Best media player?

Best media player?

  • VLC

  • MPV

  • Potplayer

  • MPC-HC

  • Windows Media Player

  • Realplayer

  • Mediamonkey

  • JRiver Media Center

  • Plex

  • Other (specify below)

  • The one that whips the lama's ass

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Medulseur

Medulseur

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kiwifarms.net
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Nov 11, 2020
Been using VLC since about forever. I'm a simple creature that likes stuff that just works. Recently I installed MPV and I kind of like it better for its simple and minimal design that pleases my monkey brain. What is your favorite media player? Should I be using it? Should everyone be using it?
 
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Personally, I use Media Player Classic (Home Cinema). The interface is pretty simple and plays a wide range of file formats. I think if your file supports multiple languages (subtitles and audio), you can toggle between different languages and it's pretty neat.
 
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I use MPC to watch video and Clementine to listen to music. Before that I used KMPlayer and Foobar2000. On Linux I used VLC.
 
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I'm too used to VLC by this point to change.

VLC's option to scale video down to it's native resolution was a revelation, sure it's tiny, but look at how non-pixelated it is!
 
Dom Cruise said:
I'm too used to VLC by this point to change.

VLC's option to scale video down to it's native resolution was a revelation, sure it's tiny, but look at how non-pixelated it is!
Click to expand...
Can't any media player do that if you resize the window?
 
This is a very specific setup and takes some time to configure, but I use MPC-BE with LAV Filters, madVR and XySubFilters, the last three come with K-Lite Codec Pack Full/Mega, which is the basic requirement for players like MPC-BE to work, as they rely on external codecs.

MPC-BE is basically MPC-HC with some extra features, one of which is the ability to playback YouTube videos.
LAV Filters are used for hardware video and audio decoding.
madVR is a real-time video upscaler and artifact remover, it's pretty nice when watching content that's lower res than your native resolution.
XySubFilters is a subtitle rendering engine, it gives a good, sharp result.

As I've said, it takes a bit of configuration. First you need to configure MPC-BE to use LAV Filters, madVR and XySubFilter, then you'll have to configure madVR to get the best quality and performance balance for your hardware. Would you be surprised if I told you real-time video upscaling takes some processing power? I also had to go into registry and manually add additional subtitle paths to XySubFilter, because for some reason it wasn't saving the ones I've set in it's configuration menu. But after that it just works.
 
Slav Power said:
As I've said, it takes a bit of configuration. First you need to configure MPC-BE to use LAV Filters, madVR and XySubFilter, then you'll have to configure madVR to get the best quality and performance balance for your hardware. Would you be surprised if I told you real-time video upscaling takes some processing power? I also had to go into registry and manually add additional subtitle paths to XySubFilter, because for some reason it wasn't saving the ones I've set in it's configuration menu. But after that it just works.
Click to expand...
Are the results pretty good on the real-time video upscaling? If so I may have to give this a try.
 
Medulseur said:
Are the results pretty good on the real-time video upscaling? If so I may have to give this a try.
Click to expand...
It's not as amazing as straight up upscaling the entire video in ESRGAN but it is still a noticeable improvement. Here's an example of it upscaling a 360p video of Squid Game S01E01.
madVR:
madVR.png
Standard:
EVR.png
 
Slav Power said:
It's not as amazing as straight up upscaling the entire video in ESRGAN but it is still a noticeable improvement. Here's an example of it upscaling a 360p video of Squid Game S01E01.
Click to expand...
That's not bad at all! How much processing power does it take, though?
 
Medulseur said:
That's not bad at all! How much processing power does it take, though?
Click to expand...
Well you do need a GPU to run it in the first place. With my current config playing that Squid Game episode puts the usage on my 1060 6GB at around 40%. Of course the settings can be adjusted to do lower quality processing in case your GPU struggles to run madVR and vice versa: if you have a better GPU you can crank it higher.
 
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