I quite often find that when I’m setting up something that I’m going to use myself, the extra layers are just annoying. Kodi/XBMC is great, but if you don’t care to set it up right it can feel clunky… to me anyway. That said, I do want some comforts in my solution.
No manually typing out long file names!
No cryptic, long commands
I give you btv, a wrapper I wrote for MPV. It is meant to be used over SSH.
Log in via SSH, change directory to the file(s) you want to play and type btv, it will list out the available video formats in that dir. Hit the corresponding number, press enter and it will start playing. It does so with nohup, so you can exit the ssh session or whatever — it’ll keep playing. If you run it again, while something is playing, it will pause for you. If you run it while something is open and paused, it resumes.
You can also manually set args with:
–stop
–pause
–resume
–play (filename)
–status
You’ll have to configure the correct audio/video outputs for your own setup. This is mine, on a pi5. If you have no audio, pulse/pipewire is probably the reason. Just stop the service(s).
Source available along with some of my other projects: