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
You can stream videos directly from Youtube and many other video websites
- Put yt-dlp.exe or 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 yt-dlp/youtube-dl, 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.
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.
Changes from 2.0.0 to 2.1.0:
Updates:
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Updated LAV Filters to version 0.78
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Updated MediaInfo DLL to version 23.10
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Updated MPC Audio Renderer
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Updated all other third party libraries
Changes/additions/improvements:
- Added OpenSubtitles.com subtitle search provider. The existing OpenSubtitles.org provider is scheduled to stop working at the end of 2023. Note: you need a new login for OpenSubtitles.com
- Video preview can now also be placed below the seekbar. See: Options > Tweaks
- The internal subtitle renderer now has an option to use libass for rendering
- Some improvements related to the advanced option for separate fullscreen
- Added right-click actions to some of the toolbar buttons:
- Play = Open File, Stop = Close File, Skip Back = Previous File, Skip Forward = Next File, Frame Step = Frame Step Backwards (seek), Mute = Toggle Next Audio Track
- Support scanning of ATSC channels
- Playlist is now docked to the right side by default. You can drag it to bottom/left/top if you prefer those locations. Or even outside player window.
- Drag&drop/LoadSubtitle/ToggleSubtitle now also work with DirectVobSub and XySubFilter
- HEVC hardware decoding is now disabled by default (on fresh install or settings reset) for Intel Haswell/Broadwell GPUs. These older GPUs have slow partially accelerated decoding and software decoding may be preferred for stability. You can of course still enable it if desired.
Fixes:
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A few DPI scaling fixes for problems that occurred when moving between two screens with different DPI
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Fixed an issue with DVB subtitles not working during live playback
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Fixed an issue changing subtitle default style through styles dialog
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Fixed Pan&Scan movement being wrong for rotated video with MadVR
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Several other small fixes
Download: MPC-HC 2.1.0 (x64) | Standalone | ~20.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: MPC-HC 2.1.0 (x86) | Standalone
Link: Media Player Classic - Home Cinema Home Page | GitHub Project Page