Media Player Classic Qute Theater (homepage)

Media Player Classic reimplemented with Qt and libmpv.

More screenshots: https://mpc-qt.github.io/gallery

MPC-HC (Media Player Classic Home Cinema) is considered by many to be the quintessential media player for the Windows desktop. MPC-QT (Media Player Classic Qute Theater) aims to reproduce most of the interface and functionality of MPC-HC while using libmpv to play video instead of DirectShow.

• Releases
• Features and improvements over MPC-HC
• Contributing and translation
• Compiling
• Compiling on Windows
• Questions and answers

Releases

Packages are available for various systems. There are release builds for Windows and Linux users on the release page; these use time-based versioning (e.g. 17.07 corresponds to July 2017). There are development builds for Windows and Linux (AppImage, Flatpak and native build).

Note that unimplemented features in the options dialog are hidden and (where this is not possible) disabled. This is to preserve the familiar options layout from MPC-HC in the meantime.

Features and improvements over MPC-HC

Clone: Nearly everything that MPC-HC does for the casual user.

Multiple playlists: When you’re watching shows on your backlog, load every show into separate playlists and still keep track of the last played file for each playlist. Finally you can eliminate the need to keep track of your progress in a spreadsheet, all while never leaving the comfort of your favorite media player.

Video preview on seekbar (thumbnail)

Play online videos (with yt-dlp)

Quick queuing: Out-of-order playback in the same style of xmms/qmmp. Got some compilation albums in a playlist, but want to hear only some rock tracks for a while? Now you can, without obliterating your playlist.

Playlist searching: Multi-threaded playlist searching, in the same style as other media players. Find the tracks you want, when you want them.

Screenshot templates: Take screenshots with a custom, sleek and stylized filename. Only include the information that you want.

Custom metadata: Display custom metadata in the playlist window. Want to show the artist as well as the title, down to even the encoder used? Nothing is stopping you.

Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements: In-app custom styling support. Make the app go faster!

Possible upcoming features

These features are wishlist items and are subject to the developer’s time.

Encoding support like VirtualDub: Churn out clips faster. No need to open a video editor when your media player can do your job for you. Requires writing an encoder-orientated backend.

Suggestions welcome.

Contributing code and translations

If you are a coder, try to follow the conventions in the code and make a PR (pull request). If you are a translator, we will be using Weblate to translate. Alternatively, you can submit the translations as a PR.

Compiling

The best version is git master, and everyone is encouraged to increase their computer-fu by compiling from source (see sections below). Compiling from source gives you several advantages over the usual user, such as the ability to use latest and pre-release software regardless of where it comes from. Unix users, there could even be packages in your distro that help with this (e.g. aur, ports).

Prerequisites

You need the Qt6 SDK installed and a recent edition of libmpv. On Ubuntu you can usually install the required libraries and tools with the build-essential, cmake, qt6-base-dev, qt6-l10n-tools, libqt6svg6-dev, libmpv-dev and boost packages. A recent edition of libmpv means either from git head or at least version 0.37.0.

I don’t know git, how do I do this?

First ensure you have the prerequisites as mentioned above, then open a terminal and cd into your general source-code directory. If one does not exist, mkdir one.

mkdir src

cd ~/src

Then clone this git repository using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/mpc-qt/mpc-qt.git

Finally, cd into the checked-out repository.

cd mpc-qt

Then the easiest way to build with CMake and install:

cmake .

make -j`nproc`

To install:

sudo make install

To uninstall:

sudo make uninstall

If you plan to help with development, it’s better to build with CMake + Ninja in a subdirectory:

cmake -B build -G Ninja

cmake –build build -t update_translations

cmake –build build

or

cmake -G Ninja -B build ; cmake –build build -t update_translations ; cmake –build build

To install:

sudo cmake –install build

To uninstall:

sudo cmake –build build -t uninstall

To clean the build files:

cmake –build build -t clean

You’re done! Later on, performing a git pull from inside the source code directory will get the latest changes.

git pull origin master

Rebuild by following the cmake+make or cmake+ninja steps as described above.

I have compiler/linker errors

Some distros have an ancient version of mpv in their repos. You can install libmpv by following the instructions at the mpv-build repo.

Compiling on Windows

While this program is meant for Unix, it is possible to compile it on Windows with MSYS2. MSVC is not supported due to the nature of the build process, but may work in theory if you throw enough stubbornness at it.

From a fresh installation of MSYS2, run the following from an MSYS2 MINGW64 prompt. First, update the packages

pacman -Syu

Restart MSYS2 MINGW64 when prompted to do so and re-run pacman.

pacman -Syu

At this stage packages required for building can be installed (Copy and paste this as one line).

pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake git mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-qt6 mingw-w64-x86_64-qt-creator mingw-w64-x86_64-imagemagick mingw-w64-x86_64-boost

MPC-QT can be compiled with a libmpv linked to MSYS2’s ffmpeg libraries, or by using the prebuilt library released on sourceforge. To use the prebuilt library after cloning this repository, download libmpv from shinchiro’s release page, and extract it somewhere. Place the files in the root folder of mpv-dev-x86_64-*.7z into mpv-dev/lib. Then place the files in its include folder into mpv-dev/include/mpv. If you do this, compile with the -DENABLE_LOCAL_MPV=ON option.

cmake -DENABLE_LOCAL_MPV=ON .

make -j`nproc`

Congratulations, you have now built MPC-QT!

Questions and answers

See also the Wiki Q&A and the other pages of the wiki.

Is MPC-QT compatible with SVP (SmoothVideo Project)?

Yes! You just need to change two SVP settings:

• the path to mpv’s JSON IPC to point to /tmp/cmdrkotori.mpc-qt.mpv
• the path to the player to point to /usr/bin/mpc-qt