Media Player Classic

Media Player Classic is, in my opinon, the best media playing program for windows. It has a very simple interface which means that it doesn’t have long loading times, nor does it connect to the internet or any other similarly annoying ‘feature’.

It closly resembles the old Windows Media Player (which comes with most Windows PCs, you can check if you have it by clicking Start > Run > “MPLAYER2” > OK)

An awful lot of things - most noticably you can remove any button/toolbar from the interface, for example you may not want anything except the video and the seekbar, or you want nothing except the video to play in a floating box.

This means you can have Anime Music Videos (AMVs) playing in the corner of your screen while you chat to a friend on MSN, or while you surf the web or even work! With the option to set Media Player Classic (MPC) as “Always on Top” and the ability to simply strech and shrink the window it makes for a pleasent distraction when waiting for a reply on MSN.. :)

And when I say “nothing else except the floating window” I mean “almost nothing”. If you instruct MPC not to show an entry on the taskbar ( also known as the startbar, usually to be found at the bottom of the screen ) it will display an icon in the system tray. Pictured above was my system tray when I was taking the screengrabs. MPC is the left most icon (ignoring the blue “EN” of the language bar).

[For those interested the other icons, from left to right are: EN (Language Tool Bar), MPC, Trillian Messenger, Winamp, eMule, Girder (a remote control program which allows me to use my TV remote, and my voice to control the PC), SpamAssasin Proxy (filters incoming emails), Volume Control (I’ve got obscure surround sound), JTV Remote (Remote control IR reciever program), Remote Administrator v2.1 (allows me to use my PC from anywhere in the world), DynDNS (keeps meermanr.serveftp.net pointing to my home machine by periodically updating the meermanr link), Hotmail Popper (allows me to get Hotmail in Outlook, while still applying rules and spam filtering), Serv-U FTP]

A lot of invisible things about MPC make it so damned great. Imagine you have a tricky problem with some files where they play up-side down? or the video comes out all green and weird? Well what can you do? Most experts you ask will tell you it is a problem with a module of software called a “codec”, but how can you fiddle with these to make your file work?

MPC has a few nifty ways for you to not only fiddle with codecs, but also change the priorities of certain codecs, and block troublesome ones altogether. Why would you want to waste time on that? Well firstly it’s quicker to disable a problemmatic codec than it is to download a fixed one. Also if you don’t have a broadband connection ( perhaps when you go home ) it’s really nice not being helpless to the will of a corrupt codec!

Codecs arn’t the only way of decoding video, infact the more common method in windows now is “DirectShow Filters”, regardless which ones your computer is invisibly using, the options can be found in the same place in MPC.

By right-clicking in the video window, when a video is loaded, and selecting “Filters” you can get a list of all the modules loaded in order to play your current video. The greyed-out ones offer you no options, the dark ones are clickable and will bring up statisics or options for that module.

I feel it would be helpful to explain the above list of filters. Please be aware that the data flows from the bottom of the list upwards, meaning that the file with the data is the bottom most, and this is passed to the layer above, who performs some actions and passing to the one above etc.

For a moment, imagine you have a slow, nasty, 750Mhz machine (like I do), and you squeeze every last drop of blood out of your machine before you even consider spending money on the brute and upgrading it. You have this picture in your mind’s eye? Perfect. Now imagine that your bastard of a machine refuses to play anime any more because it is too old and slow. It’s a bleak outlook, but MPC offers hope.

Enter the use for all this filter-malarky: Changing the quality settings to ensure the sounds doesn’t go out of sync.

Choosing DivX from the filters menu brings up the following (as a sinlge window):

Left you can see the “Quality” slider for the “Postprocessing Settings”. What this means in english, is once the video is rendered how much extra processing (computer thinking) should be done before passing it on to the filter above? Well the default setting is a quality rating of 3 - which is asking too much of our pitiful 750Mhz CPU.

Putting the slider as far left as possible gives a considerable speed boost - as does switching your screen colour depth to 16bit (minimise all your programs, right click on the desktop, choose properties, then choose the Settings tab, and then change the colour depth from “24 bits” / “32 bits” to “16 bits”.. windows will looks slightly less impressive, but it (and your videos) will be much quicker.)

In the right had dialog you can see options for the brightness and some other jazz - these are great for, well, fixing the brightness and tweaking it to run even faster, or removing those slight “jerks”from the playback and allowing extra-smooth performance on fast PCs.

So, that is another reason this is nice - it empowers you to fiddle with settings, which more often than not allows you to solve your problems on your own.

Filters and options arn’t for everyone So, for my next trick I will show you just how awesome MPC is at handling seperate audio tracks, soft-subtitles (subtitles which come in a seperate stream / file from the video) and disproportionate video (ie squashed or mis-shapen).

One those rare occations where you decide to open your files using File > Open instead of dragging them into MPC, you will see the dialog above. You’ll notice it has a “Dub” entry - here you can enter an alternative file to get the sound from - perhaps an MP3, or another AVI file and hence you can watch a french film with an english dub (though why anyone would want to I am not sure).

