Media Player Classic (MPC), Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC), and Media Player Classic - Black Edition (MPC-BE) are a family of

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

, compact, lightweight, and customizable media players for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows. The original MPC, along with the MPC-HC

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca ' pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ...

, mimic the simplistic look and feel of

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player and media library application that was developed by Microsoft for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as ...

6.4, but provide most options and features available in modern media players. Variations of the original MPC and its forks are standard media players in the

K-Lite Codec Pack The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of audio and video codecs for Microsoft Windows DirectShow that enables an operating system and its software to play various audio and video formats generally not supported by the operating system itsel ...

and the Combined Community Codec Pack. This project is now principally maintained by the community at the

Doom9 Doom9 is a website featuring information on digital audio and video manipulation (mostly video) and digital copyrights. It is also the forum username of the author of the page, an Austrian who was a college student at the time of the creation of ...

forum. The active forks ar
Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC) by clsid2
(same developer known a
clsid
responsible fo
MPC 6.4.9.1
, an
Media Player Classic - Black Edition (MPC-BE) by aleksoid

Media Player Classic

The original Media Player Classic was created and maintained by a programmer named "Gabest" who also created

PCSX2 PCSX2 is a free and open-source PlayStation 2 emulator for Windows, Linux, and macOS that supports a wide range of PlayStation 2 video games with a high level of compatibility and functionality. Although PCSX2 can closely mirror the original ga ...

graphics plugin GSDX. It was developed as a closed-source application, but later relicensed as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later license. MPC is hosted under the guliverkli project at

SourceForge.net SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, Mirror site ...

. The project itself is something of an

umbrella organization An umbrella organization is an association of (often related, industry-specific) institutions who work together formally to coordinate activities and/or pool resources. In business, political, and other environments, it provides resources and ofte ...

for works by Gabest. ''Media Player Classic'' development stalled in May 2006. Gabest, the main developer of the original version, stated in March 2007 that development of ''Media Player Classic'' is not dead but that he was unable to work on it. MPC 6.4.9.0, released March 20, 2006, is the final official version.

Forks

Media Player Classic 6.4.9.1

In August 2007, an unofficially patched and updated build became available, from

member clsid, hosted under the guliverkli2 project at

. Known as Media Player Classic 6.4.9.1, it was meant for fixing bugs and updating outdated libraries; its branch's development has been inactive since 2011. MPC 6.4.9.1 Revision 107, released February 14, 2010, is the final release version. The community at the Doom9 forum has since further continued the project with MPC-HC.

Media Player Classic - Home Cinema

A fork, called ''Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC)'', adds new features, as well as fixes bugs and updates libraries. It also updated the license to GPL-3.0-or-later. MPC-HC updates the original player and adds many useful functionalities including the option to remove

tearing Tearing is the act of breaking apart a material by force, without the aid of a cutting tool. A tear in a piece of paper, fabric, or some other similar object may be the result of the intentional effort with one's bare hands, or be accidental. ...

, additional video decoders (in particular H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 with

DirectX Video Acceleration DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) is a Microsoft API specification for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms that allows video decoding to be hardware-accelerated. The pipeline allows certain CPU-intensive operations such as iDCT, motion ...

support),

Enhanced Video Renderer Media Foundation (MF) is a COM-based multimedia framework pipeline and infrastructure platform for digital media in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11. It is the intended replacement for Microsoft Direc ...

support, and multiple bug fixes. There is also a 64 bit-version of ''Media Player Classic - Home Cinema'' for the various Windows x64 platforms. MPC-HC requires at least Windows XP Service Pack 3. As of version 1.4.2499.0, MPC-HC implemented

color management In digital imaging systems, color management (or colour management) is the controlled conversion between the color representations of various devices, such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, film printers, computer printe ...

support, an uncommon feature that nearly all video players on Microsoft Windows lack. Windows 8 support was introduced in version 1.6.5. Beginning with version 1.6.6 the stable releases are signed. Apart from stable releases as published, nightly builds are also publicly available. MPC-HC is also distributed in the PortableApps format. MPC-HC 1.7.8 released in 2015 was built with the MediaInfoLib 0.7.71. MPC-HC 1.7.1 added support for

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compa ...

format. MPC-HC 1.7.13 now requires

SSE2 SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets first introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. It extends the earlier SSE ins ...

supporting CPU and no longer runs on Intel

Pentium III The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999. The brand's initial ...

or AMD

Athlon XP Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The original Athlon (now called Athlon Classic) was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and the fi ...

. MPC-HC 1.7.13 is the final version and the program has been officially discontinued as of July 16, 2017, due to a shortage of active developers with C/C++ experience. Its source code on GitHub was last updated on August 27, 2017, a month and a half after the official final version.

Updated fork

MPC-HC 1.7.xx Maintenance versions released, bug fixes. MPC-HC 1.8.xx Youtube-DL integration, maintenance, bug fixes. MPC-HC 1.9.xx Black Theme added, modern toolbars, better subtitle handling, video preview on seekbar, improved translations, various small features, maintenance, bug fixes. Updated builds of MPC-HC, a fork from the same developer (known as clsid2 on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrori ...

) responsible for MPC 6.4.9.1, started appearing in January 2018. This fork contains updated internal

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or ...

s (LAV Filters),

AV1 AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 tha ...

support,

youtube-dl youtube-dl is a free and open source download manager for video and audio from YouTube and over 1,000 other video hosting websites. It is released under the Unlicense software license. As of September 2021, youtube-dl is one of the most sta ...

integration, a new dark theme, video preview on seekbar, support for MPC Video Renderer, A-B Repeat, subtitle performance improvements, updates to some other external components, other improvements, and many bug fixes; support for Windows XP was also dropped in these builds. Binary releases are available, as well as source code.

