Guide: Using MPC HC As Your Video Player In WMC + Media Browser/MyMovies

MPC HC (known as Media Player Classic – Home Cinema) is a free and versatile audio and video player for Windows. One of the great features of MPC HC is that the audio and video codecs are built-in. What this means is that you don’t have to mess around with dreaded codecs or filters on your PC to play back video, simply install MPC HC and you are ready to play virtually any video. It also has native support for DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) which is especially critical for low powered CPUs of PCs. I have always used MPC HC to test out my videos before I copy over to my server to make sure everything looks ok. Even though MPC HC sounds like the perfect player I have never really used for playback of my movies on my HTPCs. The reason is because it is not a media center platform like Windows Media Center or XBMC. If you want to play a movie with MPC HC you need to navigate to the movie from Windows Explorer which would bypass WMC or XBMC completely and really take away from the user experience. XBMC, and add ins for WMC such as MyMovies and Media Browser, allow you to launch MPC HC for playback when you select a movie, but it just never felt seamless. Since I operate my HTPCs solely with a universal remote, I felt like I always lost remote functionality when MPC HC was launched, which was very inconvenient and not good for the ever critical WAF. Up to now I have just stuck with using the default WMP player that W7MC uses (which requires additional codecs/hacks to be done for playback of some of my material, I will discuss this further in an upcoming post).

If you read my post from Monday, you saw I mentioned setting up bitstreaming for my HTPC. This has been somewhat buggy with WMP/W7MC, so to get bitstreaming to work properly I needed to use MPC (how I got bitstreaming to work will be in an upcoming post as well, so stay tuned!). However this led to a dilemma. Either I use MPC so I can get the full glory of bitstreaming HD Audio on my HTPC but get a reduced user experience and WAF, or continue to use W7MC/WMP but lose out on HD Audio until all the bugs get worked out. Well, I have found out I can have the best of both worlds! I had tried launching MPC from MediaBrowser but my remote wouldn’t control MPC. It turns out the reason for this is because even though when MPC launches it appears that it is in “front” of WMC, in actuality WMC is still in front, so all my remote signals were going straight to WMC and not MPC. I had posted a question on the Media Browser forum about if anyone had integrated MPC into WMC/Media Browser, and user pheare came to my rescue (a big thanks to pheare who is responsible for much of this guide). Since I now have MPC working seamlessly with WMC/Media Browser I thought I would walk through how to set it up.

Files To Download:

• MPC HC – You can get the official release here. However, I prefer to get the latest build, which can be found here.
• ExternalLauncher Minimizer MC as created by tyborg (file is at the very bottom of the post)
• DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer – necessary to run the latest MPC HC
• Optional – EventGhost, AutoHotKey, or LM Remote KeyMap

Setup:

1. Download and install MPC HC

NOTE – IF YOU ARE USING MEDIA BROWSER THUNDER BLADE OR GREATER YOU CAN SKIP STEPS 2-3 AND INSTEAD JUMP TO STEP 4A2

2. Download ExternalLauncher Minimizer MC and extract the ExternalLauncher.exe file into your MPC folder (mine is located at c:/Program Files/MPC HomeCinema)

3 .Create a bat file (you can simply use the standard Windows Notepad, my  tool of choice is Notepad ++) . Copy and paste the following line into your notepad (you may need to adjust the address depending on where your MPC folder is), and save in your MPC folder (I named the file ExternalLauncher.bat). TIP – some people have experienced issues when copying the lines below directly into Notepad. Someone the “quotes” get handled incorrectly when copied over. If MPC will not launch properly from WMC/Media Browser try deleting the quotes from the bat file and typing in manually.

@echo off
“C:\Program Files\MPC HomeCinema\mpc-hc.exe” %1 /fullscreen /play /close
Exit

IF YOU ARE DOING ON AN x64 MACHINE, THIS IS WHAT THE BAT FILE SHOULD LOOK LIKE:

@echo off
“C:\Program Files\MPC HomeCinema (x64)\mpc-hc64.exe” %1 /fullscreen /play /close
Exit

IF YOU DECIDE TO USE THE x32 VERSION OF MPC ON AN x64 MACHINE, THIS IS WHAT THE BAT FILE SHOULD LOOK LIKE:

@echo off
“C:\Program Files (x86)\MPC HomeCinema\mpc-hc.exe” %1 /fullscreen /play /close
Exit

