madVR is a new high quality GPU assisted video renderer. I’d say game changing video renderer if it will be developed actively. When I started to use madVR, I was amazed that video playback quality produced by madVR was different from other renderers (Haali, Enhanced Video Renderer, VMR-9) as night and day. Now I don’t need to adjust any contrast, saturation, sharpen or resize options because any video looks perfect right out the box. In addition to madVR, Media Player Classic Home Cinema is the only thing I need to play perfectly all my video files. I’m happy to forget about all these codec packs and mess with updating them.

So what makes madVR outstanding?

Developer of this GPU assisted renderer Madshi says that by developing madVR “highest quality has priority over anything else”. Among madVR unique features: high quality chroma upsampling and scaling (lanczos, spline, etc), high quality YCbCr -> RGB conversion, gamut & gamma correction for display calibration, full 16bit processing queue, final 16bit processing result is dithered down to RGB output bitdepth, bypasses graphics card’s video (damage) algorithms. In a nutshell, this video renderer tries to use all the quality which is present in video file and outputted by video decoders without damaging it on the way. All video resizing and transformation is done in the most efficient way as well.

How I can get best quality video playback using madVR?

Currently madVR is only supported in last builds of Media Player Classic Home Cinema. First of all, you need to download madVR, unpack and install it by clicking .bat file (check out Readme.txt included). Then download latest MPC Home Cinema build and go to View->Options->Output and put checkbox to madVR in Directshow settings column. Now open your favorite movie and enjoy!