
MPC-HC v1.7.13 is released and farewell - rakshithbekal
https://mpc-hc.org/2017/07/16/1.7.13-released-and-farewell/
======
satysin
MPC-HC is a superb media player but it is not surprising to see this happen.
Interest in maintaining open source Windows applications written in
C/Win32/C++/MFC is going to keep dropping as there are not as many people with
the skills or motivation to do it. Especially for something as complex as a
media player.

Even on the Linux side I have seen a drop in the number of full blown media
players being developed, they are mostly front ends to things like mpv and
mplayer.

~~~
pmoriarty
Making front-ends to existing back-ends makes a lot of sense to me. I don't
really see the advantage of writing a monolithic media player from scratch as
opposed to leveraging existing back-ends.

~~~
satysin
I knew I should have clarified that I don't think it is a bad thing they are
"just" front ends to mpv :)

I agree with you that there isn't much (if any) advantage to doing it all
again with a new media player core. I would rather all the expertise is put
into mpv to be honest and then let others build front ends that do all the
extra bits.

------
NuDinNou
Farewell old friend. For those looking for an alternative: you should try MPV.
It's a video player for the geeks/hackers
[https://mpv.io/manual/stable/](https://mpv.io/manual/stable/)

~~~
rakshithbekal
Does not have NGU

~~~
NTripleOne
Holy shit those spam replies to this comment... what the hell was so special
about this that it warranted like 5 spam replies?

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ksec
I have been using MPC-BE for many many years and it is being actively
developed with developers feedback and response on Doom9.

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/)

~~~
dtech
Why has this version been forked off?

~~~
olegkikin
For the looks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Player_Classic#Black_Edi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Player_Classic#Black_Edition)

~~~
kakarot
Not just the looks.

It says right there in the source you provided that MPC-BE "not only looks
better than MPC, but also performs faster"

~~~
olegkikin
MPC-HC is already so fast, I doubt that claim is even true. I just double-
clocked on a video file after a cold boot, the UI shows up almost instantly,
and the playback starts after around a second.

~~~
ksec
To all those asking why BE? It really has NOTHING to do with speed. To simply
put, BE was well maintained and continuous bug fixing. From my perspective HC
has seen the writing on the wall ever since BE forked.

Not only does it look better, it plays files better then HC by default. Not
sure HC has improved since then, back in the day BE would handle AVI, rmvb,
WMV, much better without the need of fiddling around with settings and
filters.

MPC-BE is the only thing I really miss on Mac.

~~~
armada651
The writing for MPC-HC was on the wall a lot longer than when MPC-BE was
forked. There's no future for a player that's not cross-platform, case-in-
point:

> MPC-BE is the only thing I really miss on Mac.

And HC definitely improved after BE was forked. While BE chose to keep
maintaining their own decoding filters the HC team chose to completely switch
to an internal build of LAV Filters. MPC-HC also had a lot of performance
improvements to the internal subtitle renderer.

MPC-BE regularly backported these improvements though, so the fact that MPC-HC
died also affects MPC-BE.

------
greyskull
MPC-HC was always my go-to. Starts up instantly and the performance was always
superb, much better than VLC in seeking. I don't know what it is, but more
often than not, VLC pauses for a moment when seeking to a random part of the
file, while MPC-HC has always been instant.

I suppose I'll try out MPV.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
VLC in a nutshell: Rebuilding fonts...

Fortunately, I believe MPC-HC will still likely be updated if necessary, or
forked and updated if need be. I know I haven't updated mine in years and
haven't had any problems.

~~~
rossy
> _VLC in a nutshell: Rebuilding fonts..._

I wonder if this is still a problem (I haven't used VLC in a while.) That
message box is shown when fontconfig rebuilds its font cache, but libass has
been able to run without fontconfig since 0.13.0 (October 2015.) I guess it
depends on whether the current release version of VLC still needs it.

~~~
dEnigma
It happened to me on the current Windows version just a few days ago. But it
doesn't seem to happen as often as in the past.

------
sotojuan
Damn. I remember all the debates on /a/ (4chan anime board) on what are the
best options and presets... for watching anime. Looking back it was kind of
silly but we were able to do that because the player was so well built.

