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ynoTV Docs

Playback & MPV

ynoTV uses the powerful MPV engine for media playback. Settings → Playback controls which engine runs, how video and audio are processed, and — for power users — the exact MPV flags passed to the player.

Playback Engine

Section titled “Playback Engine”

ynoTV ships with two playback engines, chosen at the top of the MPV Player tab:

  • Standalone Sidecar (mpv.exe — Default) — runs MPV as an isolated external process that communicates over IPC named pipes. The classic behavior, stable and battle-tested.
  • Embedded libmpv — an in-process native playback engine with instant startup and smooth seeking, rendering through Direct3D 11 / OpenGL directly in the app.

Picture Quality Profiles

Section titled “Picture Quality Profiles”

Picture Quality Profiles applies a video scaling and processing profile to MPV on the next stream start:

ProfileWhat it does
Smooth on weak PCsLowest GPU/CPU load — bilinear scaling, no dithering or debanding, faster decoding
Balanced (Default)MPV’s standard defaults with no extra processing
Maximum qualityHigh-quality scaling, debanding, and dynamic HDR peak analysis for powerful GPUs

Hardware Acceleration

Section titled “Hardware Acceleration”

Hardware decoding significantly reduces CPU usage by offloading video processing to your GPU. The Enable Hardware Video Acceleration toggle automatically passes --hwdec=auto and --vo=gpu to MPV — but a custom --hwdec parameter in your flags below takes priority (the toggle shows a “Managed by custom parameter” note when that happens).

Section titled “Recommended Decoding Flags”
# General recommendation: Auto-detects the best available decoder
--hwdec=auto

If “auto” causes stability issues, use these overrides:

--hwdec=d3d11va
--gpu-api=d3d11

HDR-to-SDR Tonemapping

Section titled “HDR-to-SDR Tonemapping”

If HDR content looks washed-out or too dark on your standard display, enable HDR-to-SDR Tonemapping — it maps HDR video sources (HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision) to SDR for accurate colors and contrast.

  • Show HDR Quick Toggle in Player Bar adds an [HDR] button to the player control bar, letting you toggle tonemapping on the fly during playback — even when the main tonemapping setting is off.

Audio Settings

Section titled “Audio Settings”

The Audio tab of Settings → Subtitles & Audio shapes your sound directly in the MPV engine:

  • Normalize Loudness — dynamic normalization that evens out quiet dialogue and loud action scenes.
  • Audio Profile — e.g. Night mode, which gently compresses loud moments for late-night watching. Profiles take effect immediately and stack with the normalizer.
  • Mix Surround Sound Down to Stereo — folds 5.1/7.1 surround into 2 channels for clear dialogue on laptops and stereo speakers.
  • Maximum Volume Boost — allows amplifying audio past 100% (100% / 150% / 200%) for quiet recordings and streams.
  • Default Audio Language — auto-selects your preferred audio track when a stream has multiple languages.
  • Audio Output Device — route playback to a specific device (e.g. headphones vs. speakers).

yt-dlp

Section titled “yt-dlp”

yt-dlp powers YouTube trailer playback. Settings → About → Updates shows which version is bundled, its path, and a one-click Update yt-dlp button that downloads the latest release into the bundled sidecar location. The status confirms when you’re up to date (“Up to date (version)”) or reports the newly installed version.

Custom MPV Parameters

Section titled “Custom MPV Parameters”

Beyond the toggles, you can pass custom MPV parameters (one per line) that are applied on player startup. A few common flags are provided as one-click helpers (hardware decoding, stream caching, network timeout, smooth playback, cache size, auto-reconnect).

Optimization Tier 1: Essential Stability

Section titled “Optimization Tier 1: Essential Stability”

Add these flags immediately to improve stream buffering and network resilience:

--vo=gpu                           # High-performance GPU rendering
--cache=yes                        # Enable stream buffering
--demuxer-max-bytes=50MiB          # Buffer 50MB of data ahead
--demuxer-max-back-bytes=10MiB     # Keep 10MB in memory for quick seeks
--network-timeout=10               # Prevent hanging on dead connections
--user-agent="Mozilla/5.0"         # Avoid blocks from strict providers

Optimization Tier 2: Stream Reliability

Section titled “Optimization Tier 2: Stream Reliability”

Prevent common IPTV issues like audio drift and connection drops:

--stream-lavf-o=reconnect=1        # Auto-reconnect on drop
--stream-lavf-o=reconnect_streamed=1
--stream-lavf-o=reconnect_delay_max=5
--video-sync=display-resample      # Maintain perfect audio/video sync
--audio-stream-silence=yes         # Prevent clicks during audio underruns
--deinterlace=auto                 # Fix quality on older broadcast content

Reconnect & Stall Handling

Section titled “Reconnect & Stall Handling”

Under Auto-Reconnect, ynoTV can recover streams automatically:

  • Event-Based Reconnect — reacts immediately to stream errors (EOF, HTTP errors, MPV crashes). Disable if you experience overly aggressive reconnects on slow or unstable sources.
  • Stall Detection (Watchdog) — periodically polls MPV to detect frozen streams, with a configurable timeout (seconds of no position change before a stream is considered stalled). Values below 8s can false-trigger on slow servers.
  • Max Retry Attempts — how many reconnection attempts before showing a permanent error.