SwitchWave

A hardware-accelerated media player for the Nintendo Switch, built on mpv and FFmpeg.

Features

• Custom hardware acceleration backend for FFmpeg, with dynamic frequency scaling. The following codecs can be decoded:
• MPEG1/2/4
• VC1
• H.264/AVC (10+ bit not supported by hardware)
• H.265/HEVC (12+ bit not supported by hardware)
• VP8
• VP9 (10+ bit not supported by hardware)
• Custom graphics backend for mpv using deko3d, supporting:
• Playback at 4k60fps
• Direct rendering (faster software decoding)
• Custom post-processing shaders
• Custom audio backend for mpv using native Nintendo APIs, supporting layouts up to 5.1 surround
• Network playback through HTTP/S, Samba, NFS or SFTP
• External drive support using libusbhsfs
• Rich and responsive user interface, even under load

Screenshots

Setup

• Download the latest release, and extract it to the root of your sd card (be careful to merge and not overwrite folders)
• Network shares can be configured through the app, as can mpv settings via the built-in editor (refer to the manual)
• Most relevant runtime parameters can be dynamically adjusted during playback through the menu, or failing that, the console (manual)

Building

Docker (recommended)

./build-docker.sh

This builds the toolchain image and compiles everything automatically. Output will be found in build/.

To build with GIMP 3 instead of the default GIMP 2:

GIMP_VERSION=3 ./build-docker.sh

Manual

• Set up a devkitpro environment for Switch homebrew development.
• Install the following packages: switch-bzip2, switch-dav1d, switch-freetype, switch-glm, switch-harfbuzz, switch-libarchive, switch-libass, switch-libfribidi, switch-libjpeg-turbo, switch-libpng, switch-libwebp, switch-curl, switch-libssh2, switch-mbedtls, switch-ntfs-3g and switch-lwext4. In addition, the following build dependencies are required: switch-pkg-config, dkp-meson-scripts, dkp-toolchain-vars, and GIMP (2 or 3).
• Compile and install a GPL build of libusbhsfs.
• Compile and install libsmb2 and libnfs.
• Configure, compile and install FFmpeg: make configure-ffmpeg && make build-ffmpeg -j$(nproc).
• Configure, compile and install libuam: make configure-uam && make build-uam.
• Configure, compile and install mpv: make configure-mpv && make build-mpv.
• Finally, compile the main application and build the release distribution: make dist -j$(nproc).
• Output will be found in build/.

Credits

• Behemoth for the screenshot button overriding method.

--- Tranlated By Open Ai Tx | Last indexed: 2026-04-11 ---