Mac Player stuttering video playback

[gbooker02]

@cortig

I wish we had an update to the Plex player app. The issue is quite annoying ad it’s a bit sad to see Plex stutter and/or use massive resources on local, passthrough content, when the TV+ app plays 4k without ever triggering the fans on my Mac.

I fixed this a couple months ago and it just need someone to make the release. HTPC has had a release cycle with the fix since then. Sadly I no longer work for Plex so I can no longer help in this regard.

@cortig

I peeked inside the app and it doesn’t look like mpv is integrated as a standalone executable. It’s probably integrated in the Plex executables, which implies that even though mpv is open source, we can’t re-compile it on our own and replace the copy in the Plex app.

It’s a separate library. See libmpv2.dylib in the Frameworks dir. MPV is compiled under the LPGL license and so linking it into the binary is a violation of the license. That’s why it is a separate library and the LGPL requires that users be able to substitute the library. In fact, I had made a post on how to do this on Windows: HTPC Tips and Tricks - #3 by gbooker02 . So if you are willing to build yourself (and deal with app signatures), then you can use your own MPV.

You may be able to take the MPV out of the current HTPC app but you would likely also need to grab its libav* and PlexMediaServer.framework as well as I think FFmpeg was bumped since then. Even then this particular combination may not work.