plex-mpv-shim VS ff2mpv

You could also use something like https://github.com/iwalton3/plex-mpv-shim

My best client experience is nvidia shield, and using plex-shim-mpv. It uses mpv as the client and supports every format I watch, specifically ASS subtitles for anime get direct played.

I found this thread: https://github.com/iwalton3/plex-mpv-shim/issues/31 It seems that changing the config to use http (insecured connection) may solve this issue. I have remote access enabled and I'm signed in to the Plex server, so maybe that's why I didn't have those issues.

I just don't worry about it until I try and watch the movie and it has black bars, then I just use plex-mpv-shim to watch it, and handbrake it after.

Have you tried this? I use it all the time when watching stuff on Plex. It direct plays every thing I have minus 4K. Note it doesn’t offer the Plex gui. Instead I used my phone to find what I wanted using the Plex app and then cast it to the player

The plex experience in a browser was never great for me, whether it was transcoding or subtitles. Once I started using plex-mpv-shim, all those problems went away and it's a fast and seamless experience with directplay every time.

It is. And you can use it in your (desktop) browser with an add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ff2mpv/

FWIW there is a GitHub repo [0] which keeps track of currently-working ways to block Twich ads. If you don't need chat, ff2mpv [1] can be used to send streams directly to MPV by right clicking on them in the browser. This bypasses the entire proprietary Twitch frontend and displays a silent purple screen during ad breaks.

[0] https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ff2mpv/

Unfortunately this won't work with the extension playwithmpv unless you modify the python server to launch a different command. I personally use ff2mpv and I modified the python code of the backend to make this change. If you are interested, this is what I changed on ff2mpv:

There are also browser extensions that add a toolbar button and a link context menu option to automatically open videos from quite a number of popular sites in MPV. I'm using ff2mpv. It only took a minute to set up.

You can use a browser extension like ff2mpv to send the urls directly from your browser (so no need to type into the terminal). This works not only in youtube but in many sites as yt-dlp has support for multiple pages.

If Firefox still uses too much CPU, then I recommend ff2mpv -- It does require changing your habits a bit, like blocking autoplay and clicking ff2mpv to launch the video in mpv when you're ready to watch, but it is well worth it.

With Firefox, use the extension ff2mpv to play anything supported by youtube-dl with mpv player.