MPC-HC (Media Player Classic)

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.

The player supports all common video and audio file formats available for playback. It has a built in DVD player with real-time zoom, support for AVI subtitles, built-in MPEG2/SVCD/DVD codec. Media Player Classic was created and is currently maintained by a programmer named "Gabest". This is a mod of Media Player Classic design for home cinema usage.

What's New

Changes/additions/improvements:

• Some improvements for hotkey and global media key handling. This for example fixes a problem caused by a Windows/Chrome/Edge bug where clicking on notifications could send a keypress with value 0 to wrong window, which could trigger hotkey actions in MPC-HC.
• This adds a new option to display audio track details in the statusbar. Note: Statusbar info does not (yet) update when changing audio track through splitter tray icon, only when doing it using player functionality.

Fixes:

• Fixed a crash when using libass and subtitles were (partially) located outside of visible video area.
• A few other small fixes and improvements.

Overview of new features

• Play HDR video
  • This requires using either MPC Video Renderer (MPCVR) or madVR.
  • After installation these HDR capable renderers can be selected here:
  • Options > Playback > Output
  • With other video renderers, the colors will be wrong!
  • I recommend installing K-Lite Codec Pack. That includes MPC-HC and the renderers all in one easy to use package.
  • You should change hardware decoder to D3D11 in LAV Video Decoder settings when using MPCVR on Windows 10/11, because renderer will use DirectX11.
• Modern GUI Theme (Dark or Light)
  • Options > Player > User Interface
  • 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
• 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 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 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 yt-dlp.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)
• 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.