[GuB-42]

Is it dead or done?

MPC-HC is just a DirectShow frontend, or at least, that's how I used it. Filters do most of the work. And no one seems to care about DirectShow anymore but that's mostly because everything works fine.

It will die eventually, because Microsoft is trying hard to kill DirectShow (to replace it with something inferior...) and the opensource guys mostly go to mplayer, but for now, updates are not really necessary.

[unscaled]

Calling MPC-HC just a DirectShow frontend is almost as inaccurate as saying mplayer is just a UNIX frontend. Just as mplayer is using POSIX APIs, MPC-HC is using the DirectShow API to run its filter graphs, but it actually provides a lot of internal decoders and filters (mostly based on ffmpeg/libavcodec), and if memory serves me right it even has its own renderer, and pretty much customizes its graph building, so you don't get a default DirectShow graph. To be honest, the DirectShow code provided by Microsoft usually ends up providing very little besides the Renderer (unless you're using an external renderer like madVR or Haali) and the glue code.

[Const-me]

> to replace it with something inferior

Media Foundation ain’t that bad. I coded some moderately advanced stuff with it, custom stream sources, custom transforms — it was fun, and it run well.

I can see how it was inferior back in 2007. The first version of MF was shipped with Vista, and Vista… Let’s just say many people were disappointed with it. Nowadays however, when you only need to support Windows 7+, MF is fine.