Improve your MPV experience by adding a trash-and-skip key binding workflow

I know #Kodi ! I love #VLC ! But since i learned to know #MPV is LIVE it! Looks like nothing, but is everything one could ever want. However the default configuration really needs some personal touch to make it work for me.

Today i fixed my urge to have a media player function that just trashes/moves the media file that is playing back with a simple key stroke. (somewhat similar to kodi, but way easier to achieve!)

To use my solution just download the following shell script and execute it. It will automatically deploy a small helper shellscript to your personal home directory (~/bin/) for MPV to use and adds a new key binding to your personal mpv input configuration ( ${HOME}/.config/mpv/input.conf ) with pretty much no effort.

The next time you playback a bunch of media files and find a piece of “trash” all you need to do is press the key combo that we bind to that helper script (ctrl+t by default). It will move the recent media file to a trash folder, will skip playback to the next item in playlist and will display a (OSD) message to give you feedback that mpv “took care” about the file. This should make “sorting your shit out” real easy!

Have fun! — Axel Werner 2026-01-25 13:18

mpv-install-trashIt-key.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# mpv-install-trashIt-key.sh
 
set -euo pipefail
 
# ---------- Configuration ----------
MPV_CONF_DIR="${HOME}/.config/mpv"
INPUT_CONF="${MPV_CONF_DIR}/input.conf"
BIN_DIR="${HOME}/bin"
HELPER_SCRIPT="${BIN_DIR}/mpv-trash-and-next.sh"
 
# BINDING_LINE with a OSD Message:
# - Large font (\fs50) (font size)
# - Red color (\1c&H0000FF&) (rgb)
# - ms duration (2000ms)
BINDING_LINE='Ctrl+t run /bin/bash '"${HELPER_SCRIPT}"' ${path}; playlist-next; show-text "{\\fs50}{\\1c&H0000FF&}File blacklisted!" 2000'
 
# ---------- Setup ----------
mkdir -p "${BIN_DIR}"
mkdir -p "${MPV_CONF_DIR}"
 
# ---------- Install Helper Script to Users home bin/ ----------
cat > "${HELPER_SCRIPT}" <<'EOF'
#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# MPV NOTE:
#   MPV will call this script with an single
#   argument , the full qualified path to
#   the media file that is been played
#   at the moment.
#
MEDIA_FILE=$1
MEDIA_DIR=$(dirname "$MEDIA_FILE")
BLACKLIST_DIR="$MEDIA_DIR/../blacklist"
[[ -z "$MEDIA_FILE" ]] && exit 1
 
# NOTE: NO NEED to mkdir -p "$BLACKLIST_DIR" !
 
mv -t "$BLACKLIST_DIR/" "$MEDIA_FILE"
EOF
 
chmod +x "${HELPER_SCRIPT}"
 
# ---------- Install MPV key binding ----------
touch "${INPUT_CONF}"
if ! grep -Fq "${HELPER_SCRIPT}" "${INPUT_CONF}"; then
    echo "${BINDING_LINE}" >> "${INPUT_CONF}"
    echo "Added key binding to ${INPUT_CONF}"
fi
 
echo "Installation complete!"