empv.el

An Emacs media player, based on mpv. More precisely this package provides somewhat comprehensive interface to mpv with bunch of convenience functions.

empv is mostly focused on audio but it also provides some means to manage videos. It also supports YouTube searches. If you are a consult user, then you can also install consult-empv package to get search suggestions while using empv’s YouTube search capabilities.

Workflow is generally M-x empv-something and completing-read based, no buffers or complex interfaces (except for the tabulated YouTube results). Scroll down to see available interactive functions. No default keybindings are provided.

Installation

First, you need to install mpv, go check out it’s installation instructions for your operating system/distribution. Then you can install empv.el using:

(use-package empv
  :ensure t
  :quelpa (empv
           :fetcher github
           :repo "isamert/empv.el"))

Alternatively, you can use the straight package manager:

(straight-use-package '(empv :type git :host github :repo "isamert/empv.el"))

Another option is just downloading empv.el file and putting into your load-path, afterwards you can simply do the following in your init.el:

(require 'empv)

Embark and Consult integration

If you have consult and embark installed on your system, empv will integrate itself with those packages and you’ll get some embark actions that you can use on the displayed candidates.

Interactive functions and configuration

This list is not complete. I only listed most important functions. Do M-x and then search for empv- to list all available functions. Here are some information about functions:

• Most of the functions will ask you if you want to directly play your selection or if you want to enqueue it.
• Some functions have -multiple variations which serves the same functionality but also let’s you select more than one media to play/enqueue.

Basic functions

empv-play

Play given file/path/URL. It’ll ask for an string input. Input can be any type of media file/url; videos, audios, playlists, media streams etc.

empv-enqueue

Like empv-play but add the given URI to end of the playlist.

empv-play-file

Like empv-play but let’s you interactively select one of your local files.

empv-pause

Pause.

empv-toggle

Toggle the pause state.

empv-seek

Change the playback position interactively.

empv-exit

Shut down empv.

empv-save-and-exit

Shut down empv save the current playing position. You can also add --save-position-on-quit to empv-mpv-args to get the same effect by default so that every time you quit empv, it’ll automatically save the playback position of the currently playing file and it’ll seek to previous position on start.

(add-to-list 'empv-mpv-args "--save-position-on-quit")
    

Playlist functions

empv-playlist-next

Play the next media in the playlist.

empv-playlist-prev

Play the previous media in the playlist.

empv-playlist-select

List all playlist items and select one to play.

empv-playlist-clear

Clear the playlist.

empv-playlist-shuffle

Shuffle the playlist.

Directories

Directory-related functions opens the selection menu starting from the default-directory. If you want to use a base directory to start the selection menu from, see empv-base-directory variable. This is mainly useful for starting your selection from your music collection (or any other collection) so that you can easily navigate to sub-folders (albums etc.) and play them.

empv-play-directory

Start playing all media files in given interactively selected directory.

Collections

Some convenience functions for quickly finding and playing files from your local collections.

empv-play-audio

List and interactively select one of the files under empv-audio-dir (the directory is scanned recursively. Also see empv-max-directory-search-depth.)

empv-play-audio-multiple

Multiple selection version of empv-audio.

empv-play-video

Like empv-play-audio but for video files instead.

empv-video-multiple

Multiple selection version of empv-video.

See empv-video-file-extensions and empv-auido-file-extensions for more customization options. Also note that these functions require fd to be installed.

Radio/Stream functions

List of radio channels are configured through the empv-radio-channels variable.

empv-play-radio

Interactively select one of the stations from empv-radio-channels and start playing it.

empv-play-random-channel

Play a random channel from empv-radio-channels.

Misc

empv-toggle-video

Toggle the visibility of video (if the currently playing media is a video file). TIP: You can press _ in mpv to hide the video, or you can just call this function from Emacs again to hide it too.

empv-toggle-event-display

Toggle the displaying of events in the echo area. (Like track changed, playback stopped etc.)

empv-display-current

Display the currently playing media info in the echo area.

YouTube

empv.el lets you search in YouTube videos/playlists and play them in background or just play the video itself. This is done through invidious API. It’s a privacy respecting frontend (and API) for YouTube. To be able to use these features, you need to set an invidious instance manually, like:

(setq empv-invidious-instance "https://some-invidious-instance.com/api/v1")

You can select an invidious instance from here.

empv-youtube

Search given term in Youtube videos and then interactively select one of the results.

empv-youtube-multiple

Multiple selection version of empv-youtube.

empv-youtube-playlist

Search given term in Youtube playlists and then interactively select and start playing selected playlist.

empv-youtube-last-results

Show last set of search results.

Thumbnails greatly help to identify the right video in a search. Using completing-read falls short here, empv.el offers some additional commands to address this issue:

empv-youtube-tabulated

Search given term in YouTube and display them in a buffer with video thumbnails. This buffer has some default keybindings, like:

• p plays the current selection, a adds the current selection to the end of the queue, Y copies the video address, Return asks you to play or enqueue the current selection.

empv-youtube-tabulated-last-results

Show last set of search results in a tabulated search result buffer with thumbnails. This command works even if the last search was done using the completing-read interface.

You can also set empv-youtube-use-tabulated-results to a non-nil value to make YouTube commands use the tabulated interface by default at all times.

If you have installed consult-empv.el:

consult-empv-youtube

Like empv-youtube but it also shows search suggestions while typing the query.

consult-empv-youtube-multiple

Multiple selection version of consult-empv-youtube.

consult-empv-youtube-playlist

Like empv-youtube-playlist but it also shows search suggestions while typing the query.

consult-empv-youtube-playlist-multiple

Multiple selection version of consult-empv-youtube.

A note about empv-toggle-video

If you start playing a YouTube video, it’ll start playing in background. You may be tempted to call empv-toggle-video to start watching the video itself but it’ll not work. mpv tries to be smart when it’s in background it only downloads the audio if it’s possible. If you want to be able to watch YouTube videos whenever you want, you need to add something like this to your configuration to force-download videos:

(add-to-list 'empv-mpv-args "--ytdl-format=best")

See this page for how you can use --ytdl-format option.