HC Player 1.4

This release brings a major upgrade to HC Player’s playlist and web-media workflow, with a strong focus on responsiveness, large queues, native web playback, safer YouTube playlist handling and keyboard productivity.

Main Highlights

• New 40-item visual playlist pages for much better responsiveness with large queues.
• The real mpv playlist remains complete — the 40-item page is not a queue limit.
• Local files, YouTube, HLS, and other web media share the same paged queue.
• A deterministic 1000-item maximum for the normal queue.
• New Previous / Next page controls with localized tooltips.
• New Ctrl+A shortcut to select every item on the current page.
• Existing Ctrl+Click, batch delete, right-click removal, and Delete-key workflows are preserved.
• Native YouTube playlist support with safe 30-video expansion windows.
• YouTube index= links open the correct 30-video range from the requested position.
• Queued YouTube playlists now expand correctly whether reached by Next or Continuous Playback.
• Improved ownership tracking prevents an older yt-dlp item from interfering with the next queued YouTube playlist.
• More reliable web collection tracking using stable mpv playlist IDs instead of timeout-based state.

The 40-item page applies to the normal HC Player queue as one unified sequence, including:

• Local files
• Local folders added to the queue
• YouTube videos
• YouTube playlist items
• HLS / .m3u8
• Instagram and other yt-dlp-supported web media
• Other normal HTTP/HTTPS media

New Audio Output Controls

Audio channels

HC Player 1.4 adds control over the audio layouts allowed at the output:

• Automatic
• Stereo
• Surround up to 5.1
• Surround up to 7.1

Automatic mode follows the normal device-driven path, while the explicit layouts provide more control for headphones, televisions, soundbars, and AV receivers.

Dolby & DTS passthrough

Compatible encoded audio can be sent directly to a supported receiver or soundbar. Available modes include:

• Off
• Dolby Digital / DTS
• Home Theater (HD)

Home Theater (HD) supports compatible Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS, DTS-HD, and Dolby TrueHD streams. A compatible output device is required.

SponsorBlock

HC Player 1.4 brings native SponsorBlock support, disabled by default:

• Colored category segments on the seek bar.
• Automatic sponsor skipping.
• Category information during timeline interaction.
• Support across Full, Compact, Minimal, and Picture-in-Picture modes.

Fixes and Polish

• Removed resize cursors and resize hit targets from screen edges in borderless fullscreen mode.
• Smoothed Playlist ↔ MediaInfo switching.
• Automatic local folder queues now ignore ZIP/archive files and subdirectories.
• In fullscreen, the first Esc closes the mpv console; a separate second Esc exits fullscreen.
• Improved Picture-in-Picture entry visuals and timeline alignment.
• Corrected dark-theme loading-indicator styling.
• Updated English and Brazilian Portuguese localization.