From wikipedia: mpv was forked in 2012 from mplayer2, which was forked in 2010 from MPlayer.

Development of mplayer2 and MPlayer appears to be coming to an end with mpv as the command line media player receiving the ongoing development.

The version of mpv currently in the ubuntu 18.04 repository is: 0.27.2. The current latest stable release from the mpv web-site is 0.29.1 which was released in Oct 2018.

 

With mpv installed the command $ mpv --list-options displays a total of 761 options. These options differ from the options with MPlayer and mplayer2. So if you have bash files that call mplayer and you want to convert them to call mpv, then options associated with the call are likely to need to be changed as well.

If you don't feel inclined to read through and learn all 761 options then installing Gnome mpv may be the way to go and you can then just use your mouse to click your way through a reduced set of options.

Gnome mpv uses the GTK3+ (other names: GTK, GTK3, Gimp-ToolKit) graphical toolkit to provide the GUI front-end for mpv. In the next few months GTK4+ will be released but it will just be called GTK.

Gnome mpv is also install-able from the ubuntu 18.04 repository...

$ sudo apt install gnome-mpv

The version installed is 0.13, while the latest version available from the web-site is v0.16 which was released in Jan 2019.

Gnome mpv is now called Celluloid so expect installation from repositories in the future to be...

$ sudo apt install celluloid

I find the name change to Celluloid to be a nuisance as its already a noun that's been in use for over 100 years, so internet searches for Celluloid are going to lead you to a lot of things you are not interested in.

cheers,

Ian.