Why should I use VLC rather than MPC Home Cinema?

[ModelBehavior]

Hi Everyone,

First-time poster here. .... I'm using both MPC Home Cinema and VLC on my computer, but I have MPC chosen as my default player since I encountered big-time problems with VLC 1.0.2 on my 64-bit computer. It looked like half of the program installed as x86 and the other half as 64. Now that VLC 1.0.3 is out it appears that the issue has been resolved.

I'm perfectly happy with MPC, but I see that the user ratings are a little higher for VLC. I was interested in finding out what the major differences were, and why VLC is 5 times larger upon installation than MPC. Clearly, I must be missing something. VLC must have additional features that MPC does not have.

Can someone enlighten me? I don't want to reset all of my file associations unless there are major differences.

Thanks, cheers!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

VLC uses its own codecs and not the dshow ones. It has many plugins that are not in MPC => Size explanation.

About the popularity, I have no idea about the reason.

[ModelBehavior]

I will try VLC as my default player then. I didn't realize that VLC offers more plug-ins, and I also thought that all open source codecs were all equal (as in DirectShow).

The only difference that I saw was the fact that VLC has an image capture feature and MPC does not. Also, when I went to playback a movie with subtitles, VLC played the subtitles perfectly, while MPC failed to show the subtitles at all. Perhaps this is a result of the additional plug-ins that you mentioned.

Thank you for your reply J-B.

[eventcrasher]

you should try VLC rather than MPC... its just better... j-b is right about the VLC....