Here is a screenshot of what my MPC HomeCinema folder looks like:

——————————————-For Media Browser——————————————-

4a1. Go into your Media Browser Configuration Tool, select Advanced, and go to the External Players tab. Click the Add button and select the media type you want to assign a 3rd party player to. Now click the Select Player button and navigation to the ExternalLauncher.exe file. That is it, Media Browser will now launch MPC for any media type you choose (see my screenshot below, I used mkv as my media type)

4A2.Go into your Media Browser Configuration Tool, select Advanced, and go to the External Players tab. Click the Add button and select the media type you want to assign a 3rd party player to. Now click the Select Player button and navigation to MPC-HC.exe file. Now to get MPC-HC to launch in fullscreen click on the “Change Parameters” button and enter the following parameters:

“{0}” /fullscreen /play /close

NOTE – FOR SOME REASON COPYING AND PASTING FROM THIS BLOG, THE QUOTES GET MESSED UP, SO PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU TYPE THE QUOTES IN MANUALLY

That is it, Media Browser will now launch MPC for any media type you choose (see my screenshot below, I used mkv as my media type)

———————————————-For MyMovies———————————————-

4b. Go into Collection Management. Under Tools -> Options go to External Players. If you only want specific files to be used by MPC HC click the Add button under “Specific File Types (Advanced):”, type in the file extension, and then in the dropdown choose “Media Player Classic Homecinema”. The other choice would be to just change “Other Files (Default):” to Media Player Classic. Please keep in mind that to use MPC as an external player with MyMovies you are required to have 1,250 points (USD 50.00 or via contributing to  the web service). If you unsure about this feature, you can request a free 21 day trial to gain access to all MyMovies features.

5. Now before we test out if MPC launches properly from Media Browser, we want to make sure that our remote (I use a Harmony remote set up as an MCE remote) can control MPC just as if we were using the default WMC player. Open up MPC  and go to View -> Options. Under Player go to Keys. Here you will see a list of all the commands for MPC and what keys control.If you scroll to the right you will see the App Command column which shows if any Apps have been assigned to the respective command. Right now we just want to focus on the basic commands which would be Play, Pause, Stop, Exit, Next (skip chapter forward) and Previous (skip chapter previous). By default you will see that MPC already has App Commands assigned to most of these commands, the only one that is missing is Exit. When I hit the stop button I want MPC to exit and go back into Media Browser, so I assign the App Command MEDIA_STOP. For me this covers everything I need, but feel free to play around with the different commands.

6. One other feature I want enabled with MPC is I want the ability to resume where I left off if I exit out of a video. While still in the Options screen go to Miscellaneous and check “Remember DVD position” and “Remember File Position” (thanks for the tip thejulianath20).

7. Now this part is completely optional. In the Files To Download section I mentioned programs like EventGhost. What these programs will allow you to do is further customize how you use your remote to control your HTPC. For instance, with an MCE remote the “Videos” button will automatically launch the default videos library in WMC. With these programs  you can overwrite this and have the Videos button pull up some other command to your liking. Right now I am happy with the basic functions I have working with MPC so I have not spent much time with these programs. An excellent guide on how to set up a program like EventGhost can be found here.

Tips/Tricks:

- When  you launch MPC from WMC you will briefly see the desktop wallpaper as WMC minimizes and MPC launches. To further create the seamless integration pheare has make his desktop wallpaper black and hidden all desktop icons, so you never even realize you are switching from one program to another.

Summary:

So there you have it. In a couple of steps you can set up MPC to be your default player for videos with WMC + Media Browser. You can also achieve this with MyMovies, and I will update this guide for this once I have a few minutes to set up and document. As much as I love to tweak and mess around with settings on my HTPC one of the things I absolutely hate dealing with are codecs. Using MPC is an easy solution around this and greatly reduces the chance that you kill your system with codec issues. Stay tuned as in the coming days I hope to write up about how I set up bitstreaming (guide now posted here) as well as a closer look at mkvs, codecs, and anything else that comes to mind.

Resources:

• Media Browser Setup Guide
• MyMovies3 Setup Guide
• MyMovies 3rd Party Player Documentation

Tagged as: Guides, Media Browser, Media Center, Media Player Classic, Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, Media Streaming, MPC, MPC HC, MyMovies