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 1.9.20 changelog:
Updates
- Updated LAV Filters to version 0.76.1
Changes/additions/improvements
- Rewritten code that deals with file history. It works better with multiple instances now.
- Remembered file position now resets to 0 when playback has reached 95% of file duration when closing the player. We assume that end credits have been reached in that case.
- Remembered file position also resets to 0 when pressing stop button. So close player directly or open other file without pressing stop if you wish to resume later.
- The uninstaller now unregisters file associations
- The last used QuickOpen and SaveImage paths are now remembered individually
- Added support for extended locale names in subtitles menu
- Decimal values are now possible for subtitle font spacing and border width/shadow settings
- Now supports loading chapter metadata from .xchp file. Use text file (UTF-8 encoding). Each line is a chapter defined as HH:MM:SS,ddd timecode, optionally followed by a space and chapter name.
Fixes
- Fixed issue where PGS subtitles could be partially rendered outside of visible area
- Fixed regression with reading CDText metadata
- Fixed regression regarding auto-hide of toolbar in case of two monitors with vertical placement
- Workaround for Windows 11 bug where the options dialog was not rendered properly for RTL languages
- Workaround for Windows 10/11 bug where subtitle download dialog could become visible when using taskbar window peek
- Several other small bugs
Download: MPC-HC 1.9.20 (x64) | Standalone | ~20.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: MPC-HC 1.9.20 (x86) | Standalone
Link: Media Player Classic - Home Cinema Home Page | GitHub Project Page
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