So the thing is, I love MPC-HC for its subtitle controls. I can set subtitles to be displayed on the bottom of the display instead of the bottom of the movie. Coz there are movies which are even wider than a 16:9 display, you know. It makes no sense to take space from the movie when the display has tons of unused space on the top and bottom in the form of black stripes. This option is basic in my opinion, yet only MPC-HC seems to get it right. Let me demonstrate it. Here’s how it looks in MPC-HC after some fiddling in options:

And here’s how it looks in VLC no matter what I do:

Makes a whole lot of sense, right? And why is the subtitle italic? I don’t want that. Oh guess what, that’s a “VLC on Windows 8 issue“.

Anyway, after all this bitching at VLC, let me show you how still VLC is the most advanced player in most other aspects. I noticed this recently after an attempt at recreating my old YouTube music channel. You know, a static picture and music in the background. So this involves taking snapshots (i.e. a PNG file) of the old movies (coz I don’t have the pictures anymore) and encoding in Movie Maker. The encoding involved another trick, but that will be another post.

So when I took a few snapshots I figured that VLC tends to make much better shots than MPC-HC. Why? I don’t know. And honestly I don’t care either. I let you decide.

Just open it in full size and see how horrible the sky looks in the MPC-HC window. And yeah, this is reproducible in most of my other videos too. I’m using the latest of both, i.e. MPC-HC 1.6.4.6052 and VLC 2.0.4.

So after all, I can choose between the two halfway-broken options. As usually. Good stuff. And uh, no, please don’t come here and spam me with ads like “go use xyz” coz I won’t. I’ve tried a million other players too, they suck even harder.