Man of Honour
Aye, I've been installing/uninstalling one thing at a time.
Best program for watching films
- Thread starter chrisxuk
- Start date
Associate
vlc may work weel, but looks very basic
AVS player is free and works well for ripped movies for me
AVS player is free and works well for ripped movies for me
Man of Honour
Grr, I still can't do this. :/
VLC. For those who don't like how it looks you can download custom skins for the latest version, I believe there is even one that makes it look like quicktime!!
PS// I was always on the fence between MPC and VLC until I realised that VLC will play DVD's of a different region to your DVD drive with out having to change the region. Clinched it for me.
PS// I was always on the fence between MPC and VLC until I realised that VLC will play DVD's of a different region to your DVD drive with out having to change the region. Clinched it for me.
Man of Honour
Soldato
VLC for most things but it doesn't play 720p or 1080p MKV files very well at all. The H.264 decoder in VLC is single threaded and not hardware accelerated in any way, which puts it at a major disadvantage.
For 720p/1080p MKV files, I therefore use MPC Player in combination with Haali Media Splitter, PowerDVD (which installs a really good general purpose and hardware accelerated H.264 codec onto your PC) and the AC-3 filter for sound. An alternative to the PowerDVD codec is CoreAVC but I have found this to only support Nvidia CUDA for hardware acceleration. It doesn't support DxVA (a more basic form of hardware acceleration, but still good). CoreAVC is good though if you have a powerful CPU (2.4GHz C2D) because it is probably the fastest software decoder by far.
For 720p/1080p MKV files, I therefore use MPC Player in combination with Haali Media Splitter, PowerDVD (which installs a really good general purpose and hardware accelerated H.264 codec onto your PC) and the AC-3 filter for sound. An alternative to the PowerDVD codec is CoreAVC but I have found this to only support Nvidia CUDA for hardware acceleration. It doesn't support DxVA (a more basic form of hardware acceleration, but still good). CoreAVC is good though if you have a powerful CPU (2.4GHz C2D) because it is probably the fastest software decoder by far.
It's basically the same thing. I think it has more options for use with a home cinema - better surround sound support etc, perhaps?
I use it on my NC10 and I haven't noticed any operational differences between it and the regular one, though.
I use it on my NC10 and I haven't noticed any operational differences between it and the regular one, though.
Associate
Media Player Classic!!!
Soldato
FFDshow and CoreAVC aren't very good for H.264 IMO. The FFDshow one has high cpu utilization and the CoreAVC one seemed a little unreliable and the IQ not so great.
I use the Cyberlink H.264 and am very happy with it's performance. Combined with Matroska, vobsub and the relevant audio codecs (some from FFDshow actually) MKVs play very well in VMC.
Associate
Soldato
I ran into the same problem I always do with VLC, can't get surround using spdif withought non-stop stuttering. I'll stick to MPC and cccp, never had a problem with that yet.
Actually I think the MPC is no longer developed so some people continued it as Home Cinema edition.
MPC has no decoders in it at all. Home Cinema does (built in) which is why one is several MB bigger than the other.
If you install MPC on a blank system you will not be able to play back any h264 or divx stuff. If you install MPC:HC on a blank system you will, as it has some decoders in it.
I am sure there is more complicated answers, and MPC:HC supports more stuff, but the major difference is that it has some decoders in it.
rp2000
Don
I use Windows Media Player or VLC normally. I find both are better at different things. I prefer the WMP, but VLC works with more formats straight out of the box. I also think it is generally better coded.
