How to Clear Recent Files History in mpv?

Managing your privacy and keeping a clean workspace often requires clearing your recent playback history. While the mpv media player is incredibly lightweight and doesn’t have a traditional graphical user interface (GUI) settings menu, it does track recently opened files depending on your operating system and configuration. This guide will show you how to quickly locate and clear the recent files list in mpv for Windows, macOS, and Linux, as well as how to disable the feature entirely.

Understanding How mpv Tracks History

By default, the core mpv application does not maintain an internal playback history file. Instead, recent files are typically tracked in one of two ways:

• System-level tracking: Your operating system’s desktop environment (like Windows Jump Lists or macOS Recent Items) tracks the files mpv opens.
• Script-level tracking: You are using a popular third-party lua script (like stats.lua, recent.lua, or history.lua) that logs your watch history to a text file.

Clearing History on Windows

If you are using Windows, mpv files appear in your Quick Access and taskbar Jump Lists.

1. Right-click the mpv icon on your taskbar.
2. Right-click a specific file in the Recent list and select Remove from this list.
3. To clear all history, clear your Windows File Explorer history by opening File Explorer Options, going to the General tab, and clicking the Clear button under the Privacy section.

Clearing History on macOS

On macOS, the operating system tracks the files handed to the application.

1. Open the mpv application.
2. Click on File in the top menu bar.
3. Hover over Open Recent and select Clear Menu.

Clearing History on Linux

Most Linux distributions running GNOME or KDE track recently used files globally. You can clear this through your system settings or by deleting the global recent files manager cache:

rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

Clearing Third-Party Script History

If you installed a custom script to log history within mpv, your history is stored in a .txt or .log file inside your mpv configuration directory.

1. Navigate to your mpv configuration folder:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\mpv\
• Linux/macOS: ~/.config/mpv/

2. Look for folders named script-opts or files named history.log, recent.json, or mpv_history.txt.
3. Open the file and delete the lines, or delete the file entirely.

How to Disable History Tracking Permanently

If you want to prevent mpv from ever showing up in your system’s recent documents lists, you can pass a specific flag when launching it or add it to your mpv.conf file.

Add the following line to your mpv.conf:

# Disable operating system recent documents tracking
no-taskbar-progress

Note: If your history is being generated by a script, you will need to open that specific .lua script file or its configuration in script-opts and set its tracking or logging variable to false.