MPC Video Renderer 0.10.8.2569 nightly

MPC Video Renderer, usually shortened to MPCVR, is a free DirectShow video renderer for Windows that handles the last stage of playback: turning decoded frames into what you actually see.

The current release is 0.10.8.2569, a 788KB ZIP, open source and free for any use.

Get MPC Video Renderer 0.10.8 now, or read the next section first if you arrived here because playback stutters.

What a video renderer actually does

Playing a video file takes three stages. A splitter opens the container, a decoder turns compressed data into raw frames, and a renderer puts those frames on your display.

MPCVR is only the third stage. It replaces whatever renderer your player uses by default, which is usually EVR or the older EVR Custom Presenter.

That distinction decides whether this download will help you at all. Our guide on the roles of decoders and renderers goes through the split in more detail.

What it will not fix

If your CPU sits near 100% during playback, that is a decoding problem and a renderer will not touch it.

The fix there is hardware decoding, which means LAV Filters set to DXVA2 or D3D11 instead of software mode. There is a walkthrough in our guide to enabling hardware acceleration.

If files refuse to open, or you get sound with no picture, you are missing a decoder rather than a renderer. A codec pack or our Codec Finder will get you further.

What it does fix

• HDR content that looks grey, flat or washed out on an HDR display.
• Banding in dark gradients, where the renderer's dithering does the work.
• Soft, mushy upscaling when 720p or DVD material lands on a 4K panel.
• Combing and jagged edges on interlaced sources such as DVDs and old TV recordings.
• Dolby Vision colours coming out wrong or oversaturated.
• Video that plays sideways or upside down because the rotation flag is being ignored.

Installing it: this is a filter, not a program

The download is a ZIP with no installer, no shortcut and no Start menu entry, which catches almost everyone out the first time.

1. Unpack the ZIP somewhere permanent. A folder you will not tidy away later, because moving it afterwards breaks the registration.
2. Run the included install .cmd file as administrator. There is a 32-bit and a 64-bit one, and you need the one matching your player rather than your copy of Windows.
3. Open your player, find the video renderer setting, and choose MPC Video Renderer from the list.
4. Restart playback. The filter brings its own settings dialog, reachable through your player's filter list, which is how you confirm it is actually running.

Our step-by-step configuration guide covers the settings dialog itself once you are that far.

Using it with MPC-BE

In MPC-BE the setting lives under Options, Playback, Output, in the DirectShow video renderer dropdown.

Version 0.10.8 raised the recommended pairing to MPC-BE 1.9.1.11 or newer. The 1.9.1 figure this page used to quote has been out of date for a while, and the current MPC-BE release is comfortably past it.

Using it with MPC-HC

MPC-HC offers the same renderer dropdown in the same place, so the pairing works there too.

The download page here also carries builds compiled by clsid2, who maintains MPC-HC, alongside the mainline ones. Those clsid2 builds stop at 0.9.10.2433, so they are several releases behind and only worth taking if a newer build misbehaves on your setup.

Any DirectShow player can use the filter, including PotPlayer and most of the rest of our media players section.

HDR, Dolby Vision and tone mapping

This is where MPCVR earned its reputation, and it is why two of the reviews below describe moving to it from madVR specifically for HDR.

Version 0.10.1 added local tone mapping for HDR output, with a choice of ACES, Reinhard, Habel, Mobius, BT2390 and ST 2094-10 curves. ST 2094-10 applies to Dolby Vision only.

HDR to SDR conversion is there as well, which is the setting you want if you collect HDR files but watch them on an ordinary display.

Dolby Vision support has moved quickly. Profile 20 colours were corrected in 0.10.7, and Dovi Extension Level 1 and 2 processing arrived in 0.10.1.

One honest limit: as of 0.10.5, Dolby Vision Profile 7 with a Full Enhancement Layer is not supported, and the renderer skips it rather than mishandling it. That mostly affects Blu-ray remuxes.

Super Resolution and RTX Video HDR are NVIDIA only

The Super Resolution upscaling this page used to advertise without qualification runs on NVIDIA RTX hardware and nothing else.

It needs an RTX card and a GeForce driver from the 572 branch or newer, and it only began working alongside HDR passthrough in version 0.9.3. RTX Video HDR carries a second restriction on top: it is available in the 64-bit build only.

On AMD or Intel graphics neither option appears at all. Everything else here still applies, and the DXVA2 and Direct3D 11 paths work across all three vendors.

DXVA2 stands for DirectX Video Acceleration 2, and it is the older of the two paths. D3D11 is the one to prefer on anything modern.

Recent releases

Builds numbered above 0.10.8 are nightlies rather than tagged releases. They are usually fine, but they are untested by definition, so keep the last working version to hand.

Subtitles are somebody else's job

MPCVR renders video and nothing else, so subtitle handling stays with whichever filter you already use.

It sits happily alongside XySubFilter and DirectVobSub in the usual arrangement.

Who should look elsewhere

• You are on an older Intel integrated GPU and your complaint is scaling sharpness. One reviewer here found Intel's own adaptive scaler in plain EVR looked better on an HD4400U.
• You want the absolute ceiling and have a strong discrete GPU. madVR is the other name in this conversation, and it is far heavier to run and to tune.
• Your files do not play at all. That is a decoder problem, so start in our video codecs section instead.
• Your player is not DirectShow-based. VLC and mpv use their own internal pipelines, and this filter cannot hook into either.

If you are still weighing the options, our roundup of the best video renderer options compares them side by side.

Quick questions

Download MPC Video Renderer 0.10.8 and see how it handles your files, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.