Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC) is a free and open-source video and audio player for Windows. MPC-HC is based on the original Guliverkli project and contains many additional features and bug fixes. MPC-HC isn’t flashy but it works with nearly any media format. MPC-HC uses DXVA technology to pass decoding operations to your modern video card, enhancing your viewing experience. And MPC-HC supports both physical and software DVDs with menus, chapter navigation, and subtitles.
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:
Dark interface
- Menu > View > Dark Theme
- When using dark theme it is also possible to change the height of the seekbar and size of the toolbar buttons.
- Options > Advanced
Video preview on the seekbar
- Options > Tweaks > Show preview on seek bar
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 with the internal audio renderer. This also has 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 youtube-dl.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 youtube-dl, it is recommended to also put ffmpeg.exe in the MPC-HC folder.
- Several configuration options are found here: Options > Advanced
Play HDR video
- This requires using madVR or MPC Video Renderer.
- After installation these renderers can be selected here:
- Options > Playback > Output
Ability to search for and download subtitles, either automatically or manually (press D):
- Options > Subtitles > Misc
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. It also has updated internal codecs. Support was added for CUE sheets, WebVTT subtitles, etc.
Media Player Classic - Home Cinema 1.9.17 changelog:
Updates:
- Updated LAV Filters to version 0.75.1-10-g75744
Changes/additions/improvements:
- Added support for System Media Transport Controls in Windows 8.1/10/11. This displays playback controls for the player when adjusting volume in Windows. You can enable this functionality through: Options > Advanced > UseSMTC
- Some improvements to SaneAR Audio Renderer: It now automatically falls back to shared mode when exclusive mode is enabled but unsupported. Exclusive mode option no longer needs to be enabled for bitstreaming, instead it is used implicitly when bitstreaming.
- Generating a thumbnail sheet is now faster. It now seeks to keyframes as much as possible.
- Added an advanced option to disable automatic pause when locking the screen in Windows.
- You can now use "off" as a value in the subtitle track preference setting. It may follow language codes that you do prefer to use. In that case it will disable subtitles only if no preceding language code has matched.
- Some visual improvements to playlist numbering and title editing.
- Some improvements for subtitle selection and language name display for the rare situation where a language does not have a LCID.
- Some optimizations to the filter graph builder. This should speed up file loading in some situations.
- The player now reloads the video file when resumed after hibernate or very long pause (> 30 min). This is done as a workaround for driver bugs. It will remember playback position and track selection.
- DVB improvement: It now stores the symbol rate for scanned channels.
- Added support for wildcards in filenames in M3U playlists.
Fixes:
- Fixed subtitles being early by a few frames with VMR9 renderer.
- Fixed a subtitle parsing issue for files that contained 4-byte UTF-8 characters (such as emojis). Those are handled properly now.
- Fixed an issue with drag&drop of a folder onto the playlist window.
- Several other small fixes
Download: MPC-HC 1.9.17 (x64) | Standalone | ~20.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: MPC-HC 1.9.17 (x86) | Standalone
Link: Media Player Classic - Home Cinema Home Page | GitHub Project Page