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.
Media Player Classic – Home Cinema 2.3.0 changelog:
Updates
- Updated LAV Filters to version 0.79.2-9-g56aab
- Updated MediaInfo to version 24.05
- Updated MPC Video Renderer to version 0.8.3.2255
- Updated libass and various other external libs
Changes/additions/improvements
- MPC Video Renderer is now included in the installer/zip and usable as internal filter.
- It is not yet the default renderer, but will become that in near future (on modern systems).
- You can select it here:
- Options > Playback > Output
- It uses DirectX 11 on Windows 10/11, so for optimal performance and compatibility it is also recommended to change the hardware decoder from DXVA2 to D3D11:
- Options > Internal Filters > Video Decoder > Hardware acceleration
- Note: an external copy of the video renderer gets used first when available, so either uninstall that or update it.
- New OSD implementation. It now also works during audio-only playback. OSD transparancy can be adjusted in advanced options.
- Volume normalize algorithm now no longer regains on short seeks and much less on long seeks. This should prevent unwanted jumps in volume.
- Improved downsampling quality of the images when generating a thumbnail sheet.
Fixes
- Several small fixes and improvements
Download: MPC-HC 2.3.0 (x64) | Standalone | ~20.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: MPC-HC 2.3.0 (x86) | Standalone
Link: Media Player Classic – Home Cinema Home Page | GitHub Project Page