On Linux/macOS I use mpv - I recommend it!

~~~
Veratyr
I really liked the interpolation stuff you could get in MPC-HC. Panning and
such in anime was so much nicer.

Edit: Turns out this isn't unique to MPC-HC: [https://www.svp-
team.com/](https://www.svp-team.com/)

~~~
NTripleOne
In case anyone's seeing this using SVP3 and had no idea that 4 had released, 4
is _well worth_ paying for, it is far less hardware intensive (SVP3 would
choke getting high bitrate 1080p videos to 60fps, SVP4 handles the same files
like a dream - anecdotal but better than nothing), the interface of the main
application has been... improved (kinda subjective, but it's definitely more
idiot proof) and it even supports VLC now if you swing that way.

------
tibiapejagala
If you are reading this, thank you for your hard work all these years

~~~
Fifer82
I want to second this. Been using it for years and appreciate all the work you
guys have done.

------
snvzz
Maybe it's time for mpc-qt: [https://github.com/cmdrkotori/mpc-
qt](https://github.com/cmdrkotori/mpc-qt)

It reimplements mpc-hc UX using qt for the UI and libmpv for the heavy
lifting. The issue with this one is that it doesn't have public builds yet,
but it has been in active development for years.

~~~
jzelinskie
Can you use external renderers like madVR in mpc-qt?

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GunlogAlm
Hopefully some people step forward, I'd hate to see MPC-HC come to an end. :(

------
TheKIngofBelAir
> K-Lite contains a custom build of MPC-HC that contains additional fixes and
> improvements compared to the officials builds. This will continue in the
> future. The internal codecs that MPC-HC uses are also still actively
> maintained.

[http://codecs.forumotion.net/t2644-mpc-hc-is-
dead#14216](http://codecs.forumotion.net/t2644-mpc-hc-is-dead#14216)

------
castell
Very unfortunate, MPC-HC was so simple to use, has a slick UI inspired by MS
Media Player and to quickly review/seek videos it was the very best. (much
faster than VLC for that task)

~~~
jhasse
It still is ;)

------
rakshithbekal
I really want to use mpdn because it uses WMF but I haven't gotten results
with it like I have using MPC-HC and madvr. Anybody know any other program
that's as advance as mpc, compatible with madvr and uses Windows media
foundation over directshow?

------
AsyncAwait
As a potential replacement, there's [https://github.com/cmdrkotori/mpc-
qt](https://github.com/cmdrkotori/mpc-qt) which uses mpv backend, but has the
MPC look and feel.

~~~
revelation
It's a media player. Frankly, it's pretty frickin "feature complete" as it is
right now.

Maybe you want someone to update the ffmpeg it links to. Occasionally. But
that's already well into "super power user" territory.

------
xvilo
How can this come to an end :( - I am not a C/C++ dev. But I would like to
support this project money wise if it would help?

~~~
Paul_S
Or you could just use mpv? Is there anything that you find missing in it?

~~~
homulilly
a GUI

------
Strom
An excellent player with a ton of great features. However I'm not sure if it
ever caught up to VLC in terms of performance. Specifically it was around 10x
slower at seeking in H.264 video compared to VLC. When used on low performance
machine (Pentium 4 @ 3 GHz + 7200 rpm HDD), this resulted in a sub-second seek
time in VLC compared to over 5 seconds in MPC-HC when viewing 10Mbit bitrate
video. Especially annoying when I wanted to rewatch a single moment over and
over again.

~~~
rakshithbekal
I doubt it. Mpc according to many on doom9 and other video player forums in
combination with madvr filters provided objectively better quality frames.
They post side by side comparison pictures in high resolution and mpc comes
out as a better choice if you care about picture quality. Also about
performance I don't think mpc is as bloated as vlc is and recall many having
complaints of vlc using a lot of ram and cpu whereas mpc seems pretty
lightweight. I can't stress enough how much vlc is losing out on not having
madvr equivalent add on type to enhance picture quality though, the hardware
utilization to push out the perfect pixel is nuts, not to mention built in
smooth motion

------
GuB-42
Is it dead or done?

MPC-HC is just a DirectShow frontend, or at least, that's how I used it.
Filters do most of the work. And no one seems to care about DirectShow anymore
but that's mostly because everything works fine.

It will die eventually, because Microsoft is trying hard to kill DirectShow
(to replace it with something inferior...) and the opensource guys mostly go
to mplayer, but for now, updates are not really necessary.

