MTT File Manager

Native Windows file manager built in Rust with a modern UI, disk usage analysis, archive browsing and creation, advanced media preview, and Windows integration.

Download & Install (Windows)

Download the latest release

On the release page, expand Assets and download MTT-File-Manager-Setup-<version>.exe. The Source code ZIP/TAR files are for developers, not installers.
Open the downloaded installer and approve the Windows administrator prompt. Administrator access is needed to install the background search and drive-information service; normal use of the file manager does not require it.
If the installer shows Required Microsoft component, click Download from Microsoft, open the downloaded Visual C++ Redistributable x64 installer, and finish its installation. Restart Windows first if requested, then return to MTT setup and click Check again and Next.
Finish setup and open MTT File Manager from the Start menu. Global Search builds its index in the background; its initial results may be incomplete until indexing finishes.

Installation help

Offline installation: download the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable x64 beforehand, install it on the target computer, then run MTT setup.
Microsoft component still missing: complete its installation, including a restart if requested, and click Check again. Installing the x86 version alone does not satisfy the x64 requirement.
An older MTT installer only displays a prerequisite warning: install the Microsoft component using the link above, then run setup again.
Updating: MTT checks normal GitHub releases at startup and shows the release notes. Use Settings > About > Check for updates to check manually or disable startup checks. Download update opens the official release page in your browser; download and run the installer manually. MTT does not download or execute installers, close itself to update, or include a separate updater executable.

Key Features

Interface & Navigation

Appearance themes — Choose Light, Dark, Dark Deep, Midnight, or System in Settings > Appearance; saved between sessions and shared with image, PDF, DOCX, XLSX, and text viewers, including native title bar styling
Interface fonts and text size — Choose an installed Windows font in Settings > Appearance, preview it before confirming, and save a separate text-size preference for each font without resizing icons or document contents
Text and interface scaling — Adjust the status-bar interface-size slider from 100–200%; release it to apply and save the size. Text and controls grow together on top of Windows display scaling; 100% follows Windows scaling alone. Thumbnail size remains separately adjustable alongside it
Dual panel (split view) — Side-by-side file browsing with independent left and right panels; toggle via the toolbar button. Each panel maintains its own navigation history, sort order, view mode, and selection. File copy/move operations default to the opposite panel as the destination
Tabbed navigation — Multiple tabs with independent history; dual-panel mode also provides separate tabs for each pane, with independent navigation state and drag-hover activation. Right-click tabs to close, duplicate, close tabs to the left or right, or pin/unpin them. Pinned tabs stay on the left, cannot be closed until unpinned, and open other locations in a new tab instead of replacing their pinned location. Reopen closed main tabs from the context menu or with Ctrl+Shift+T
Tab detaching and drag previews — Drag a main or dual-panel tab outside the window to move it into a new window when multiple instances are enabled; animated previews show tab movement while dragging
Session restoration and startup location — Continue the previous session with saved tabs, pane layouts, and view preferences, or start at This PC, Documents, the user profile, or a custom folder; restored Tag tabs display their names immediately. With previous-session startup and multiple instances enabled, exiting all instances together preserves their separate tab sessions for the next launch
New-tab preferences — Choose the current location, This PC, Documents, the user profile, or a custom folder for new tabs, and optionally open archives in a new tab. Choose whether new tabs become active, with Ctrl reversing that preference for supported opening actions; open multiple selected folders in separate tabs, or middle-click supported sidebar locations to open them in a new tab
System tray — Optionally send the main window to the notification area when closing it. A shared icon with an instance-count badge provides a menu organized by instance, tab, and panel; restore a specific location, restore all instances, or exit all instances
Single or multiple instances — Choose whether to allow multiple application instances in Settings > General. When disabled, launching MTT again restores the existing window, including from the system tray
Grid, Details, Column List, and Miller's Columns views — Switch between thumbnail, detailed table, horizontally scrolling list, and Finder-style hierarchical layouts. Miller's Columns keeps the folder hierarchy visible in side-by-side columns and supports keyboard navigation, multi-selection, rectangle selection, inline renaming, context menus, and drag-and-drop
File grouping — Group items by name, date, type, or size, including in Miller's Columns; reverse the group order, collapse individual sections, and preserve grouping preferences between sessions. Enabled additional property and tag columns are also available as sorting and grouping criteria
Configurable shortcuts and view controls — Customize keyboard and mouse-wheel shortcuts in Settings, including Back, Forward, and Up navigation with support for assigning Backspace. Ctrl+mouse wheel cycles view modes by default, while Ctrl+Shift+mouse wheel adjusts thumbnail size in Grid view
Customizable columns — Drag List view headers to reorder columns, right-click to show or hide columns, or use the searchable picker to add Windows file properties and tags; active columns appear first in the menu and picker without changing the saved layout. Column layouts are saved separately for regular folders, This PC, and the Recycle Bin
File-list preferences — In Settings > General, choose automatic content sizing, manual column widths remembered per folder, or Fit columns to panel; wider layouts support horizontal scrolling. Hover previews can be disabled independently. Enable optional alternating row colors in Settings > Appearance
Date formats — Choose DD/MM/YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY, or YYYY-MM-DD for displayed dates and Global Search date filters
Per-folder view locks — Preserve the view mode, sorting, and folder position for one folder or for that folder and all of its subfolders; inherited locks identify their source folder
Smart address bar — Direct path input with breadcrumbs; activating path editing selects the full path for copying or replacement. Recognized Windows folders use shorter breadcrumb labels, and supported cloud roots show provider and account labels while editing retains the filesystem path
Sidebar — Quick access to drives, libraries, Cloud Drives, and Recycle Bin; sections reclaim space when collapsed, with an adjustable drives area and a separate collapsible Network Locations section. Choose independent section scrolling or an optional unified scrollbar in Settings > General. Right-click empty space or section headers to collapse or expand all sections; tab context menus can reveal a folder in the tree or collapse the expansion created by that action
Sidebar renaming — Rename folders directly in the sidebar tree
Settings window — Remembers its size and position between launches, stays within the application window, and provides scrollable content at smaller sizes
Network browsing — Enter a UNC server address to list its shares; browse saved Windows Network Locations from the sidebar or This PC, and launch the Windows Add Network Location wizard. Use native Windows dialogs to map network shares to drive letters or disconnect mapped network drives
Cloud Drives — Detects Windows Cloud Files sync roots registered with Explorer and shows them in a dedicated sidebar section; tested with OneDrive, Proton Drive and Google Drive
Quick Access — Pin folders via right-click or drag-and-drop; pin/unpin supported folder locations directly from tab context menus; reorder via drag; choose a vertical sidebar section or horizontal bar in Settings > General
Archive navigation — Open supported compressed files like folders and browse their contents directly (.zip, .7z, .rar, .tar, .tar.gz, .tgz, .tar.bz2, .tbz2, .tar.xz, .txz, .tar.zst, .tzst, .gz, .gzip)

