Interacting with mpv

Tuesday, 21 May 2024 | Haruna Media Player Blog

Haruna allows you to run any mpv command through it's Custom Commands settings page. The most useful command would be the set command which lets you set an mpv property to some value. For example to set the hwdec property to vaapi you use set hwdec vaapi in the command field of Haruna's Custom Commands page; if the value contains spaces wrap it in quotes.

Custom commands can be triggered either at startup or through a shortcut (this can be set when creating the custom command).

If you want to set multiple commands you can create an mpv config file and load it with set include "/path/to/config/file.conf".

mpv scripts can also be loaded, but they are more cumbersome to use. Create a custom command loading your script load-script "/path/to/script.lua".

If you want to interact with a script you must create another custom command script-message-to target arg1 arg2 ... script-message-to.

  • target - the filename of the script (without the file extension)
  • arg1 - the name assigned to a function inside your script by register_script_message, can be the same as the function name
  • arg2, arg3 etc. - arguments passed to the function

Example:

-- my_simple_script.lua
function set_volume(volume)
 mp.commandv("set", "volume", volume)
end

mp.register_script_message("set_volume", set_volume)
-- ............................^ name to use in the script-message-to call

-- mp.register_script_message("set_volume", set_volume)
-- .............................................^ name of the function
  1. create a my_simple_script.lua containing the code above
  2. create a custom command to load the script load-script "/path/to/my_simple_script.lua"
  3. create a custom command (triggered by a shortcut) to interact with the script script-message-to my_simple_script set_volume 56
  4. assign a shortcut to the script-message-to custom command
  5. trigger the script-message-to command after the script is loaded (depends on how you load the script, at startup or by shortcut)

Note

When running the flatpak version the scripts won't be able to access system programs/binaries/executables.