How do you open an audio file in mpv using the terminal without the album art opening along with it?

Question

I have an arch linux based ditro and I'm trying to open up an audio file (mp3 and flac files) in the terminal using the following command:

$ mpv song.flac

If the audio file doesn't contain any album art, it opens up in the terminal and starts playing like I want it to. When the audio file does have album art though, it opens up a new window displaying the album art while playing the song. Is there a command I can enter or a setting I can change so I can play my audio files in the terminal without a new window being opened to display the album art?

Clem

Answer 1

mpv comes with a flag to disable the display of cover art:

$ mpv --audio-display=no song.flac

does just what you want.
See the relevant documentation here.

Whizbang

I prefer --audio-display=no over --no-video because with this option you still get video for files like *.mp4 – Pallas

Answer 2

If you browse the "Video" section of the man page for mpv, you will see this very near the top:

−−no−video
Do not play video. With some demuxers this may not work. In those cases you can try −−vo=null instead.

Urbanize

Answer 3

The shortest option I can find appears to be -vid=no: $ mpv -vid=no song.flac.

Variants include -vid no, --vid=no, --video=no, -no-vid and --no-video.

-vid=0 may seem like it works, but the thumbnail shows up again after a track change.

Tested on Ubuntu 22.04 only.

Holly