[mileswu]

There are many rendering filters and pipelines available for DirectShow (and therefore MPC-HC) that VLC does not have. For example MadVR[1] improves upscaling and display rendering quality dramatically and xy-VSFilter can render subtitles many times faster than libass which is used in VLC.

These are just two examples that I came up with off the top of my head, but there are countless more. The advantage of VLC is that it's simple and just works out of the box for 95% of stuff, but MPC/Directshow gives you far more flexibility as you can construct a very custom filter chain (eg. using different decoders and renderers).

[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228 [2] https://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/