Are there other ways to display images in mpv?

[ahaoboy]

When using an overlay to display an image, the text in the image display area will be covered.
According to the documentation, image-overlay will always override osd-overlay.

z
The Z order of the overlay. Optional, defaults to 0.

Note that Z order between different overlays of different formats is static, and cannot be changed (currently, this means that bitmap overlays added by overlay-add are always on top of the ASS overlays added by osd-overlay). In addition, the builtin OSD components are always below any of the custom OSD. (This includes subtitles of any kind as well as text rendered by show-text.)

It's possible that future mpv versions will randomly change how Z order between different OSD formats and builtin OSD is handled.

[na-na-hi]

It is possible to display image with osd-overlay with lots of 1x1 px vector squares in ASS. It is the method used by fansubs to display images in ASS subtitles, but it will have bad performance.

Alternatively you can compose the image and text to a single buffer off screen and display the whole as a single image overlay.

[ahaoboy]

This only works for very small pictures. A large number of OSD overlays significantly impact performance and memory usage.