This project is now principally maintained by the community at the Doom9 forum. Variations of the original MPC and its forks are standard media players in the K-Lite Codec Pack and the Combined Community Codec Pack. The original MPC, along with the MPC-HC fork, mimic the simplistic look and feel of Windows Media Player 6.4, but provide most options and features available in modern media players. Media Player Classic ( MPC), Media Player Classic - Home Cinema ( MPC-HC), and Media Player Classic - Black Edition ( MPC-BE) are a family of free and open-source, compact, lightweight, and customizable media players for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows. To play files, you just drag them into the open window.English, Russian, Chinese(Simplified), Chinese(Traditional), Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Ukrainian Media controls are hidden during playback, although they’ll appear if you hover over it. In fact, MPV doesn’t have much of an interface at all.

MPV is another fork project, taking the best bits of the older MPlayer and mplayer2 projects, adding new features and interface along the way.

We’re happy to report that VLC isn’t the only active, open-source media player in development, thanks to MPV. It still runs great on Windows 10, however, and is still one of the best media players, especially for older PCs. The one downside to MPC-HC is that development has stalled, meaning there have been no new features or fixes since 2017.

It’s also customizable, with interface skins and plugins able to extend functionality further. Like VLC, it handles common and unusual media files, with playback for DVDs and live streams included. Don’t be put off by the dated interface, because MPC-HC is one of the most capable media players available.

Media player classic standalone