Media Preview

Media metadata — The preview panel extracts video and audio details such as codec, bitrate, channels, sample rate, and music tags
Smart thumbnails — Multi-stage generation: image crate → WIC → Shell API → Media Foundation
Selection sizes — Include folder contents in selection totals, with background calculation and progress updates while folder sizes are resolved; size sorting uses calculated folder sizes as they become available
Animated GIF playback — Animated preview on details panel

Image, PDF, DOCX, XLSX & Text Viewers

Consistent dedicated windows — Images, PDF documents, DOCX documents, XLSX workbooks, and text files open in lightweight viewer windows with the selected appearance theme, themed toolbars, and native title bar integration
Image viewer — Uses a bounded sliding-window GPU texture cache, hidden-first startup, multi-threaded decoding, zoom controls, and drag-to-pan navigation for zoomed images; copy the displayed image as both a bitmap and file, delete through Windows Shell, crop with a rotation-aware selection and safe save workflow, or switch to full screen with F11. Crops can replace supported raster images after confirmation or be saved as PNG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, or TIFF; animated GIFs export the displayed frame
Image conversion — Convert images in the background, including export to a single-page PDF, with safe destination replacement that preserves existing files on encoding failure and refuses to overwrite files changed after confirmation
PDF viewer — Uses native PDFium rendering with asynchronous document loading, prioritized progressive rendering, virtualized pages and thumbnails, bounded texture caching, and keyboard navigation in the thumbnail sidebar; supports single-page, two-page, and two-page-with-cover layouts
DOCX viewer — Uses BetterOffice's native OOXML parsing, pagination, and raster renderer in a read-only window with zoom and page navigation; supports document search and text selection/copying. Double-click continues to open the Windows default application
XLSX viewer — Uses BetterOffice's native workbook model and rendering in a read-only window with worksheet tabs, zoom, workbook search, and cell-range selection/copying
Text viewer — Opens plain text, source code, logs, and markup files in a focused viewer with go-to-line controls and search that highlights and navigates individual matches

