syn-play

A front end for mpv: playlists you can see, a queue you can rearrange, quick open, and a history of what you have watched and where you stopped.

mpv already decodes, keeps a playlist, shuffles it, resumes where it stopped and reads m3u. What it has no place for is showing you any of that. So this adds exactly those and delegates the rest — shuffle is mpv's playlist-shuffle, resume is mpv's own watch-later files, and a playlist is an m3u8 that opens in mpv, in VLC and on a phone.

Playing

syn-play ~/Videos/film.mkv       # play it now
syn-play ~/Music/Album           # a folder becomes its files
syn-play add ~/Music/Other       # add to the end of the queue
syn-play open blade runner       # find the best match and play it
syn-play resume                  # the last thing played, where it stopped

Quick open searches the history first and never walks $HOME, so it answers immediately for anything played before.

Driving it

syn-play status
syn-play queue
syn-play next | prev | jump 4
syn-play pause | toggle
syn-play seek +30 | syn-play seek 12:05
syn-play shuffle | unshuffle
syn-play loop playlist
syn-play volume +10

unshuffle restores the order files were added in, because that is mpv's own undo rather than a copy of the list kept here.

Playlists and history

syn-play playlist save "Sunday"
syn-play playlist load "Sunday"
syn-play history 20

The other two faces

syn-play tui                 # the queue and history, in this terminal
syn-play gui                 # the window

The window and the terminal UI are control surfaces beside mpv, not around it: mpv keeps its own video window, and syn-play next from a keybind, a script, the terminal UI and the window are the same line to the same socket.

Requires

mpv, which is an optional dependency only because everything except playback works without it. quickshell for the window, yt-dlp for playing a URL.

Install

git clone https://github.com/velle999/syn-play
cd syn-play && makepkg -si

makepkg fetches the source for this PKGBUILD's exact version from this repository's releases, so a clone can only ever build the source it was written against. .SRCINFO lists what it needs.

Where this comes from

Developed in the SynapseOS monorepo, in syn-play/. This repository is generated from it — the PKGBUILD, a generated .SRCINFO and this README — so issues and patches belong there.

syn-play 0.1.0-9 · GPL-2.0-or-later