~~~
unscaled
Calling MPC-HC just a DirectShow frontend is almost as inaccurate as saying
mplayer is just a UNIX frontend. Just as mplayer is using POSIX APIs, MPC-HC
is using the DirectShow API to run its filter graphs, but it actually provides
a lot of internal decoders and filters (mostly based on ffmpeg/libavcodec),
and if memory serves me right it even has its own renderer, and pretty much
customizes its graph building, so you don't get a default DirectShow graph. To
be honest, the DirectShow code provided by Microsoft usually ends up providing
very little besides the Renderer (unless you're using an external renderer
like madVR or Haali) and the glue code.

------
drngdds
RIP. Is VLC the best alternative at the moment?

~~~
mkishi
I really like PotPlayer. mpv is great but requires a bit of tinkering, whereas
PP comes with some ready to go defaults and as much flexibility as MPC-HC.

~~~
LeoNatan25
On Windows, I have not found a better alternative than PotPlayer.

------
jaimehrubiks
Long live the best player ever mpc!

------
sergiotapia
Those looking for a great alternative try using MPV.

[https://mpv.io/](https://mpv.io/)

    
    
        $ brew install mpv
        $ mpv ~/Media/my-movie.mp4
    

And you're off!

~~~
ldjb
Isn't MPC-HC for Windows, and Brew for macOS?

MPV is indeed a good alternative, though.

~~~
Zyst
EDIT: I just realized you said "Isn't MPC-HC for Windows, and Brew for macOS?"
which threw me off.

I am currently on Windows and use MPV, I don't see why it should be exclusive
in any way.

The dotfiles are compatible, and same goes for lua scripts. So there's no
trade off at all that I've found. And it's nice to be able to just clone my
dotfiles and have it work in OS X, and same for Windows.

~~~
ldjb
I agree. MPV is very customisable, and it's great to have a video player that
works just how you want it, regardless of the system you're using.

EDIT: Yeah, I was just pointing out the fact that, if you're using MPC-HC,
then you're probably using Windows. In which case, whilst MPV is a good
alternative, you wouldn't be installing it with (Home)brew, which is a package
manager for macOS.

------
krautsourced
I've used MPC for quite a while in the past, but have since moved to
[https://potplayer.daum.net/](https://potplayer.daum.net/)

It's super feature rich, with (in my opinion) a much nice interface than e.g.
VLC.

~~~
TheKIngofBelAir
If you don't mind sending telemetry data to their HQ in Korea then sure it's a
nice media player.

Article 5 (Collection and Use of Data and Other Information)

(1) Daum may collect and use data from the computer of Users as a part of its
product support services that are provided to Users in connection with the
Software. Data that may be collected solely include the type of computer and
type of operating system used on the computer, memory capacity, type of
graphic card, Directx version, media player version, type of webcam and TV
reception card.

(2) Daum will use the above collected data only for the purpose of improving
the Software or providing service or technology that is suitable to the user
environment of the User and will not use such data for any other purposes.

------
NamTaf
Well, nuts. I really liked MPC-HC as part of the CCCP. I'll check out some of
the alternatives offered in this thread. Hopefully one follows the slim design
and flexibility of MPC.

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kozak
I like how MPC-HC uses proper hardware codecs for h.264 and doesn't try to do
it programmatically on its own like some other players do.

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r3demon
sad, but things change, eventually

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vasili111
Used MPC for a long time. After switched to Daum Pot Player.

------
fithisux
The fate of C++ projects.

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pussypusspuss
A more verbose title would've been useful. I shouldn't have to click through
to the linked site to find out what the acronym MPC-HC means.

~~~
Nexxxeh
I don't think it really matters what the acronym means. It's a project name,
like VLC (which is VideoLAN Client, to save you the trip ;) ) and its known BY
the acronym.

