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A new release of ff2mpv

Jan 23, 2024     Tags: devblog, programming    

This is a short announcement post for the 5.x series of ff2mpv.

The last release (the 4.x series) was exactly 2 years ago, so it’s been a little while.

Big new things

This release series has two primary features:

• ff2mpv now supports configurable profiles, which can be created and modified directly from the extension. The associated pull request has all of the relevant details, but the relevant bit is this (under about:addons > ff2mpv > Preferences):

  

  As the big scary message indicates, you must be careful about what you put in your MPV profiles: these are arbitrary flags that are passed to the underlying mpv invocation, and MPV has ample ways to execute arbitrary code. Caveat emptor.

  Many thanks to @DanSM-5 for his development efforts on this feature.

• External extensions can now invoke ff2mpv via the browser.runtime.onMessageExternal API, by user demand. The change itself was small (just 23 additional lines), but will apparently make ff2mpv compose with other extensions.

  Thanks again to @DanSM-5 for this feature enhancement as well.

Smaller new things

• Outside of the extension itself, support for other browsers (beyond Firefox and mainline Chrome/Chromium) has continued to improve. Or at least I think it has, because people only sporadically file bugs for Brave, LibreWolf, &c. Some relevant changes over the last two years:

  • Support for more browsers in the installation scripts by @eNV25
  • An install script for Windows by @DanSM-5
  • A new Rust native host implementation by @ryze312
  • Support for Brave in the Windows installation script by @DanSM-5
  • A fix for installations on arm64 macOS by @claudiofreitas
  • …and a whole bunch of miscellaneous documentation fixes and improvements by various contributors. Thank you all!

Upcoming things

ff2mpv continues to be very conservatively developed: support for MPV profiles is the biggest feature addition in years, and is likely to remain the biggest for a long time.

The biggest upcoming thing is the move to Manifest V3, which Chrome is making us do. There’s a work in progress PR for it, but we still have a few months until anything needs to change (provided Chrome doesn’t push the migration back again).

When MV3 comes out, I will likely begin the 6.x series. Until then, enjoy the 5.x series and please report any bugs you run into!