My Review of MPC-BE

Summary: MPC-BE is the best video player for playing local video files on Windows on your PC. It doesn't have the ability to cast to smart TV's that other players have, but it has great support for all common audio and video formats, a very usable user interface, and plenty of customizability.

Supported Formats

I've tried opening a few different files on the MPC-BE to check if it supports them.

Format	Support
WAV	✅ Yes.
MP3	✅ Yes.
FLAC	✅ Yes.
OGG	✅ Yes.
WMA	✅ Yes.
AIFF	⚠️ Yes*.
MIDI	✅ Yes.

⚠️ I tried opening AIFF files from two different sources. Strangely, only one of them opened with MPC-BE. I'm not very familiar with this format so I'm not sure what could have been the reason.

Format	Support
AVI	✅ Yes.
MP4	✅ Yes.
WebM	✅ Yes.
MKV	✅ Yes.
WMV	✅ Yes.
MOV	✅ Yes.
FLV	✅ Yes.

Note: before this review I had version 1.6.11 which crashed when I tried to open an FLV. I upgraded to 1.8.4 and now it can open the FLV.

Playlist

✅ Has sibling traversal: when you press the play next button in MPC-BE it will automatically play the next file in the same folder without needing to manually create a playlist. ✅ The traversal is on demand: if you open a file in MPC-BE, then add new files to its folder, MPC-BE will figure out which file comes next when you press the next button, always reflecting the current state of the folder, and not simply create a playlist from all files on the folder when you open a file.

Through View -> Playlist you can display the playlist panel. When you have 2 or more files in the playlist, the behavior of "play next" changes to play the next file in the playlist instead of finding the next file in the folder.

Looping

✅ Can loop a whole playlist.

⚠️ Can loop a single file, but only if it's not part of a manually created playlist.

While Play -> Repeat -> Forever is checked, the current file is looped if the playlist only has one file, but if it has two files, both files are played and then it loops the playlist. If you uncheck this and check Play-> After Playback -> Play Next in the Folder (Looped), it plays the next file in the folder and loops.

✅ Can play a segment of a file. ⚠️MPC-BE says the keyboard shortcuts for setting the start and end of the segment are the keys for the square brackets [ and ], but these keys don't work for me, likely because I'm on a Brazilian keyboard layout. It seems it's mapped to the position of the keys, and not to the actual characters, so I have to press ´ and [ to make it work.

Shuffling and Order

✅ Can shuffle: this is a bit hidden, but if you display the playlist panel, you can right click on it to display its context menu and on it there will be a Shuffle option. It seems this doesn't do anything when playing files without manually creating a playlist. I found an issue raised on a different fork of MPC-HC that succinctly explains the situation.

StormProductionsMusic: I know about this one, however I wanted it in a different way. Lett's say I have a folder with 100 tracks. I press enter on the first one, MPC-HC opens and starts playing it, but it's the only track shown in the playlist. I want that when I press the next button that will play the next track in the folder, it would instead shuffle all tracks in that folder, not play it alphabetically.
Let me know if you need more details or to explain in another way.

clsid2: I am not adding that.

Feature Request: Shuffle Play for Tracks in a Folder, [https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/issues/2475] (accessed 2025-04-09)

Playback

✅ Has a progress bar.

✅ Displays the time remaining and the total length of the file on the progress bar. Clicking on it switches from "time remaining / length" to "time elapsed / length." Which mode is currently displayed is indicated by the sign of the timestamp: if it's negative, e.g. -00:30 / 04:16, then it's time remaining, and if it's positive, e.g. 03:46 / 4:16, then it's time elapsed.

✅ Can seek. Pressing the left and right arrow keys skip forward and backward by 5 seconds, respectively.

Casting

❌ Can't cast to smart TV.

Full screen

✅ Can go full screen.

✅ Double clicking the main pane enter and exists full screen mode.

✅ Pressing the Esc key leaves full screen mode.

While in full screen the interface is hidden except for an overlay on the top right corner that provides a way to escape full screen. This overlay can be hidden by clicking on a padlock icon to "unlock" it. While in full screen, the bottom bar and the overlay on the top right corner will appear when you move the cursor toward them.

Speeds and Frames

✅ Can play at different speeds. ✅ Ranges from 0.125x to 16x.

✅ Can go to the next frame of a paused video with Play -> Frame Step (Ctrl+Right).

✅ Can save the current frame of the video with File -> Save Image (Alt+I).

Audio

✅ Has a volume control. ❌ It doesn't work with MIDI for some reason, seems to be a bug. Other formats work.

✅ Clicking on the speakers quickly mutes and unmutes the audio.

✅ A slider displayed on a bottom bar can be clicked on to set the volume at any time with one click.

Music Playback

❌ No equalizer. There might be a way to add one to it with plugins (external filters), but I haven't tried.

❌ No visualizations.

✅ Can display the cover picture of a music album.

Video Audio Playback

✅ Can switch between languages in videos with multiple audio streams, Play -> Audio and choose the stream.

Subtitle Support

✅ Can display embedded subtitles. Play -> Subtitles and choose the subtitles.

✅ Can load subtitles from a file (e.g. .srt). File -> Load Subtitle....

File Properties

✅ Has a dialog for file properties that includes the length, file size, author, album, and plenty of technical information about the media file, including which audio and video codecs were used on each stream, their bitrate, channel count, encoding settings, etc.

Other Observations

✅ Has a menubar.

✅ Has a right click main menu in addition to the menubar.

✅ Every keyboard shortcut can be customized in the options dialog.