Video Player

Standalone playback — Opens video and audio files in an mpv-based player with a D3D11 GPU pipeline, without an app-imposed file-size limit
Audio visualization — Displays a real-time waveform while playing audio-only files
Playback controls — Supports 5% volume steps with Up/Down and five-second seeking with the mouse wheel
Optical media playback — Plays DVDs and Blu-rays from an optical drive's context menu
Optical media limitations — DVD menus are not supported; protected DVDs depend on libdvdcss and physical-drive access, while AACS-protected Blu-rays require externally configured libaacs and keys

Drive Information

System overview — The This PC details panel shows the device name, CPU, installed RAM, GPU, Windows version, storage usage, motherboard, and BIOS information
Hardware details — The details panel can show model, serial number, firmware, interface, standard, supported features, rotation, and current/maximum transfer modes for local drives
Health telemetry — Reads standardized NVMe and ATA/SATA health data such as SMART status, temperature, remaining life, host reads/writes, power cycles, and power-on hours when the device protocol provides those values
NVMe link information — Reports the current and maximum PCIe generation and link width when Windows exposes the corresponding PCI device properties
On-demand access — Hardware queries run through the elevated mtt-search-service only when a local drive is shown in the details panel; successful results are cached for five minutes
Proactive health status — Background scheduling preloads drive health when possible and surfaces distinct warning and critical badges in the sidebar, This PC, and drive details
Sidebar drive details — Hover over a drive in the sidebar to see its label, filesystem, capacity, free space, and available hardware metadata
Compatibility limits — Native NVMe and standard ATA/SATA paths are prioritized. SAT-compatible USB bridges are supported on a best-effort basis, while proprietary USB bridges, RAID controllers, multi-disk volumes, and vendor-specific counter formats may not expose all fields

Disk Usage Analyzer

Standalone NTFS analysis — Launch Analyze disk usage from a local NTFS drive's context menu to open an independent analyzer window backed by a full-volume snapshot from the mtt-search-service index
Visual navigation — Explore usage through a colorblind-safe treemap, category breakdown, usage chart, and breadcrumb drill-down; open a selected folder directly in the main file manager
Metrics and filters — Compare allocated size, logical size, or file count and narrow results by name or path, extension, category, and minimum or maximum size
Largest items report — List the largest files and folders with file-count ranking and filter-adjusted values; visible controls independently select folders/files first, the sort column, and ascending or descending order, synchronized with clickable headers
Duplicate detection — Run an on-demand, cancelable scan: exact size, validated 64 KiB prefix, then full BLAKE3 confirmation; short files are not read twice. Per-stage progress and actual bytes read, conservative or opt-in bounded parallel readers, cloud-placeholder protection, Recycle Bin exclusion, and hardlink-aware recoverable-space totals
Duplicate comparison and deletion — Compare two selectable copies with full paths, sizes, dates and bounded image previews loaded in the background. Explicitly delete a selected file through the same native Windows Shell operation as the main file manager: the Recycle Bin is requested, but Windows may permanently delete depending on settings/location, with native warnings enabled. Both displayed files are fully compared again before deletion, and an unchanged, physically independent copy must remain verifiable; a hardlink alone is not sufficient. The report updates after removal; a visible warning requests a fresh disk analysis for chart and size totals

Deletion validation and the native, path-based Windows operation are not an atomic filesystem transaction. The surviving file is held against writes and deletion during the operation, but unrelated software can still rename or replace the selected path between validation and Windows processing it.

