Latest nightly is much, much faster!

[travisbell]

Hey guys, I don't know what you did but the latest nightly plays 720p Xvid's and transport stream (720p/1080i) files much, much better on my 1.5Ghz G4. I am talking, noticeable speed difference. 720p Xvid's are now playable... 0.8.4 they are not, used to drop on avg 4-10 fps... 720p/1080i MPEG2 used to drop about 15fps...

Can any developers say what was changed?

[fkuehne]

Well, first of all, the H.264-decoder by the ffmpeg-people gets better almost week by week. We used a snapshot of this codec taken at the beginning of November for 0.8.4 and 0.8.4a, while the nightly builds are using the current source of the day of their creation.
Additionally, VLC 0.8.4x was built using GCC 3.3.x for compatibility reasons with OSX 10.2.x. The nightlies are built using GCC 4.0.1, which can optimise the codec in a much better way than the previous versions. That's why the decoder runs much faster.

[travisbell]

Well nice work guys, I also love the new video window... it's much nicer having those controls

Cheers, and a happy new year!