How does this compare with VLC Player. I have a friend that wants to install a different player as a replacement for WMP and I was going to recommend VLC.
I have both and I can tell you: MPC; better image quality, uses less resources VLC; more configurable, reads broken files and ISOs there are other details, like MPC being able to increase the size of the image (when you want to keep the ratio but fill the screen), or VLC having a better fast forward/slow motion, I have MPC as the default player, but need VLC around
FYI. Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC) Portable 1.7.7 (lightweight media player) Released, courtesy of PortableApps.com.
The one thing that is driving me crazy is that there's still no easy way to "flip or rotate" the screen in MPC, are these guys kidding me? Other than that, it' still the best video-player IMO.
I have VLC and MPC-HC on my Win 7 x64 computer. I tend to agree with the above, they are both good at certain things. I tend to prefer MPC for a variety of reasons, but I like to have the choice between it and VLC. However, on my x86 Vista laptop MPC won't play audio and video together on at least a fifth of my mp4 files. This is a known bug. It doesn't affect VLC or SMPlayer though. When I finally replace Windows with Mac and Linux I will miss MPC-HC. I'll still have VLC though I suppose.
VLC never works for me. And MPC-HC has the feature to inspect frames, AFAIK only MPC and its forks (yes I know HC is a fork too thank you very much) have this feature.
if you have a dedicated gpu you can reduce VLC's cpu usage, go to Tools-Preferences-Input/Codecs and set "Hardware-accelerated decoding" to automatic that will have VLC using the gpu's processing power
My problem was not about system resource usage, there has never been any problems with that part. My problem was jumpy playback and I couldn't fix it no matter what I did.