Global Search

Instant search — Query an in-memory index supporting millions of files, with trigram acceleration for eligible volumes and fallback matching for short queries and very large indexes
Filename patterns — Use case-insensitive * and ? wildcards and semicolon-separated alternatives, such as *.jpg;*.png, in global search, local filtering, and tagged results
Hybrid volume indexing — NTFS/ReFS via USN Journal; non-USN volumes via full-tree scan
Live NTFS size updates — Refresh logical size and stream allocation using complete NTFS file references, including after growth or truncation. Older binary caches retain their records and receive a one-time background size refresh after upgrading; no manual index deletion is required
Background service — Dedicated Windows Service for continuous indexing
Spotlight-style overlay — Activated by Ctrl+Shift+F
Paginated results — Offset/limit pagination with incremental loading
Category filters — Show all results or narrow them to files, folders, images, videos, audio, documents, or applications; Applications includes executables, installers, application shortcuts, and scripts
Drive, size, and date filters — Narrow results to a drive, set minimum and maximum file sizes, or specify a creation-date range
Tag filters — Narrow global search results to any tagged item or to specific tags and their sub-tags
File interactions — Select multiple results, use range selection, copy or cut files, rename inline, open the Windows context menu, and drag results to folders or other applications
Responsive tagged search — Tagged results are resolved asynchronously and stale requests are cancelled when the query or filters change
Initial indexing feedback — After an installer-driven index rebuild, a persistent notification reports preparation and live item counts until every indexed volume is ready

Disclaimer: Global Search reads the NTFS/ReFS USN Journal and MFT, and drive health queries access physical storage devices. Because Windows restricts these operations, the installer registers a dedicated Windows Service that runs with administrative rights.

File Operations

Core operations — Copy, cut, paste, rename, delete
Clipboard feedback — Distinct markers identify copied and cut files and folders, with faded icons for items marked for moving; choose separate copy/cut highlight colors or disable both highlights and cut-icon fading in Settings > Appearance
Internal drag-and-drop — Move items between folders, hold Ctrl to copy, or hold Alt to create shortcuts. Copies and shortcuts can also be dropped into the source folder, with copies receiving a separate name
Permanent deletion — Use Shift+Delete or hold Shift while clicking Delete in the context menu or toolbar to bypass the Recycle Bin
Selection controls — Select all, clear selection, or invert selection from the status bar
Folder access assistance — For access-denied folders, request permanent full control for your Windows account through an administrator-authorized helper; the main file manager stays unelevated. A warning explains that the grant also applies to inheriting files/subfolders and can be used by other programs running under your account
Batch rename — Select 2+ eligible files or folders and press F2 or click the toolbar's Rename button to open the batch rename modal; configure a shared base name, number position (suffix/prefix), separator style (parentheses, underscore, dash, space, or none), and start/step/padding; drag-to-reorder; live preview table with per-row conflict detection
Folder listing export — Export all items or a selection from a filesystem folder to CSV, TSV, TXT, or HTML, saved to a file or copied to the clipboard. Choose columns and sorting, optionally include subfolders and calculate folder sizes, and use a tree layout for recursive TXT exports
Windows Shell context menu — Integrates native Shell entries with MTT actions. Right-click an empty folder area for View, Sort by, Refresh, Open in CMD, Open in CMD (Admin), and folder Properties; New > Folder retains its keyboard shortcut alongside available Windows document-creation entries
Archive creation — Compress selected files and folders to ZIP or 7Z from the context menu, with byte-level progress, cancellation, conflict-free archive naming, and temporary output cleanup after failures
Archive extraction — Access the Windows Shell Extract All action directly from the context menu for supported archive files
External drag-and-drop — Drag files from MTT File Manager to Windows Explorer and other compatible Windows applications
Tag assignment — Add, remove, or switch file/folder tags from the context menu; tags are preserved on supported renames/moves and cleared when files are deleted
Recycle Bin — Browse, restore, and permanently delete; drag selected items to the Recycle Bin target in Quick Access to send them there
Cloud Files support — Sync status badges for cloud-only, locally available, syncing, and pinned files; supports Windows Cloud Files actions such as "Always keep on this device" and "Free up space"
Google Drive integration — Read Google Drive sync status through its Windows Shell integration and resolve folder shortcuts for navigation
ISO mounting — Mount ISO files as virtual drives, detect images mounted before the app starts, and eject them from the sidebar

