Media Player Classic - Home Cinema
Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC) is a free and open-source video and audio player for Windows. It is famous and loved for its simple and effective user interface, providing an excellent user experience. It offers a huge amount of functionality. Being a DirectShow player, it also allows flexibility and extensibility through third party filters.
Development Status
The player is mature, stable, reliable, and already provides a huge amount of features.
I currently do not accept any new feature requests. But that does not mean that the player is not getting any new features or other improvements. In fact, a huge amount of improvements have been made since I have taken over development in 2017.
There are three primary reasons why I currently do not accept any new feature requests:
- I and my fellow developers are too busy working on our own ideas and wishes for MPC-HC, and do not have any time or desire to work on other stuff.
- 90% of all requests are for functionality that is already available in the player, sometimes for over a decade, but users are too lazy/stupid to have a look at the options and player menus, or do a simple Internet search for help.
- For certain extra functionality there are already good solutions available. Such as an equalizer.
The internal codecs are developed in an external project (LAV Filters). That project is actively maintained, and MPC-HC will be updated periodically with the latest codecs. Same applies to code/files from other external projects that are used by MPC-HC, such as MediaInfo.
If you are a programmer and want to help improve MPC-HC, then you can do so by submitting a pull request containing your patches.
Overview of features
A lot of people seem to be unaware of some of the awesome features that have been added to MPC-HC in the past years. Here is a list of useful options and features that everyone should know about:
- Modern GUI Theme (Dark or Light)
Options > Player > User Interface
When using modern theme it is also possible to change the height of the seekbar and size of the toolbar buttons.
- Video preview on the seekbar
Options > Player > User Interface
- Play HDR video
This requires using MPC Video Renderer (included) or madVR.
After installation these renderers can be selected here:
Options > Playback > Output
Tip: If you want an easy to use all-in-one package that contains MPC-HC and these renderers, then use K-Lite Codec pack.
- Added support for playback of many new audio and video formats:
For example HEVC (H.265) / VVC (H.266) / AV1 video, and AC4 audio.
- Improved subtitle rendering performance, and ability to use libass. Plus support for WebVTT.
- Ability to search for subtitles
Press D for manual search.
Or enable automatic search in: Options > Subtitles > Misc
- Adjust playback speed
Menu > Play > Playback rate
The buttons in the player that control playback rate take a 2x step by default. This can be customized to smaller values (like 10%):
Options > Playback > Speed step
Adjusting playback speed works best in combination with the SaneAR or MPC Audio Renderer. These two renderers have automatic pitch correction.
Options > Playback > Output > Audio Renderer
- MPC-HC can remember playback position, so you can resume from that point later
Options > Player > History
- You can quickly seek through a video with Ctrl + Mouse Scrollwheel.
- You can jump to next/previous file in a folder by pressing PageUp/PageDown.
- You can perform automatic actions at end of file. For example to go to next file or close player.
Options > Playback > After Playback (permanent setting)
Menu > Play > After Playback (for current file only)
- A-B repeat
You can loop a segment of a video. Press [ and ] to set start and stop markers.
- You can rotate/flip/mirror/stretch/zoom the video
Menu > View > Pan&Scan
This is also easily done with hotkeys (see below).
- There are lots of keyboard hotkeys and mouse actions to control the player. They can be customized as well.
Options > Player > Keys
Tip: there is a search box above the table.
- You can stream videos directly from Youtube and many other video websites
Put yt-dlp.exe in the MPC-HC installation folder.
Then you can open website URLs in the player: Menu > File > Open File/URL
You can even download those videos: Menu > File > Save a copy
Tip: to be able to download in best quality with yt-dlp, it is recommended to also put ffmpeg.exe in the MPC-HC folder.
Several YDL configuration options are found here: Options > Advanced
This includes an option to specify the location of the .exe in case you don't want to put it in MPC-HC folder.
Note 1: You also need to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)
Note 2: yt-dlp nightly build (very latest version made daily)
Note 3: yt-dlp fork with Win7 support
- Besides all these (new) features, there have also been many bugfixes and internal improvements in the player in the past years that give better performance and stability.
System Requirements
- Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 / 10 / 11
License
MPC-HC's code is licensed under GPL v3.
/mpc-hc