The main reason I use BE instead of HC is the seekbar preview. I'm so used to it from online video players that not having it in my desktop player seems odd.
Like many forks in open-source, MPC-BE was forked off because of an internal conflict in the team. MPC-BE is made up of all the Russian developers from the former MPC-HC team after a complete breakdown in communication (i.e. drama).
MPC-HC is already so fast, I doubt that claim is even true. I just double-clocked on a video file after a cold boot, the UI shows up almost instantly, and the playback starts after around a second.
To all those asking why BE? It really has NOTHING to do with speed. To simply put, BE was well maintained and continuous bug fixing. From my perspective HC has seen the writing on the wall ever since BE forked.
Not only does it look better, it plays files better then HC by default. Not sure HC has improved since then, back in the day BE would handle AVI, rmvb, WMV, much better without the need of fiddling around with settings and filters.
The writing for MPC-HC was on the wall a lot longer than when MPC-BE was forked. There's no future for a player that's not cross-platform, case-in-point:
> MPC-BE is the only thing I really miss on Mac.
And HC definitely improved after BE was forked. While BE chose to keep maintaining their own decoding filters the HC team chose to completely switch to an internal build of LAV Filters. MPC-HC also had a lot of performance improvements to the internal subtitle renderer.
MPC-BE regularly backported these improvements though, so the fact that MPC-HC died also affects MPC-BE.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/