The VideoLAN Forums

Hello Friends,
I have VLC 2.1.5 installed on my Macbook Pro Retina Mid 2012. When I play h264 videos, the energy impact of VLC goes up to 40-50 and laptop becomes quite hot while playing same videos by Quicktime has almost no energy impact.
I believe VLC is not using hardware acceleration to decode h264. how can I enable this ? I have already set Preferences -> Input/Codecs -> Hardware Acceleration to VDA.
Is there any other settings needed to be made to enable hardware decoding ?

UPDATE : I installed VLC 2.2.0 which comes with a disable option for "Preferences -> Input/Codecs -> Hardware Acceleration", when I disabled this option "Energy impact" went up to 70-80, with this option enabled, "Energy impact" is about 30, while Quick time "Energy impact" for same video is around 5. meaning VLC uses 6x more energy to decode same video even with hardware acceleration. I blame Apple for this, they are known to break or limit third party apps intentionally to create the illusion of Apple superiority. Every App I've tried works better on Windows except those provided by Apple directly. Time to ditch the ship guys.
Regards

Currently, it is normal that VLC might use more CPU power with hardware accelerarion than Apples own apps. This is because we offer several video effects, also with hardware acceleration - in constrast to other players like quicktime.

Thanks for your reply bro, quicktime and all other Apple apps suck ! VLC FTW, I hope you can improve on CPU usage of VLC with HW acceleration. you are our only hope.
I use VLC to watch Twitch HLS streams using Livestreamer, I have written a guide on how to do that if anyone is interested :
http://www.adminsehow.com/2014/10/how-t ... e-quality/
The problem with Quicktime is that it is unable to accept any kind of input other than actual files so it is impossible to use with Livestreamer :
https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer/issues/450
https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer ... layers.rst

Hardware Acceleration does not work on 2010 MacBook Air (it crashes when a file entitled to use DVXA plays), I would like to know if this also happens to MacBook Pro or MacBook users as it could be due to the same nVIDIA 320M chip. This seems to be solved on VLC 2.2.0... still waiting for the next release ETA.