[luci5r]

Working perfectly here.  Maybe someone else will confirm.
I see you altered the code and it looks like it should work.  At the very least PDVD should be opening all of those file types and Kodi everything else but a file name containing HDR.... not MPC even with your alteration.  You have something else screwy directing all files to be played back using MPC.  Maybe your Windows default player action?  I couldn't tell you?  Only you know how your system is setup.  The only logical thing that makes any sense is if you have 4K as part of every file name for every title you have or at least tested but I doubt that.  I also know how easy it is to have a bunch of playercorefactory.xml's on hand renaming them as you go.  Are you sure this one is named proper and is indeed the one in use?  Give some examples of your file names and how they fail to open the proper default player.  Maybe we can see something.

 I hear you brazen1 - I'm as confounded as fathomable. It should be working, but it isn't. I don't see any logical mistake in the code. 

Upon your suggestion, I did some deeper investigation:

i. There are absolutely no default associations with MPC-BE on my system. It is not the default player for any file type. 
ii. As you assumed, all of my media files do not have "4K" appended to them. Only the 2160p media. I tested "1408.mkv", "Beetlejuice.iso", "battleship.mkv", etc.
iii. Checked & re-checked, only one single "playercorefactory.xml" exists in Kodi's userdata folder. Removed all others. Checked code before launching Kodi - code as described. 

This code works well; it opens everything in Kodi's Internal player, except ISOs, bdmv, etc.

Code:


<playercorefactory>
<players>
   <player name="PowerDVD" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
     <filename>C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\PowerDVD17\PowerDVD.exe</filename>
     <args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
     <hidekodi>false</hidekodi>
     <hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
     <warpcursor>none</warpcursor>
   </player>
</players>
<rules action="prepend">
   <rule filetypes="iso|bdmv|mpls|m2ts" player="PowerDVD"/>
   </rules>
</playercorefactory>


This code opens EVERYTHING in MPC-BE, no exceptions.

Code:


<playercorefactory>
  <players>
    <player name="PowerDVD" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
      <filename>C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\PowerDVD17\PowerDVD.exe</filename>
      <args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
      <hidekodi>false</hidekodi>
      <hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
      <warpcursor>none</warpcursor>
    </player>
    <player name="MPC-BE" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
      <filename>C:\Program Files\MPC-BE x64\mpc-be64.exe</filename>
      <args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
      <hidekodi>false</hidekodi>
      <hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
      <warpcursor>none</warpcursor>
    </player>
  </players>
   <rules action="prepend">
    <rule filename="*(4K).*|.*4K.*|.*4K.*|.*4k.*" player="MPC-BE"/>
    <rule filetypes="iso|bdmv|mpls|m2ts" player="PowerDVD"/>
   </rules>
</playercorefactory>


It just doesn't make any sense!!

I'm stumped.