Automatic File Organizer

Persistent rules — Automatically move files from a source folder to a destination based on file extensions
Extension presets — Quickly configure rules for documents, images, videos, audio, archives, and executables, or enter custom extensions
Conflict policies — Resolve destination conflicts manually, skip them, automatically rename the source, or redirect it to a designated conflict folder; existing files are never overwritten
Pending conflict management — Keep collisions pending, safely rename the source, rename the occupied destination after confirmation, or cancel the conflict with file identity checks before every change
Operation history — Track organizer moves and their status with configurable retention, retry eligible operations using the current rule, and safely undo completed moves while file identities remain valid
Rule controls and recovery — Enable or disable individual rules, or use Enable/disable all rules to suspend organizer moves across launches while letting an ongoing move finish. Re-enabling preserves individually disabled rules; inspect live monitoring status, create missing folders with confirmation, and recover automatically from watcher failures and event queue overflow
Safe folder monitoring — Existing and newly created matching files are processed only after remaining stable for two seconds; source, destination, and conflict folders are monitored so resolved collisions can be reprocessed automatically
Protected moves and rule validation — Cyclic rules are rejected, source files are checked before moving, and cross-drive copies are verified before their sources are removed
Preview and notifications — Preview how many files match a disabled rule and receive batched details about completed moves, policy-based skips, pending conflicts, and failures

Performance & Cache

Multi-level cache — Memory, disk (SQLite), and GPU textures
Tag view cache — Persistent metadata cache and paged loading make large Tag views appear quickly without preloading thumbnails or increasing GPU texture cache limits
Async workers — Background processing keeps UI responsive
UI virtualization — Efficient rendering of large directories
Bounded background work — Folder loading, thumbnail generation, and search rescans use concurrency limits to avoid resource spikes and improve shutdown behavior
Folder summaries — Reuse completed background calculations for folder sizes and details-panel file/subfolder counts; retain previously calculated values while refreshing them in the background
Idle memory trimming — Trims the Windows process working set after idle periods when it exceeds a configured threshold
Per-folder monitoring — Default notify crate watcher with opt-in drive-wide ReadDirectoryChangesW; event bursts are coalesced into debounced reloads

Optional Windows Integration

These options are available in Settings > General. They modify the current user's Registry settings without requiring administrator privileges or UAC confirmation.

Windows Explorer integration uses classic context-menu entries; the optional Windows 11 compact-menu package is no longer included.

Warning: Both options are experimental. Some antivirus software may detect this Registry-modifying behavior as malware and report a false positive.

Set MTT as the default file manager

Use MTT as the default handler for filesystem folders and drives through Windows' existing Open action, without adding duplicate folder context-menu entries. Obsolete MTT entries belonging to the current installation are cleaned up. Virtual folders such as Control Panel retain their native Windows handlers.

Open MTT with Win+E

This separate option redirects Win+E and Explorer launch requests to MTT.

Pressing Win+E and running explorer.exe will open MTT instead of Windows File Explorer. In situations where specific execution of explorer.exe is required, this will not be possible. This option modifies the current user's Registry settings.

Graphics Backend

The app supports three rendering backend choices, selectable in Settings > Graphics > GPU Backend (requires app restart):

Wgpu — DirectX 12 (Default)

Default backend for the main window on Windows
Uses wgpu DX12 with a DirectComposition visual for presentation
Avoids transient black frames when the borderless window is minimized
If DX12 initialization fails, startup automatically retries Vulkan and then Glow + OpenGL

Wgpu — Vulkan

Optional Vulkan backend for the main window
Keeps the Vulkan-specific thumbnail and grid performance tuning
Does not use the DX12 DirectComposition presentation path

Glow — OpenGL (Fallback)

Fallback when DirectX 12 or Vulkan is unavailable or unstable on your system.
Uses eframe's Glow renderer directly instead of wgpu's OpenGL backend
OpenGL texture uploads can be synchronous on the CPU thread, leading to some stutter.
If scrolling stutters with OpenGL, try disabling Scroll interpolation in Settings > Graphics.

Dedicated image, PDF, DOCX, XLSX, and text viewer windows start with Glow independently of the main window's backend setting. If OpenGL initialization fails before the viewer is created, they retry with Wgpu (DirectX 12 on Windows).

Prerequisites

Windows 10 or newer, 64-bit — The installer targets x64-compatible Windows systems.
Rust 1.99 or newer for source builds — Required by the workspace. The application packages remain edition 2021; the pinned BetterOffice DOCX and XLSX crates use edition 2024.
Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2015-2022 (x64) — Required by the native runtime dependencies. The official Microsoft installer is available at: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe
Administrator permission during installation — Required to install and start the Global Search and drive telemetry Windows Service (mtt-search-service.exe).
Video codecs for extended thumbnail support — Optional, but recommended for formats not supported by Windows out of the box. See Video Thumbnail Codecs.

