MPV is a great no-frills media player. Unfortunately it doesn’t ship with GPU acceleration enabled. At least not on Debian. In this quick-and-dirty guide we’re enabling hardware acceleration for Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs.
Drivers
AMD GPUs and APUs
sudo apt install mesa-va-drivers
Gen 8+ Intel hardware
sudo apt install intel-media-va-driver
Older Intel hardware
sudo apt install i965-va-driver
Nvidia GPUs
sudo apt install libnvcuvid1
Enabling hardware acceleration
1. Open mpv.conf and add hwdec=auto
nano ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
2. Exit nano and save your changes by pressing Ctrl+X, Y, then enter.
Testing
You can use applications like btop or htop to check your CPU usage. You will also notice a reduction in CPU temperature when hardware acceleration is enabled.
Uninstall
If you need to disable hardware acceleration remove hwdec=auto from the mpv.conf created in step 1.
