madVR

madVR is a DirectShow video renderer used by hundreds of thousands of home theater enthusiasts around the world. Designed as a no-compromise approach, madVR tries to achieve the best possible video playback quality. It tries to automatically find other PCs in your local network which are also running the app. If any such PCs are found, you can remotely switch audio and subtitle tracks, jump to specific chapters, etc, etc. For this network functionality to work, It tries to access the local network, obviously.

So if your firewall complains, you know why. If you don't ever plan to use madVR's network functionality, you can safely tell your firewall to block any and all madVR network accesses. Please rest assured, though, that the program does not upload your private data to a server or anything of that sort. So allowing the app to access the LAN should not result in any privacy or security problems.

Features and Highlights

• High quality chroma upsampling
• High-quality scaling (bicubic, mitchell, 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 bit-depth
• Bypasses graphics card's video (damage) algorithms
• All work is done via GPU shaders (except madVR's IVTC atm)
• No shortcuts, highest quality has priority over anything else

Media players supporting madVR:

• DVB Dream
• DVBViewer
• Emby Theater
• JRiver MediaCenter
• KMPlayer
• Kodi DSPlayer
• MPC-BE
• MPC-HC
• PotPlayer
• YAP
• Zoom Player