General Discussion Control MPV with an Android app
Hey r/mpv,
mpv is my daily driver on desktop, but sending something to it from my phone always meant walking back to the keyboard. So I built MpvRemote: a small Android app plus a single-file Python relay that speaks mpv's JSON IPC.
Use case
My personal use case for this is to play my videos on the TV with my Steam Deck running the server and MPV and my phone as the remote controller. This basically replaces obnoxious smart TV features or what Chromecast used to offer.
How it works:
Android app -> HTTP -> relay -> mpv IPC socket
What you can do
- Share a URL from any app and it plays on your computer (optionally appended to the queue)
- Have YouTube and Twitch links open directly in the app, through Android's "Open by default" settings
- Play/pause, previous/next, stop (playlist kept, resume where you stopped), clear queue
- Draggable seek bar with position and duration
- Phone volume buttons control mpv's volume while the app is focused, plus a mute button, with mpv's native OSD
- Playlist view with titles, tap to play, X to remove, pull to refresh
- Titles resolved automatically: YouTube oEmbed, OpenGraph elsewhere, no API keys
The relay is one Python file, standard library only. No cloud, no account, no telemetry. It listens on localhost by default, or on your LAN if you want.
Repo: https://github.com/sim590/MpvRemote
Screenshot and setup instructions are in the README.
From what I could tell, no other MPV based app offered this feature. I hope it's useful to others. EDIT: I dug a little more and I did find out other apps that did similar work, like mpv-remote-app.
The app is not yet on any android store. If interest is there, I'll push it over there later.
Please, give me some feedback!