Below are development builds with the latest fixes and improvements. Please test them thoroughly and report problems immediately, so that any regressions can be fixed in time for next stable release.
Latest development build: 2.8.4.25 (October 23rd 2026)
Donations are appreciated. There is now a PayPal option.
Changes from 2.8.3 to 2.8.4:
Updates:
Updated MPC Video Renderer to version 0.10.10.2618
Changes/additions:
MPCVR now has an improved HDR to SDR tonemapping algorithm
Replaced statusbar audio icon. It now also shows channel count.
Fixes:
Fixed a regression in 2.8.3 that could cause a hang when first showing seek preview
Fixed an issue that could shrink window size when exiting fullscreen from another monitor with different DPI
Fixed some issues with capture graph building
Several small fixes and improvements
Full changelog
Full list of all changes since start of this project.
Overview of features
A lot of people seem to be unaware of some of the awesome features that have been added to MPC-HC in the past years. Here is a list of useful options and features that everyone should know about:
Click to expand
Play HDR video
This requires using either MPC Video Renderer (MPCVR) or madVR.
These renderers can be selected here:
Options > Playback > Output
With other video renderers, the colors will be wrong!
MPCVR is included and is the recommended and default renderer for modern systems. MadVR needs to be installed separately. MPCVR also supports Dolby Vision. MadVR does not.
For optimal performance you should change the hardware decoder to D3D11 in LAV Video Decoder settings when using MPCVR on Windows 10/11, because this renderer uses DirectX11.
The installer of MPC-HC is very basic (and that will not change).
I therefore recommend using K-Lite Codec Pack. That includes MPC-HC and other essential components. It has a very advanced installation that can automatically create file associations, and helps you with easy configuration of important MPC-HC settings, such as preferred subtitle language(s). It also does automatic configuration of renderer and hardware decoding, for best performance and HDR support.
The Standard version should be sufficient for most people. Use Full version of you like to use MadVR.
Modern GUI Theme (Dark or Light) or the old classic theme
Options > Player > User Interface
It is also possible to change the height of the seekbar and size of the toolbar buttons.
Plus there are options to show audio/video details in the statusbar, such as codec and resolution.
Customizable toolbar buttons
You can add/remove/re-order the player buttons.
There are also several different toolbar designs to choose from.
Video preview on the seekbar
Options > Player > User Interface > Hover type
Ability to search for subtitles
Press D for manual search.
Or enable automatic search in: Options > Subtitles > Misc
Adjust playback speed
Menu > Play > Playback rate
The buttons in the player that control playback rate take a 2x step by default. This can be customized to smaller values (like 10%):
Options > Playback > Speed step
If you have 1000 IQ you can even do smart stuff like setting playback rate change to mouse right-click + scrollwheel:
Options > Player > Mouse
Adjusting playback speed works best with MPC Audio Renderer or SaneAR. These audio renderers have automatic pitch correction, while DirectSound does not.
Options > Playback > Output > Audio Renderer
MPC-HC can remember recently played files and also their playback position, so you can resume playback from when you left
Options > Player > History
You can quickly seek through a video with Ctrl + Mouse Scrollwheel.
You can jump to next/previous file in a folder by pressing PageUp/PageDown.
You can right-click on the framestep button to step backwards. Some other buttons also have right-click actions, such as closing file by right-clicking stop.
You can perform automatic actions at end of file. For example to go to next file or close player.
Options > Playback > After Playback (permanent setting)
Menu > Play > After Playback (for current file only)
A-B repeat
You can loop a segment of a video. Press [ and ] to set start and stop markers.
You can rotate/flip/mirror/stretch/zoom the video
Menu > View > Pan&Scan
This is also easily done with hotkeys (see below).
There are lots of keyboard hotkeys and mouse actions to control the player. They can be customized as well.
Options > Player > Keys
Tip: there is a search box above the table.
You can hide GUI elements even in windowed mode
Options > User Interface > Hide Windowed Controls
That hides most GUI elements during playback. To show them simply move your mouse to bottom of window.
You can even hide everything except the video by pressing 1 (restore normal view with 3).
You can seek inside the playlist by simply typing text (when playlist window has the mouse focus).
MPC-HC also supports Blu-ray playback.
Only limitation is that you need to use a decrypting tool.
And it also does not support Blu-ray menus, but you can use the navigate menu in the player to select the content to play.
Added ability to load a secondary subtitle file to view two different subtitle tracks/languages at same time.
You can stream videos directly from Youtube and many other video websites
Put yt-dlp.exe in the MPC-HC installation folder.
Then you can open website URLs in the player: Menu > File > Open File/URL
You can even download those videos: Menu > File > Save a copy
Tip: to be able to download in best quality with yt-dlp, it is recommended to also put ffmpeg.exe in the MPC-HC folder.
Several YDL configuration options are found here: Options > Advanced
This includes an option to specify the location of yt-dlp.exe in case you don't want to put it in MPC-HC folder.
Note 1: You also need to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)
Note 2: For optimal Youtube support you may also need to put deno.exe in same folder as yt-dlp.
Note 3: yt-dlp nightly build (very latest version made daily)
Note 4: yt-dlp windows7 compatible build
Besides all these (new) features, there have also been many bugfixes and internal improvements in the player in the past years that give better performance and stability. It also has updated internal codecs. Support was added for CUE sheets, WebVTT subtitles, etc.
You should really take a few minutes to look through all the options pages if you are a new user or if you are upgrading from a very old version. Don't forget the advanced options page.
Subtitle downloads from OpenSubtitles may fail depending on time of day. This is due to our daily download quota being exceeded. Current amount of donations is barely enough to pay for the existing quota. So it is unlikely that quota can be increased and situation will get worse over time.