Media Player Classic - Black Edition

''Media Player Classic - Black Edition (MPC-BE)'' is a fork of MPC and MPC-HC. It moved away from MPC's aim to mimic the look and feel of Windows Media Player with updated player controls and provides additional features on top of MPC-HC such as a video preview

tooltip The tooltip, also known as infotip or hint, is a common graphical user interface (GUI) element in which, when hovering over a screen element or component, a text box displays information about that element, such as a description of a button's ...

when hovering the mouse cursor over the seek bar, as known from video platforms such as

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...

and

Dailymotion Dailymotion is a French video-sharing technology platform owned by Vivendi. North American launch partners included Vice Media, Bloomberg and Hearst Digital Media. It is among the earliest known platforms to support HD ( 720p) resolution v ...

, though many of these features, including the video preview on seekbar, were added to MPC-HC at a later date. MPC-BE, however, doesn't include LAV filters by default, making it less efficient than MPC-HC for decoding. This is most noticeable with higher resolution files, newer codecs, or on lower end hardware. Player development began in February 2011. Developers used a modification of MPC-HC made by a programmer nicknamed "bobdynlan". The first version (1.0.1.0) was released on September 12, 2012. Starting with version 1.5.0, MPC-BE no longer supports

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

. MPC-BE version 1.5.1 and newer require

supporting CPU and no longer run on Intel

or AMD

. Nightly builds are also available.

Media formats and features

:''In this section Media Player Classic and MPC refer to both the original MPC and its forks, unless otherwise specified.'' Media Player Classic is capable of VCD,

SVCD Super Video CD (Super Video Compact Disc or SVCD) is a digital format for storing video on standard compact discs. SVCD was intended as a successor to Video CD and an alternative to DVD-Video, and falls somewhere between both in terms of technica ...

, and

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kin ...

playback without installation of additional software or

s. MPC has built-in codecs for

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, w ...

video with support for subtitles and codecs for

LPCM Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the a ...

, MP2, 3GP, AC3, and DTS audio; along with native playback of the

Matroska Matroska is a project to create a container format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. The Matroska Multimedia Container is similar in concept to other containers like AVI, MP4, or Advan ...

container format A container format (informally, sometimes called a wrapper) or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Not ...

. MPC also contains an improved

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and fi ...

splitter that supports playback of VCDs and SVCDs using its VCD/SVCD/XCD Reader. On October 30, 2005, Gabest added MP4 and

MPEG-4 Timed Text MPEG-4 Part 17, or MPEG-4 Timed Text (MP4TT), or MPEG-4 Streaming text format is the text-based subtitle format for MPEG-4, published as ISO/IEC 14496-17 in 2006. It was developed in response to the need for a generic method for coding of text as on ...

support.

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Fla ...

movies (SWF) can be played and frames jumped to. Supported media formats within the latest builds of MPC-HC and MPC-BE have been considerably expanded compared to the original MPC, as these builds are bundled with iterations of

libavcodec libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. libavcodec is an integral part of many open-source multimedia applications and frameworks. The popular MPV, xine and VLC media players u ...

and libavformat. MPC-HC version 1.7.0 and newer utilize LAV filters, while MPC-BE uses

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of ...

directly. Consequently, they support all formats from those libraries. MPC-HC is also one of the first

media players A media player could refer to: *Digital media player, home appliances that play digital media *Media player software, software that plays digital media *Portable media player, portable hardware that plays digital media *Windows Media Player, softwa ...

to support

Dolby Atmos Dolby Atmos is a surround sound technology developed by Dolby Laboratories. It expands on existing surround sound systems by adding height channels, allowing sounds to be interpreted as three-dimensional objects with neither horizontal, nor vert ...

audio natively. MPC can use an INI file in its application folder, making it a

portable application A portable application (portable app), sometimes also called standalone, is a program designed to read and write its configuration settings into an accessible folder in the computer, usually in the folder where the portable application can be ...

DirectShow

Media Player Classic is primarily based on the

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's e ...

architecture and therefore automatically uses installed DirectShow decoding filters. For instance, after the open source DirectShow decoding filter

ffdshow ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. encoded with DivX or Xvid) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as ...

has been installed, fast and high quality decoding and postprocessing of the

MPEG-4 ASP MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual (formally ISO/ IEC 14496-2) is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosine ...

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion compensation, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, com ...

, and

Flash Video Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There ...

formats is available in the original MPC. MPC-HC and MPC-BE, however, can play videos in these formats directly without

. MPC-HC and MPC-BE also provide DXVA support for compatible

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

, and ATI/ AMD video cards when using a compatible

. This provides hardware-acceleration for playback. In addition to DirectShow, MPC can also use the

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is a ...

RealPlayer RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player (software), media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multime ...

, and SHOUTcast codecs and filters (if installed on the computer) to play their native files. Though some of these files may play without the external codecs or filters installed. Alternatively,

QuickTime Alternative QuickTime Alternative is a codec package for Microsoft Windows for playing QuickTime media, normally only playable by the official QuickTime software distribution from Apple Inc. Development has now ceased and the version of the QuickTime code ...

and

Real Alternative RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including M ...

can be used in place of their player installations for expanded support of their respective file formats.

TV tuners

MPC supports playback and recording of

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication Media (communication), medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of Transmission (telecommunications), television tra ...

if a supported

TV tuner A tuner is a subsystem that receives radio frequency (RF) transmissions, such as FM broadcasting, and converts the selected carrier frequency and its associated bandwidth into a fixed frequency that is suitable for further processing, usually b ...

is installed.

References

External links

* * * * * * * {{Media players 2003 software Free media players Free software programmed in C++ Free video software Windows media players