Media Player Classic – Home Cinema (MPC-HC) is the second most popular media player in the world coming next only to the open-source VLC Media Player. MPC-HC retains the classic user interface of the Microsoft Windows Media Player as it used to look like many a moons ago.
Because of its ease-of-use, economical usage of the system resources and a very familiar user interface, it has become part of almost all the media codec packs such as the K-Lite Media Codec pack. MPC-HC is also available from its GitHub webpage at https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases/.
If you are also using MPC-HC (or its another variant MPC-BE), then you may have noticed that it retains all the video or audio files opened in a the recent files menu. This menu appears under the File menu. If you want to clear this recent files history, then we have three methods for you:
Method 1. Using MPC-HC User Interface
Using this method is very easy. We can launch MPC-HC and select File → Recent Files and then Clear List. It is the preferred method if you want to open MPC-HC to clear the history. If you want to clear the history using other methods or through a batch script, then look for other methods.
Method 2. Using Windows Registry
We can remove the MPC-HC recent files history through the Windows Registry Editor. For this we have to first open the Registry Editor which can be done by clicking on the Start button, typing regedit.exe and pressing Enter.
In the Registry Editor, we have to navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MPC-HC\MPC-HC\. Then we can right-click on a sub-key named MediaHistory and choose to Delete it.
Method 3. Using Terminal or command prompt
We can give a simple command to clear the recent files history from MPC-HC. This command can be used in the Windows Terminal, Windows PowerShell, or Command Prompt. It will work in all of these three.
The command is REG DELETE HKCU\SOFTWARE\MPC-HC\MPC-HC\MediaHistory. After this command, it will ask if you really want to delete that sub-key (MediaHistory) and you have to type “Y” to proceed.
We can also turn this command into a simple batch script. For automatically answering “yes”, we will have to add the switch /Y in this command in case we use this in a batch script.