If you create an OpenSubtitles account and configure it in MPC-HC settings then you may be able to bypass the quota.
Options > Subtitles > Misc > Right-click on OpenSubtitles.com > Setup > Fill in username/password
Below are development builds with the latest fixes and improvements. Please test them thoroughly and report problems immediately, so that any regressions can be fixed in time for next stable release.
Latest development build: 2.8.3.25 (October 15th 2026)
Added a new modern theme variant for options dialogs and menus that is based on Windows 11 UI design. The existing one was based on Windows 10. You can choose preferred theme here (regardless of which Windows version you use): Options > Advanced > ModernThemeStyle. The main interface is same for both modern variants.
Added advanced option to use native Windows 11 menus (with rounded corners).
EVR-CP/Sync now support HLG tonemapping.
Improved CUE file parsing.
Some internal improvements to further enhance stability.
Below are development builds with the latest fixes and improvements. Please test them thoroughly and report problems immediately, so that any regressions can be fixed in time for next stable release.
Latest development build: 2.8.2.56 (October 7th 2026)
Added ReplayGain support. Options can be found in audio switcher.
Improvements for exclusive mode seekbar when using MPCVR.
Improvements for opening a selection of files from Explorer. Now supports DropTarget interface.
Playback rate can now be shown in statusbar for audio files.
Keyboard shortcuts can now be edited without a mouse. Press Space or Enter to start editing a selected command. Press Enter or Tab to apply a pressed key combination. Enter/Tab can only be set as hotkey when combined with Alt/Ctrl/Shift.
Added ability to load a secondary subtitle track from the subtitle menu. This supports only external text-based formats (SRT) and excludes formats that may contain explicit positioning (SSA/PGS/VobSub). The secondary subtitle is rendered at the top of the window. There are some known limitations. For example adjustments such as delay will apply to both tracks. Secondary is also not included in screenshots. Do NOT open issues/requests about this!
Added ability to auto-copy all rendered subtitle text to the clipboard in real-time. Toggling this on/off can be assigned to a hotkey or one of the custom toolbar buttons.
New "remote" page in web interface, providing a modern interface for remote control of MPC-HC from any phone (or web browser) in your local network.
Expanded the API for remote control through window messages from a master process. See MpcApi.h header file.
Settings of SaneAR/VMR-9/EVR-CP/EVR-Sync have been moved and can now be accessed through the button behind the renderer on the Output settings page.
Cleaned up the Output settings page and updated the tooltips of the video renderers.
It is now possible to provide default settings through HKLM, which are read whenever creating fresh settings profile in HKCU section of Registry.
When storing settings in INI file, the history is now split off in a separate file. When the application folder is not writable, the history file is placed in %appdata%\MPC-HC. Also added an advanced option to always use appdata folder.
Please note that the Registry is still the preferred location for storing the settings. That has better performance than INI file. Settings backup is as easy as pressing a button here: Options > Miscellaneous > Export
Added an advanced option HistoryExcludeFilter to exclude certain content from getting added to recent file history. It is a simple semi-colon separated list of substrings that is matched against the full path or URL.
There also is a HistoryExcludeFilterPrivate setting with exact same purpose, which is not exposed through the user interface.
Added advanced option to automatically prune history entries older than X days. Defaults to 365, and can be disabled by setting to 0.
Added a new Show History entry to recent file menu. This opens a dialog for managing history entries. Allows you to search. Manually remove entries. Clean invalid entries. Clean old entries. Reset position, etc.
When opening a selection of files from Explorer, they are now added to playlist in correct alphabetical order.
Added "sort by date" option in playlist context menu. Note that all sort actions apply once to current list and do not have effect on future playlist changes.
Added advanced option to sort files by date when skipping to next/previous file in folder.
Color controls have been moved from options dialog into a new popup dialog. Accessible through the Play menu or hotkey.
Advanced settings have now been re-ordered and grouped into categories.
Improved performance when using libass for rendering subtitles.
Added stack trace to internal (fallback) exception handler.
Fixes:
Fixed an issue where subtitle styles changes were not dynamically applied during segment change in segmented Matroska files with ordered chapters.
Fixed an issue where seekbar preview could show wrong edition with playing a Matroska file with multiple video editions.
Fixed an issue where video preview was up-side-down in web interface when renderer provided a topdown bitmap.
Fixed an issue with EVR-CP that caused still images to not render immediately.
Improved long path support in a few file dialogs, such as "Load subtitles".
MPC Video Renderer is now the by default renderer on the majority of systems. Previously EVR-CP was the default. MPCVR is a more advanced modern renderer with support for HDR video.
MPC-HC will detect your GPU(s) (once) after updating to this new version and will adjust the video renderer and hardware decoding settings when it makes sense.
Added an option to show the playback timer next to the seekbar instead of inside the statusbar. By default it is placed at the right side. There is an advanced option to place it at the left side. Tip: seekbar height can be adjusted in the options. Timer text size is scaled accordingly.
Added a new customizable viewing preset (hotkey 4). By default this hides the menu and statusbar compared to the normal viewing preset (hotkey 3).
Added an advanced option to specify the default viewing preset when starting the player. By default it remembers to last used
viewing mode.
Added a submenu to playlist context menu for adjusting the playlist location.
Fixes:
A few crash fixes, bug fixes and small improvements.
Fixed an issue where player could get stuck on "Opening" when the graph worker thread malfunctioned. This happened on a few Windows 11 systems when opening files from Windows Search. We were unable to reproduce it, so root cause is unknown, likely an obscure Windows bug.