I was tempted by MC when the development of the JRVR video renderer was announced, and started using it after purchasing MC 28.
I am using MC exclusively as a video player since then, and the presence of the JRVR and its ability to play BluRays with menu support are the single reasons I use it. This is because I find using MC even just for this too cumbersome and plagued with issues.
I am not interested in it as a music player. Foobar2000 is easier to use, just drag and drop files to its playlist (or select them from the Add files dialog), press play and that's it. ASIO support is the only other thing I want from an audio player, and foobar has that too. While once upon a time I was into organizing stuff into collections and categories, now I just despise myself for the large amount of time wasted on that, as I looked back at one point and asked myself what was the point of it, and I will never be tempted in doing that again.
Unfortunately, the "library manager first, media player second" user interface is also impacting the experience of using MC as a video player in a negative way:
- you double-click a video file in Windows Explorer and want to launch it in MC; great, it works, but when you attempt to close the video player by pressing ESC or Alt+F4 like in any other video player, MC goes to "Standard View" mode instead of closing the video player, so now you have to press Alt+F4 once more;
- you want to easily see what are the files you opened last night so you play some other file in the same folder today: tough luck if you made the mistake to launch MC while the network drive where the files were located is disconnected - MC forgets what files you previously played when you launch it in such a case; while a simple player like MPC keeps all the previous entries visible in the history of its File open dialog no matter whether they are still available on the network or not, a complex player like MC doesn't;
- you want to prevent subtitles from destroying night scenes in movies, especially in HDR where their luminosity is too great, so you go to change the alpha blending value to blend them into the background and make them less visible - there is no such option of changing the alpha blending in MC; unfortunately this is another case where a simple player like MPC can do something which MC can't;
- you want to play m2ts files from inside a BluRay BDMV folder from inside MC - can't do that, MC doesn't even show them; you have to double-click on the m2ts file in Windows Explorer instead;
- you want to use your remote control from the sofa, with MC in the Theater View mode and use the Explorer gadget to browse to a location on your disks where video files are located, and play them:
-- first of all, you notice it takes a long amount of time to enter a folder which has many video files, especially when that folder is on a network location
-- then the folder is entered, and you notice that instead of the file names, you are presented with the "title" metadata of the video files;
So, not only a "File Explorer" interface does not display the file names, but you also pay for all the time needed to parse the files themselves for the title metadata that is shown in the Explorer view, and that's why you're waiting when entering a folder with many video files.
-- still in the file "Explorer" widget of Theater View, you want to see the individual m2ts files inside a BluRay BDMV folder and play them, but you can't as MC hides everything inside the BDMV folder;
-- you want to have an ISO of a BluRay or DVD mounted and play it while resting on your sofa in Theater Mode: the ISO it is mounted, but it's mounted twice, in two different disc drives; every new ISO you try, two more disc drives are created on your Windows OS filled with images; when you are done with MC, you have to manually eject by yourself the countless disc drives created from Windows Explorer; that doesn't make for a great Theater View experience;
Many of these I have already reported in various threads on MC28 and MC29 but there was no interest in doing something about them. Here's hoping that making MC30 easier to use as a video player will be given some effort. Simple operations like these, many for which a simple player like MPC has no issue with, should not be problems for a MC user. The performance as a video player is exceptional, but I find the user experience quite bad.
