#Skins media player classic home cinema movie
#Skins media player classic home cinema windows

VLC could use a lot of UI work.īest support for filters, shaders, and FX: VLC VLC always returns to its previous window size when it starts playback again. I also appreciate that when I resize MPC-HC, it stays that way, even when I’m looping a video. I’ve used VLC for years and still have to hunt around for options on occasion. MPC-HC’s context menus don’t change as VLC’s do when you’re in full-screen mode, and it’s easier to remember where everything is. VLC has clunky icons and its garish orange work cone (aren’t you supposed to avoid these?).īut the real difference is that MPC-HC’s menus and features are far better organized and laid out.

#Skins media player classic home cinema windows

MPC-HC was derived from the older Media Player Classic, whose interface is based on the Windows 95/XP Media Player. Neither VLC or MPC-HC are much to look at. MPC-HC’s logically laid out options dialog makes it far easier to access large feature set than VLC’s preferences. I’m calling it for MPC-HC, but that JPEG glitch was puzzling. So that’s eight formats to two, but a random fail on by far the most common type. On the other hand, it failed on one JPEG, then displayed it fine later. Neither program is really made for images, nor will they do a slideshow worth a darn but while VLC spun its wheels on nearly everything other than PNG and JPEG files, MPC-HC displayed BMP, compressed and uncompressed TIFF, PNG, static and animated GIFs, and TGA (Targa) files. Both automatically load subtitles the vast majority of the time.

#Skins media player classic home cinema movie

file on top of a playing movie in VLC (MPC-HC tries to open it as a playable file) and you have the winner by a small margin. VLC’s ability to add subtitles by dragging a. Re-installing MPC-HC cured the issue, which may simply have undone my tinkering with which codecs to use, but it was an issue that VLC seemed immune to. In my subtitle tests, MPC-HC was generally fine, but for some reason refused to display text after I installed the external version of the LAV filters for use with Windows Media Player. Both programs played VCDs and DVDs (even commercial ones), nicely handling the menus and other elements, and both played non-protected Blu-ray movies, too.īoth programs also played audio CDs, with VLCbeing smoother at switching tracks in this instance. On the other hand, MPC-HC did play another older MPEG-1 that choked VLC. Both also had a hard time seeking in certain WMV files, though VLC was quicker on long jumps. There was one exception: an old MPEG-1 file that VLC won’t handle either. What’s more, MPC-HC played nearly everything else I threw at it. Using the LAV filter pack, the program is more stable with bad files than VLC.

The list of internal video and audio codecs employed by MPC-HC is vast.

This won’t affect many users now, but it may soon.

VLC skipped frames like they were going out of style. I’d expected this from VLC, whose authors are almost fetish-like in supporting everything, but VLC didn’t play the 4K files as smoothly. I’m not sure why it surprised me, but MPC-HC played HEVC (x.265) files flawlessly, including 4K with decently high bit rates.