Software Update: Media Player Classic – Home Cinema 1.9.15

In July 2017, version 1.7.13 of Media Player Classic – Home Cinema was released and the developers indicated that they will continue no more new versions would bring out. However, the source code is open source, and a developer known as clsid at the Doom9 website and a long-time member of mpc-hc now releases new “unofficial” versions from time to time. These mainly contain small improvements and the latest versions of the LAV Filters and MediaInfo are always included. The changelog for version 1.9.15 can be found below.

Changes/additions/improvements:

• Seekbar video preview now supports video rotation.
• Manual subtitle search now also works for online streams.

Fixes:

• Fixed an issue that could cause a long delay when opening the File menu with certain optical drives.
• Fixed an issue in the audio stream switcher that could result in a player hang on seek or track change. This happened only when an external audio track was loaded, in combination with the internal audio renderer and madVR.
• Fixed parsing of subtitle files that contain a duplicate UTF BOM in their file header.
• A few other small fixes.

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)
• AB 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-dlit 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 bug fixes 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.