Best Media Player For PC?

Professor Snugglesworth

I made a thread like this not too long ago, but I wanted to start fresh and specify what I'm looking for.

First and foremost, I want a movie player that will play every single kind of video format out there. Currently I have to use either SM Player or MPC, depending which one will play nice with the movie file.

So I want to delete them all and start fresh, with a player that will play flv, mkv, quicktime and whatever other stupid format exists out there without any hassle.

I'm also looking for a player that automatically optimizes a movie, in both format (anamorphic, widescreen, etc) and audio (subtitles for the anime stuff).

Lastly, it needs to have customizable hotkeys for fast forwarding, rewinding, skipping ahead however much time I want (10 seconds, 30, a minute, etc).

Also, if possible, it would be nice if it could also feature motionplus (doubling a picture's framerate) as an optional On/Off feature.

So, recommendations please.

Gridlink

I've had good luck with Media Player Classic and the CCCP codec pack.

warban

Cormac wrote: »

I've had good luck with Media Player Classic and the CCCP codec pack.

Thread over. Seriously CCCP is all you want.

Bullio

VLC runs pretty much anything I've come across. The only thing I haven't had run in it are retail Blu-ray movies, but I haven't updated my version in a long time so they may very well be supported by now. It should do everything you're looking for, though I don't know about the motionplus thing. I know it has some synchronization options. They might get you close to what you want with a some tinkering.

Rohan

VLC plays absolutely everything.

Stormwatcher

I like MPCHCE (Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition). The controls are much better than VLC, IMO. It's also tiny and does the best upscaling ever. The same videos in VLC look shitty when full screen. There is probably a setting for that, but I don't know it.

Professor Snugglesworth

Optimization is important, since I'll be watching it on full screen and on HD. So would MPCHCE do the trick for high-end watching?

Also, will I need to delete previous codecs for CCCP to work correctly, or will it do that automatically?

a5ehren

Professor Snugglesworth wrote: »

Optimization is important, since I'll be watching it on full screen and on HD. So would MPCHCE do the trick for high-end watching?

Also, will I need to delete previous codecs for CCCP to work correctly, or will it do that automatically?

MPCHE works fine for everything I watch, but you do need a reasonably modern video card to do DXVA acceleration of HD content.

If you can find your current codecs (anything you've installed yourself, anyway. Don't delete the ones that came with Windows), it would be safer to delete them first but I'm not sure it's strictly necessary.

Dratatoo

Thread over. Seriously CCCP is all you want.

I would avoid codec compilations like the plague. They have possibility to cripple the media playback capabilities of a Windows system (often without remedy) and can also impact the movie playback within games. The only thing you need, if you really, really want to use MS media player, is maybe a xvid codec. As far as I know the MS Media player in Windows 7 should also handle most commonly used formats like divx, h.624 without extra codecs.

Otherwise, VLC can handle nearly everything. VLC might not be very pretty, but offeres lots of customization options and shortcuts. A long time ago I build a custom HTPC. I used VLC + freeware media center + a custom driver for my Hauppauge remote to select movies and let VLC play it in kiosk mode. For this - I remeber - I had to assign the buttons of the remote to the VLC shortcuts. And there are a shortcuts for nearly everything in VLC.

Stormwatcher

MPCHCE does most of the things VLC does, and the interface is better.
I mean, SPACE plays and pauses. VLC doesn't do that for me.
Also, ctrl+enter for fullscreen. VLC is all ass backwards.

Dratatoo

Strange, it does that for me. (Space for play and pause)
Double click for fullscreen / exit fullscreen

I have to admit, the interface isn't the best in VLC.

TychoCelchuuu

Media Player Classic should do it all, and ffdshow is my go-to codec pack (much lighter than CCCP last I checked).

Dark Shroud

CCCP doesn't use codecs, it uses "filters" or decoders based on Direct show. Very much the same as ffdshow only everything is optimized to work with MPC-HC.

Even better CCCP will work with Windows Media Player as well. WMP plays HD video better than any other player since it has DXVA support. VLC doesn't use DXVA which is why it sucks for HD video, especially on portable devices.

Synthesis

Dark Shroud wrote: »

CCCP doesn't use codecs, it uses "filters" or decoders based on Direct show. Very much the same as ffdshow only everything is optimized to work with MPC-HC.

