I switched over to MPV from MPlayer a year or two ago and haven’t looked back. However, after I upgraded my Intel Core i9-9900K with an RTX 2060 to A i9-13900KF with an RTX 3060 earlier this year I noticed videos played with MPV were very laggy, to the point where the FPS would be much slower and it’d have to drop frames to keep up with the audio. VLC and browser-based video was unaffected. It was just MPV.
I did all sorts of debugging, which included changing video drivers (--vo), decoders (--vd), and even playing with CPU scaling on the system (to the point where I even tried writing 0 to /dev/cpu_dma_latency) but nothing helped. The odd part is that some video files weren’t affected by this, specifically videos from my iPhone (H.265 in MOV container). I mostly switched to VLC, as a result, and moved on with life.
Today I came across an article where someone was troubleshooting a similar laggy video issue with MPV and even though the problem described in the thread was not related to mine, one of the troubleshooting steps helped me solve mine.
I run PulseAudio because some things like to use it but if I have the choice, I tell applications to run directly off the ALSA API. MPV uses PulseAudio by default over ALSA. It turns out that there is a slight difference in the audio controller on the motherboard on my i9-13900KF system (MSI MPG Z790 Carbon Wi-Fi) that causes outputting to PulseAudio to result in the horrible latency and lag. The fix was simple: --ao=alsa (or ao=alsa in mpv.conf).
Yes, I still feel like a jive turkey after all of these years:
