-later path (-Dgpl=false) and from FFmpeg without --enable-gpl, so the resulting libmpv is LGPL-2.1-or-later (the ffmpeg libraries inside are likewise LGPL, with BSD-licensed components such as dav1d). Distributing an application that loads one of these libraries is fine under any license; the LGPL only requires that the user be able to replace the library with a different build (trivially possible since it is loaded as a separate file at runtime) and that you keep the library's license and source-available terms for the library itself. If you use a GPL distribution instead, the GPL's obligations apply.

The build scripts and workflows in this repository are MIT-licensed. See LICENSE for the repository's license terms.