Recommendation: VLC Alternative "MPC-HC"

[KirbyLikes525]

I know VLC is a favorite amongst most tech savy people, especially us that shoot and edit video but I recently discovered MPC-HC (Media Player Classic - Home Cinema)

First thing, it has native Prores playback unlike VLC which is useful on my Windows machine so I don't have to open Premiere to just look at clips.

Second, the File>Properties>Media Info is more detailed than YouTube's stats for nerds. This showed me that the ProRes codec adapts to the framerate of the video. All white papers online are based off 1080/29.97 but I saw a licensed Prores codec device double the bitrate for the same setting with 1080/59.94 video in the Media Info.

Lastly, MPC-HC saved an edit job when I saw "Delay relative to video: -XXXms" in the Media Info for clips shot on a new-to-me handy cam. They played back in sync in VLC and MPC-HC but Adobe didn't compensate for the delay so I had to manually offet the audio in my Adobe sequence. I scratched my head for over a week before discovering this! And it truly saved the job knowing how to compensate for the delay in the sequence which varied for each clip of 4GB/26min max length.

I highly recommend this program for anyone that captures video! MPC-HC (Media Player Classic - Home Cinema)

[yourboylloyd]

You sold me at "NATIVE Pro-Res Playback"

[KirbyLikes525]

You sold me at "NATIVE Pro-Res Playback"

LOL hope you like it!

[Kharak]

And MPV

Its light and plays everythingand has no gamma shift.

[IDA_ML]

One more vote for the MPV Player.  Absolutely no problem with playing huge resolution files that VLC Player does not play smoothly, including ProRes.  It is portable too, no installation needed.

[heder]

I can also highly recommend Media Player Classic (MPC-HC), imho the best open source player for ages.

[Luther]

MPC-HC is not developed anymore... an attempt to continue the project is here:
https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc

But most developers moved to mpv. I highly recommend using mpv instead, since it has updated GPU support and better interpolation (lanczos/spline64). On Windows you can install through chocolatey to keep it easily updated:
https://chocolatey.org/packages/mpv

On OSX, with homebrew:
https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/mpv

There is also some GUI frontends to mpv, such as Baka-MPlayer and Kawaii-Player:
https://github.com/u8sand/Baka-MPlayer
https://github.com/kanishka-linux/kawaii-player

[keel]

luther, im not familiar with chocolatey (or github)... can you advise how to install from these pages. I am reading "install" but there isn't a link. Every time I am linked from the board, it is to a github.

(im not a developer, so these pages are hieroglyphics to me)

[Luther]

@keel, on github you can go on the "releases" tab and then on "assets". Normally you can find the package there ready to install. For Baka-Mplayer, for example, this is the direct link of the lastest version:
https://github.com/u8sand/Baka-MPlayer/releases/download/v2.0.4/Baka-MPlayer.x86_64.zip

But chocolatey really helps to keep everything updated (or else you would have to manually update every single software on each new release). To install chocolatey, first create a shortcut on desktop named "powershell.exe" (right-click on screen, go to 'create shortcut'). Then after you created it, right-click again above the shortcut and open it as administrator. Copy this command and paste it inside the blue screen:

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Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Then press enter and it will install chocolatey. To use it, close the powershell, then re-open it with administrator privilege and type:

Code: [Select]

choco install mpv choco-upgrade-all-at-startup

This will install mpv player and will also program chocolatey to update all packages (installed through it) everytime you start the system. You can install many other software through chocolatey (firefox, ungoogled-chromium, handbrake, inkscape, libreoffice, rawtherapee - you name it):
https://chocolatey.org/packages

You can also configure mpv to your like using a configuration file. On Windows it is located on "C:\\Users\Yourname\AppData\Roaming\mpv\". Create a text file named "mpv.conf" inside the mpv folder and you can then see the configuration options here. This is my config file on Windows, for example:

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ao=wasapi
vo=gpu
profile=gpu-hq
hwdec=nvdec
fbo-format=rgba32f
scale=ewa_lanczossharp
sigmoid-upscaling=yes
correct-downscaling=yes
temporal-dither=yes
volume-max=160
volume=50
osc=no
screenshot-format=png
ytdl=yes