Installing HomeBrew `.app` on M1

Question

I am using MBA M1 with macOS Big Sur v11.2.1.

Recently discovered that the program mpv is now available natively for M1 macs through brew. When I do brew install mpv then mpv is surely installed and it is indeed native to M1. But the problem is that there is no .app for it and everytime I want to run a video I have to necessarily open terminal and do mpv \path\ to\ file which I want to avoid. So, searching around I found that the new way to do this is to use the --cask option. But when I do an install using the said option, mpv is the Intel version.

How do I get the native version to work as a regular app? As I understand it, cask option is merely combining all the files into an .app format and it should not really affect anything. In fact, one should be able to do this fairly easily, without using cask, given the right kind of information. Please help me get this working.

Answer 1

Your last point of cask combining the files misses one key step. Someone else has to do the work to assemble and package that app. Homebrew doesn't do that assembly automagically.

I've installed mpv on three machines and your results are the same as I get - Intel Big Sur has a cask, M1 does not. Both get the command line binary.

Unless and until someone sends a pull request to add an M1 version of the cask for this package, you'll want to use a different tool or installation method.