I’ve been using MPC-HC media player for a long time to view almost any media file I ever needed to open… mp4, mov, mpg, mxf, and others. The problem is that the last update in July 2017 was the last update. Another problem with it is that its interface looked super old, like windows 95 old. So I’ve been looking for an equally or better functioning player as an alternative to MPC-HC and hopefully one that looked good and clean. I needed a media player that I could play almost any file type AND view the embedded closed captions for my broadcast files. MPC-HC did this well after I had done some tweaking with input/output filters/splitters/decoders. By the way, I’m talking REAL Closed Captions, NOT SUBTITLES!!! So many people (even some media player developers) think the two are the same, but they are different, very different.

Enter mpv. This media player is a fork of MPlayer and mplayer2. It is VERY clean looking and so far has opened anything I’ve tried to open with it! The only thing it won’t do is play closed captions in a OP-1a HDCAM .mxf. I don’t deliver these that often anymore, so that’ll be ok.

If you need a good, clean all-around media player, go here and grab the installation for your OS: https://mpv.io/installation/

Windows users, its really simple! Download and extract the 32 or 64 bit version. Extract it to say your C:\mpv. You don’t even have to INSTALL it! Just click on mpv.exe and it runs. Drop a file on it and it plays. You can also set file associations to automatically open with it either manually or using a little .bat file that is available.

One thing to note, there are MANY configuration options available (https://mpv.io/manual/stable/). I found to make it work the best is to create  mpv.conf in the same directory as mpv.exe and put this in it:

--autofit-larger=1280x720
--osd-duration=3000
--hwdec=auto
--vo=opengl
--profile=opengl-hq
--dscale=mitchell
--vf=yadif=field:yes
--deinterlace=auto
--sub-font-size=40
--sub-back-color=0/0/0/.5

This will do the following:

  • IF the video is larger than 1280×720, it will scale it down to that size. You can then maximize or go full screen. Just a preference for me.
  • Set the on screen display to 3 seconds instead of 1 second.
  • Set it to use high quality GPU mode.
  • Uses the “mitchell” downscaler which looks very good to me!
  • Automatically de-interlaces interlaced files but doesn’t touch progressive.
  • Set the captions to my liking with a translucent black background.

So if you’re looking for a good, solid, clean and powerful media player, I highly recommend mvp. It is open source, free and multi-platform.  Kudos to the developers!