The main file manager does not need to run as administrator for normal file browsing and file operations. Elevated service access is isolated in mtt-search-service.exe, which indexes NTFS/ReFS volumes using low-level filesystem data and performs on-demand health queries against physical storage devices. The installer registers this dedicated Windows Service with the required privileges instead of requiring the whole application to run elevated.

Search-service security

Connection permissions — Ordinary local processes can connect as clients but cannot create additional server endpoints on the service's communication channel; remote clients are rejected.
Client verification — Search, folder-size, and change-check requests reject clients identified as using an unexpected executable or installation directory. When identity inspection is unavailable, existing caller-permission checks remain in effect; this is not a guarantee that only MTT can access these requests. Previously strict endpoints continue to reject unverifiable clients.
Bounded connections — Connection limits, timeouts, and bounded rejection handling prevent clients that stop reading responses from blocking new connections or indefinitely occupying connection slots.

Technologies

Category	Technology	Version	Purpose
Language	Rust	Edition 2021	Performance and safety
GUI	eframe/egui	0.35	Modern immediate-mode GUI (features: `persistence`, `wgpu`, `glow`)
GPU Backend (Default)	wgpu DirectX 12 via eframe	29.x	DirectComposition presentation; requires app restart
GPU Backend (Alternative)	wgpu Vulkan via eframe	29.x	Optional Vulkan renderer; requires app restart
GPU Backend (Fallback)	Glow OpenGL via eframe	via eframe	OpenGL fallback; requires app restart
Windows API	windows-rs	0.62	Native Windows integration
Video	libmpv2	5.0.3	High-performance video playback
PDF	pdfium (pdfium-render)	0.8.37	Native PDF rendering (requires pdfium.dll)
DOCX	BetterOffice DOCX parse/layout/raster	0.3.0	Native OOXML pagination and read-only page rendering
XLSX	BetterOffice XLSX model/parse/render/raster	0.3.0	Native workbook reading and read-only sheet rendering
Database	SQLite (rusqlite)	0.32	Reliable persistence
Images	image crate	0.25	Image processing
Archives	zip + sevenz-rust/sevenz-rust2 + tar + flate2/bzip2/xz2/zstd	9 / 0.6/0.20 / 0.4 / 1 / 0.5 / 0.1 / 0.13	Native archive browsing plus ZIP/7Z creation
RAR	unrar	0.5	Native RAR handling via the upstream UnRAR source
Parallelism	rayon	1.10	Parallel processing
IPC	Named Pipes + bincode	1.3	App ↔ search service communication
Service	windows-service	0.7	Background indexing and on-demand drive telemetry service
i18n	rust-i18n	3	Multi-language support (en, pt-BR, zh-CN, ru, el)

Runtime Dependencies

libmpv-2.dll — Required for video playback
pdfium.dll — Required for PDF viewer
Video codecs — Required for video thumbnail extraction (see Video Thumbnail Codecs below)

Privacy

No tracking or automatic data uploads

MTT does not collect user or machine information for analytics, advertising, or profiling, and does not automatically upload diagnostic reports. File browsing, search indexing, previews, and hardware information are processed on your computer; file metadata and device information used by these features are not sent to the project or the update service.

Internet access and updates

MTT's built-in Internet requests are used exclusively to check for application updates and retrieve release notes from the official GitHub repository over HTTPS, without account credentials or uploads of files, search terms, diagnostics, or machine identifiers. Opening the release page launches the browser; downloading and running an installer are manual actions outside MTT.

Update requests identify the application and its version in the User-Agent header. Like any Internet connection, they expose the connection's public IP address to the service provider; this is not an anonymous connection. GitHub handles these requests under its own privacy statement.

Startup checks are enabled by default and can be disabled in Settings > About. Manual checks remain available; installation is manual.

Optional local diagnostics

Enable Settings > Diagnostics only when needed for troubleshooting. It records technical information about the application's operation, such as errors, timings, counters, and resource usage, along with the application version, operating-system family, and architecture.
Before writing diagnostic text, the logger filters recognized file and folder names, filesystem paths, network server/share names, drive labels, search terms, and other sensitive identifiers. Filtering reduces exposure but is not a guarantee that every possible identifier will be recognized; inspect the plain-text file before sharing it.
The diagnostic file stays on your computer. It is never uploaded automatically, including during updates. You decide whether, when, and with whom to share it.
Diagnostic mode auto-disables after 24 hours and limits the file to approximately 10 MiB while retaining recent filtered events.
These are technical privacy measures for data minimization and safer troubleshooting, not a standalone legal certification of LGPD or any other regulatory compliance.