By right clicking and choosing File > Load Subtitle you will get a windows Open File dialog where you ought to choose a soft-subtitle file (usually *.srt, *.sub, *.ssa). From here on in the subtitle will be rendered on top of the video as you watch - and they will always be at high resolution (quality) - so low quality video put to full screen with soft-subs will always have crisp, easy-to-read subtitles.

NB: Internal subtitles are only enabled if you have set your renderer (View > Options > Playback > Output > “DirectShow Video”) to one of the “renderless” ones (VMR7 / 9). Note also that choosing overlay substantially lessens CPU usage than either of the renderless ones.

If you happen to have more than one set of soft subs for the same file, the Subtitles sub menu will display a list of them - of if you simply want to turn off subtitle which loaded automatically with the file (subtitles are loaded automatically if they begin with the same characters as the file, for example “Wonderful Days CD 1 of 2.avi” is matched by “Wonderful Days CD 1 of 2.sub” and “Wonderful Days CD 1 of 2.EnglishSubs.sub” etc).

But wait, it gets better. Suppose you are going to watch the soft-subs version of “Wonderful Days”.. full screen will give you something to the effect of:

While this is not the best example shot, please bear with me. The subtitles are appearing in their normal place, a little above the bottom of the screen - but they overlap part of the wide-screen video.. what a waste to have all that black space at the top.. if only we could shift the video up the screen!

Take a gander at your NumPad and be amazed as it squashes and reshapes your video on each key-press, gasp as the ALT + “NumPad Key” combinations slide the video around your screen effortlessly!

Yes, for the low low price of £0.00 you too can enjoy widescreen soft-subs epics without the hassle of overlapping subtitles. So:

Hopefully it is obvious that I moved the active part of the picture up to the top of the screen, and left the subtitles in their own area.

Note for laptop users: I have found that these shortcuts don’t work on my laptop’s virtual number pad ( you know, that Fn + some other key stuff ), so I’ve had to change the shortcuts to something else.

Usually if you want to watch a film which has external subtitles you need to download and install a filter called “VobSub” or something similar - this usually is a bit fiddly, and more to the point, it causes some issues with control. MPC has built in subtitle renderers, and this coupled with some other features makes it the ultimate media player for subtitles!

Well, as fellow Anime fans, you may, as I do, get tired of the intros at the beginning of a series - you may even have remembered where on the seekbar you need to click to skip it perfectly! Well if you’re doing things like that, then MPC has something you’ll like. If you goto the options, and head over to the “tweaks” section you’ll find the following:

A “jump” distance is how far (in milliseconds) to skip forward/backward when a certain key is pressed. (I have changed the keyboard shortcuts so that left and right move it by a single frame, CTRL + Left/Right moves a small distance, CTRL + SHIFT a medium, and CTRL + SHIFT + ALT a large). So if you set your large jump distance to 90000 (1min 30sec) you’ll tend to skip almost exactly one song intro ( almost all Anime I have come across has an intro in the region 1m23sec → 1min 37sec ) and this means I can rewind for things I miss and skip horrible time-filling musicals without needing to find the little block on the seekbar and teadeously drag it the tiniest bit, you can just use the keyboard!

There are loads of things actually so I’ll make a quick-and-dirty list:

• Has a webinterface for controlling it ( goodness knows why, its an experimental thing atm )
• Supports LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) and uICE (something similar)
• Allows every key to be remapped ( ie have the shortcut changed )
• Has a BOSS key - so you can watch Anime at work now ( smack the boss key when trouble heads you way to make it pause and minimise instantly - if you use the SystemTray Icon - you’re safe)
• Incorporates many types of screen-renderer - so it’s bound to work on your machine
• Supports playback of Quicktime and RealPlayer using Internet Explorer plugins (I assure you though, it is seamless)
• Allows audio to be mapped to any/all channels of a surround sound system
• Plays DVDs / OGM
• Supports Matroska ( a new format which hopefully will replace the dated AVI standard )
• Allows the subtitles font, colour and default location to be changed
• Allows filters to be blocked / prioritised as desired ( good for nailing a codec problem )
• Supports ShoutCast, RoQ (Id Software), Smacker & Bink, FLI/FLC CAD videos, VCD/SVCD/XCD
• Can remember last window position and size if requested to do so
• Allows always-on-top to be set
• Has a Dockable playlist, which means if you have a mutli-monitor system you can have MPC maximised on one screen, and have the play list on the other - making it ideal for working with projectors and at parties.
• Has command line switchs for adding files to the playlist, changing to fullscreen and more - allowing easy scripting of a video into, say, a morning alarm schedule (yes I am so lazy I’ve set it to play the BBC newscast from their site every morning).
• Allows you to change the default logo

There is no installation! You just download and run the .exe If you don’t like it just delete the mplayerc.exe This makes it ideal for including on CDs you burn which contain soft-subs!

Well that concludes my article/rant on how much I love MPC, I hope you try it and love it too! The download information is at the top of this article.

Robert Meerman

[ AnimeSoc Webführer / Librarian ] (at time of writing)

Currently my MSN / ICQ / IRC status is: http://web.icq.com/whitepages/online