Even better CCCP will work with Windows Media Player as well. WMP plays HD video better than any other player since it has DXVA support. VLC doesn't use DXVA which is why it sucks for HD video, especially on portable devices.

'Nother vote for CCCP. Configuring it to work with WMP 12 will basically make it capable of opening almost every type of file that you could otherwise with WMC (I guess the exception is RealMedia and Quicktime files...does anyone still use those on Windows?). The installation will do it for you. MKVs are no problem.

I prefer WMP over WMC because my keyboard's quick buttons don't work with WMC, I think, but they're both good. CCCP will also save you some trouble with getting the right options to get most streaming options to consoles, if my memory serves.

Professor Snugglesworth

Okay, I installed both CCCP and MPCHCE. I get a picture just fine, but no audio. There's a bunch of options here, but I can't figure out how to get sound. Help?

Rohan

Stormwatcher wrote: »

MPCHCE does most of the things VLC does, and the interface is better.
I mean, SPACE plays and pauses. VLC doesn't do that for me.

:?

Also, ctrl+enter for fullscreen. VLC is all ass backwards.

Is it really that hard to double-click anywhere inside the video window? MPC keeps pausing when I click anywhere in it's window, which is annoying. I also prefer VLC's subtitle options. But hey, it's all about what you're familiar with and little else. They're both competent pieces of software.

RandomEngy

Zoom Player. It's got a built-in download center that gets everything you need. Includes FFDShow and some other helper filters and it's quite solid.

Also, unlike VLC it's instantly responsive when you pause/play, which is something I like. And unlike MPC you can customize controls and do cool stuff like middle-click to toggle fullscreen and the arrow keys to skip by 5 or 20 second increments.

Professor Snugglesworth

Still no help on the MPC issue? I get audio from WMP, so it seems to be something with the program itself.

Satsumomo

I'm gonna try MPC out, I absolutely hate that ever since VLC 1.1 they added some dumb code that makes the player arbitrarily "Cache fonts" whenever it pleases to.

Gridlink

Professor Snugglesworth wrote: »

Still no help on the MPC issue? I get audio from WMP, so it seems to be something with the program itself.

Check to see in the FFDshow and/or Direct Show filters what the audio output is set to. It's possible that it's set to something other than the default i.e. your soundcard. If you didn't do it when you installed CCCP, re-run the setup wizard again to see if there's an audio option that needs to be changed.

Ego

Snugglesworth, try KMPlayer. Other than motionplus (though I gather you can use external framerate doublers with it) it fits your criteria.

-ridiculously good format support
-automatic aspect ratio settings (and custom settings for when people encode things badly.)
-lets you set up subtitles how you want them. And edit the subtitles themselves, for that matter. And load external subtitle files. And sync them to the video.
-ridiculous amounts of audio / video tweaking/rendering options.
-customizable hotkeys for fast forwarding, rewinding, skipping ahead etc. And yes, you can customize how far they skip ahead or backwards.

On top of that, it's got:

-internal codecs that don't fuck with things
-support for external codecs, though I've never needed to add one
-support for dxva (though you have to set it up, which I've only bothered to do on my laptop)
-good capture support
-on the fly zooming in/out/stretching of the video. Handier than you'd think.
-oh, and FLAC support .
-edit: another good one is on the fly adjustment of brightness/contrast/saturation/etc, through keyboard shortcuts, both in hardware and software.

MPCHC is good, too.

autono-wally, erotibot300

I like VLC, but when I want to watch Full-HD content, I need to use WMP for some reason. Maybe the built in codecs don't use nvidias hardware acceleration for decoding?

Dark Shroud

autono-wally, erotibot300 wrote: »

I like VLC, but when I want to watch Full-HD content, I need to use WMP for some reason. Maybe the built in codecs don't use nvidias hardware acceleration for decoding?

WMP & MPC-HC use DXVA to get hardware acceleration on any brand of card as long as the card has the hardware decoding built in. VLC has just started to work with CUDA for Nvidia cards and nothing for AMD cards. So VLC can't handle HD video really at all, especially if you're not running specific Nvidia cards and the latest beta of VLC. MPC is the best right now for play back of HD video with MPC-HC as a very close second.

Unknown

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RandomEngy

You can also set up Zoom Player to use MPC's hardware H.264 decoding.