Thread: MPC-HC + MadVR Setup Guide

After years of using FFDshowtryouts and VLC, I made the switch to MPC-HC + MadVR, and notice a humongous upgrade in video quality and pc stability. I highly recommend you guys at least give it a shot. Props to Mindbomb for the guide.

Benefits:
-Great picture quality
-10 bit H264 decoding
- Interlaced VC-1 Decoding
- Hardware accelerated decoding and multithreaded software decoding available for many different types of video
- LAV audio decodes truehd and flac audio perfectly. It also decodes lossy formats with very high precision. With the arcsoft dts dll, it gains the ability of high quality dts and dts-hd decoding.

Hardware Requirements
You will need graphics performance at least as good as that found with Intel Sandybridge. The CPU may or may not really play a role, depending on how the software is configured, and the type of graphics hardware you have, and the type of videos you watch, but I would say you need at least around a 2.4ghz core 2 duo or a 2.7 ghz amd athlon x2 if you are not using hardware decoding and wish to comfortably play high bitrate videos of high complexity.

What you need to download
1. MPC-HC x86 - 32-bit. It's ok if you use a 64 bit OS, it will still work. ( grab a new build with installer at http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/downlo...lassic-hc.html )
2. MadVR (get the latest version at madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted) - Doom9's Forum )
3. LAV filters 32 bit (can be found at LAV Filters - DirectShow Media Splitter and Decoders - Doom9's Forum . )
4. Optional - Arcsoft TMT software (buy it at www.arcsoft.com/products/totalmediatheatre/ )

Media Player and Video Renderer Install
First install media player classic home cinema. Check the box to reset settings during the installation if you’ve mucked around with the mpc hc settings before and want to start fresh. Then install MadVR by running the install.bat for it.
Now, open mpc hc, press “o” for options, and go to output. For video renderer, choose MadVr.


Installing The Decoders and Splitter
-To install LAV filters, download the .zip file, extract it to a folder somewhere, and run the 3 install files (audio, video, splitter).
- To configure mpc hc to use lav splitter and madflac, open mpc hc, press o for options, go to internal filters, uncheck matroska, flac, flv, avi, mp4/mov, mpeg ps/ts/pva, and ogg under source filters. The final product should look like this:

- Now, go into MPC-HC, options, external filters. Select Lav Audio, Lav Splitter, LAV Video, set them to prefer, and hit Ok. At this point, if you have Haali Media Splitter installed, you must add it to the list, but in this case, set it to block (you want to use lav splitter, not haali splitter).


Video Decoding
Lav video has a Nvidia Cuvid, Intel quicksync, and DXVA copyback mode (for AMD gpus mainly), which allows hardware decoding with madvr. DXVA copyback appears to require at least UVD 2.2 for good performance (most of the radeon 4000 series and newer). To use hardware decoding, open the config for lav video by double clicking on it in external filters and select the proper mode for hardware acceleration. If no modes are available, or you are using an old AMD card, select none as the hardware decoder to use.


MadVR Performance Enhancements for Weak GPUs
Open a video. Notice the madVR logo in the taskbar. Right click it and click edit MadVR’s settings. Then go to Scaling Algorithms and expand it for further configuration. The defaults are fine for most people, however, if you have a weak gpu, set chroma upscaling, luma upscaling, and luma downscaling all to bilinear.



Alright, you're all set to go now on the video side of things. To see what performance is like, press ctrl j. It’s normal to have some dropped frames at the very beginning of a video. If you are struggling with interlaced video, play around with lav video's gpu deinterlacing options, if available, or the video card driver's deinterlacing options to improve performance.

Audio Config
Go to external filters again. Then double click on LAV audio, go into formats, and make sure everything is checked. Then go into Audio Settings and under Bitstreaming, select the formats you want to bitstream. For analog, don’t check any, for SPDIF, check Dolby Digital and DTS, for HDMI, check all the options for bitstreaming.


Optional – Advanced DTS and DTS-HD Decoding
If you are not planning to bitstream DTS or DTS-HD, search the arcsoft TMT folder for a file called dtsdecoderdll.dll. Then copy this file into the same folder that the x86 LAVaudio.ax is in. This will allow high quality DTS and DTS-HD decoding through LAV audio.

A Few Words on Windows Audio Configuration
Assuming you have Windows 7, go to control panel, sound, select your sound device, right click it and go to properties. Then go to advanced. You will want to select a default format that matches the bit depth of your sound device’s DACs (generally 24 bit nowadays). If you are using digital audio, you also have to specify the amount of channels that you have properly. And if you don’t want resampling, you will likely want to select a frequency of 48 khz. While in the sound control panel, I also suggest that you double check the speaker configuration for the sound device as well (right click on sound device> configure speakers). This part actually only applies to people using analog, and for those people, it is important to make sure the correct speaker configuration is selected, and to choose whether you want full range output.

Subtitles
Double click on LAV splitter in the external filters list. You can set an audio and subtitle language preference here. For example, you can enter jpn for audio to make sure you never hear an english dub of an anime when the japanese audio is present, even if the english audio is labeled as the default track.

For subtitles, select advanced subtitle selection mode. If you are an english only speaker, you will probably want to enter "eng:eng|f;eng:off;*:eng" (without the quotes) here. This will enable only forced english subtitles when english audio is present (ideally for situations like the english subtitles for the alien language in district 9), and english subtitles when a non-english audio is present. This should generally lead to the correct subtitle choice, but if for some reason it doesn't, you can use the W key to toggle on/off subtitle rendering, and the S key to cycle through the different subs present in the file.





Also, go into MPC-HC options, Subtitles. Here, set the maximum texture resolution to that of your display, check allow animation when buffering, and uncheck round up to power of 2, to get the highest quality subtitles out of MPC-HC


DVD Macrovision Error Workaround

Install ffdshow from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffds...eric%20builds/ . For components, you can uncheck everything. For speaker setup, select disable mixer.

Then open MPC-HC. Go to external filters, and add ffdshow video decoder at the end of your external filters list, and set it to prefer. Double click on ffdshow video decoder, go to codecs, and next to mpeg2, select libavcodec as the decoder, and make sure dvd decoding is checked at the bottom.

DVDs should then work when you try to open them with file>open dvd in mpc hc.

Big props to Mindbomb for his hard work!

Thanks for the guide. Do you know if this is compatible with 64-bit Windows Media Center or is it limited to MPC?

Update:

Read further down on the linked post and found this:

(1) First of all you need to use a media player which supports using madVR as a renderer. Your choices are currently MPC-HC, Zoom Player, J.River Media Center 16, PotPlayer and KMPlayer.

Looks like it's a no go for me.

Nice guide but after following every word it doesn't work well, audio and video stuttering and subs don't work.
I'm heading back to CCCP.