Video Thumbnail Codecs

The thumbnail pipeline uses 3 Windows APIs for video files: Shell API (Stage 3), IThumbnailCache (Stage 4), and Media Foundation (Stage 5). All three require video codecs to be registered on the system.

What works out of the box (Windows 10/11)

MP4 (H.264/AVC), WMV, AVI — native Windows codecs

What requires installation

Format	Without codecs	With K-Lite Codec Pack
MP4 H.264	✅ Works	✅ Works
MP4 HEVC/H.265	❌ Fails	✅ Works
MKV (any codec)	❌ Fails	✅ Works
WEBM VP9/AV1	❌ Fails	✅ Works
FLV	❌ Fails	✅ Works

Recommended: K-Lite Codec Pack

Download K-Lite Codec Pack (Standard) — includes LAV Filters which register:

Thumbnail handlers for Windows Shell (enables Stages 3 and 4)
Media Foundation decoders (enables Stage 5)
Support for HEVC/H.265, VP9, AV1, MKV, WEBM, FLV, and more

Note: Without the appropriate codecs installed, all video thumbnail stages will fail silently and the file will display a generic icon instead.

Credits

This project includes and builds upon work from the following projects:

ModernH, by Harkesh Bhatia. Our OSC file originated from this project and is used here with small modifications.
RTX HDR / RTX VSR toggle gist, by anthonybaldwin. This gist served as an early development reference while experimenting with RTX HDR / RTX VSR behavior in mpv; the current repository implementation has since been reworked independently.
BetterOffice, by Elia Hilse and The OpenOOXML Project. MTT uses its Apache-2.0 DOCX and XLSX engines for the read-only document and workbook viewers; the upstream attribution notice is included in third_party_licenses/ and public installers.

Translations

Chinese (Simplified) — contributed by @cdtsuipo
Russian — contributed by @Nekiplay

License

Except where otherwise noted, the original code and documentation authored for this repository are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the top-level LICENSE and NOTICE files.

Apache-2.0 was chosen because it fits the current Rust stack well and gives a clear attribution baseline: anyone redistributing the Apache-licensed portions of this project must preserve the copyright notice, the license text, and any applicable NOTICE entries. In practice, this lets the project require retention of legal attribution, but it does not force public branding, UI credits, or endorsement for every downstream project.

This repository also contains or redistributes third-party components that remain under their own licenses and are not relicensed under Apache-2.0. Key examples include:

mpv_ui/portable_config/scripts/modernH.lua and mpv_ui/portable_config/script-opts/osc.conf, derived from ModernH and kept under LGPL-2.1.
mpv_ui/portable_config/scripts/autoload.lua, copied from upstream mpv tooling and governed by upstream mpv licensing.
target\release\libmpv-2.dll, whose redistribution terms depend on the exact binary build shipped.
target\release\pdfium.dll, which carries upstream PDFium licensing and notice obligations independent of the Rust bindings.
mpv_ui/portable_config/fonts/Material-Design-Iconic-Font.ttf, which has its own upstream asset license.
unrar, whose Rust wrapper is permissive but whose embedded UnRAR sources retain the upstream UnRAR license.
BetterOffice's DOCX and XLSX engines, under Apache-2.0, and the shared Yrs 0.27.3 dependency, under MIT. The upstream attribution notice and applicable license texts are included with the installer; the vendored Yrs copy contains a documented stable-Rust compatibility change. Raster/ZIP dependencies also retain their BSD-3-Clause, MIT, and Zlib notices in third_party_licenses/.

The official Windows installer is therefore a multi-license distribution, not an Apache-only artifact. Public redistribution is intended to be allowed when the installer keeps the bundled notices/license texts, the matching source code or source locations remain available, and third-party components are not described as being relicensed under Apache-2.0.

For practical release guidance, see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and the third_party_licenses/ bundle. Public installers include that directory, which contains full license texts, attribution notes, source availability notes, and release-sensitive binary provenance.

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