mpv is a fork of mplayer2, which is a fork of MPlayer. mpv as a whole is licensed as GPL version 2 or later (see LICENSE). Most source files are GPLv2+, but some files are available under a more liberal license, such as LGPLv2.1+, BSD, MIT, ISC, and possibly others. Look at the copyright header of each source file, and grep the sources for "Copyright" if you need to know details. Files without Copyright notice are licensed as LGPLv2.1+. All new contributions must be LGPLv2.1+ licensed, or if the changes are done on GPL code, must come with the implicit agreement that the project can relicense the code to LGPLv2.1+ at a later point without asking the contributor. (This is a safeguard for making potential relicensing of the project to LGPLv2.1+ easier.) Using a more liberal license compatible to LGPLv2.1+ is also ok. For information about authors and contributors, consult the git log, which contains the complete SVN and CVS history as well. Note that mplayer2 as a whole is licensed under GPLv3+. This is because it uses a copy of talloc (part of Samba), which is LGPLv3+, and the next compatible license for this mix is GPLv3+. MPlayer as a whole is licensed under GPLv2 (incompatible to GPLv3!), because some files are licensed to GPLv2 (and _not_ any later version of the license). In particular, this affects the file libmpdemux/demux_ty_osd.c. It is disabled under mplayer2, and has been removed from mpv. "v2.1+" in this context means "version 2.1 or later".