A long time ago when Microsoft introduced a new modified modern version of their Windows Media Player in Windows XP, the users revolted and created their own Media Player Classic. That project has later inspired more projects like Media Player Classic – Home Cinema (MPC-HC) and Media Player Classic – Black Edition (MPC-BE).
MPC-HC comes bundled with codec packs like K-Lite Mega Codec pack and can make use of the codecs or filters provided in the pack. You can also download it from its GitHub webpage at https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/.
MPC-HC offers many features that make it so much convenient to watch movies on a computer. For example, some movies come with those big black bars that appear because of the letter-boxing effect (fitting a video frame inside a particular resolution).
It is not easy to get rid of these bars when watching the videos or movies with other players like VideoLAN VLC Media Player. But with MPC-HC, we can use the Numlock up-down arrows to remove them instantly. Just keep pressing the up or the down arrows until you get rid of these black bars. And resetting can easily be done by pressing the Numlock 5 key.
Another cool feature that is not so easily possible in the VLC media player is the ability to rotate the video frame using the keyboard or the menus. In order to rotate the video frame using the menubar in MPC-HC, we can select View, Pan & Scan and then Rotate Clockwise or Rotate Counter-Clockwise from there.
We can rotate the video even more conveniently and faster using the keyboard shortcuts. For rotating, we can press Alt + Numlock 3 to rotate the video clockwise. Each time you press this hotkey, it will rotate the video frame clockwise 90 degrees. This way you can have a video rotated by 90°, 180°, 270° or back to regular rotation.
Rotating a video can be very useful when you come across the videos that are recorded using the wrong orientation.