Month January 2019

Make MPC-BC more like MPC-HC

I have been a long time user of MPC-HC which was recently abandoned by its developers. It’s a shame, because the media player was not only versatile and minimal. It was blazing fast, very user friendly, and supported all media formats I could think of. So I started to use MPC-BC instead, as recommended by many. Its a great alternative, though it honestly looks like a cheap and tacky version of MPC-HC. For me though, some of the default settings are a bit odd. Player window does not adjust to resolution First of all, the player window does not adjust to the video resolution. This means that if you open a video in UHD resolution, for example, the video player might be super small. Here is how you can fix it: Just turn on “Auto-zoom” to 100% in Options -> Playback. Blurry subtitles Another strange default setting in MPC-BC is that subtitles look very blurry. Almost as if they are burned in the video, even if they are external subtitles. You can fix this by going to Options -> Subtitles -> Rendering and set the “maximum texture resolution” to “Desktop”. Turn off dark theme You can also turn off the “dark theme”. Not sure why everyone is so obsessed with that these days. Options -> Player -> Interface -> Uncheck “Use dark theme”. Remove the logo The startup MPC-BC logo is not really too good looking either. Why not just remove it? Options -> Player -> Logo -> Skip with right arrow until the picture is gone.

Record microphone with FFmpeg in Windows

It’s easy to record your computer microphone with FFmpeg. The only tricky part (although not that tricky) is you just have to know the name of your microphone input. Before you begin make sure you have FFmpeg added to PATH. Let’s start by listing your recording devices. Amongst other things this will give you something like: The only thing you need to note is your device name. In this case it is Line (3- Steinberg UR44). To start the recording you just run the following code: To stop the recording hit CTRL+C. -f dshow means “DirectShow” and lets FFmpeg capture audio and video devices, video capture devices, analog tv tuner devices. -i audio="name_of_your_microphone" is the audio device you wish to record from. Replace name_of_your_microphone with the name of your input device. -c:a libmp3lame means FFmpeg will encode the audio with LAME MPEG Audio Layer III, also known as the MP3 format. -ar 44100 tels FFmpeg to record at a sample rate of 44,100 Hz. That is the standard for most audio nowadays unless you intend to use the audio for a video in which case you would use 48,000 Hz. -b:a 320k is the audio bit rate. The highest support for MP3 is 320 kbit/s. -ac 1 means the audio will be in mono as opposed to stereo streams. This makes sense as most microphones record in mono only. If you haven’t changed the directory in your command line you can always specify where to save the file. For example C:\output.mp3.