mpv 0.42.0 is out, and the release notes read less like a media player update than like the completion of a decade-old to-do list.
The headline feature is disc navigation. mpv can now walk DVD-Video menus, Blu-ray HDMV menus and BD-J menus, play DVD-Audio, and open .iso images of DVD-Video, DVD-Audio and Blu-ray discs directly — features VLC has had for years and that mpv's users have been requesting just as long. Menus are exposed through a new discnav command, a disc-menu option and a synthetic "Disc Menu" edition, with key bindings in input.conf.
The second cluster is networking. A new libcurl-based stream backend brings HTTP/2, HTTP/3 and connection reuse, handles ftp/ftps, reads Icecast metadata, and routes nested HTTP opens inside FFmpeg's demuxer through the same stack; it needs libcurl 7.88.0 or newer. MPEG-TS programs and HLS variants now appear as editions, which makes switching channels inside a transport stream behave like selecting a title.
Video and audio got their own list: Dolby Vision Profile 7 enhancement-layer support in gpu-next, scRGB output via --target-trc=scrgb, DSD-over-PCM passthrough with --audio-spdif=dsd, an AMD Frame Rate Conversion filter (--vf=amf_frc), and a rewritten display-sync audio drift compensator.
Linux and terminal users get the most structural work. Wayland session management and protocol-level colour management replace the workaround through Vulkan, HDR signalling on DRM improves, and the sixel, kitty and tct terminal outputs were rebuilt around a shared swapchain. On Windows, libmpv gains a D3D11 render API backend, while the D3D9 renderer is removed outright.
Two changes deserve attention beyond the feature list. TLS verification is now on by default (--tls-verify), which will break setups that quietly relied on unverified connections. And the project raised its floors: FFmpeg 6.1, libplacebo 7.387.0, libwayland 1.22, Vulkan headers 1.4.309. The release binaries are CI builds — useful, with larger "full" Windows builds intended as the complete package.
Why it matters beyond mpv's own users: mpv is the playback engine underneath a long tail of players, front-ends and media apps, so disc-menu support and the curl backend propagate outward. For a project whose releases are infrequent, 0.42 is a large step — and the first in a while that changes what the player can do, not only how well it does it.
