The VideoLAN Forums

Could a VLC expert comment on the current status of hardware acceleration for video decode and/or playback? I've been searching the forum for a definitive yes or no, but it seems that only the users have been discussing their experiences with adjusting the video options and observing the results. What I need to know is whether DVD playback is being accelerated. My power measurements are almost identical for all cases when changing the options for "Accelerated Video Output" and for "Output" in the General Video Settings. My CPU usage in XP is around 5-10%, so I am assuming that hardware acceleration is always on, overriding whatever options I have chosen. My video card is an integrated Mobile Intel 45 Express, and I am using VLC 0.9.8a.

Thanks for any insight.

I'm no expert, but have a read of viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9647 I assume you have already seen viewtopic.php?f=2&t=42328

I suspect VLC is not using graphics card video acceleration but with 10% CPU usage that is probably not an issue for you.
If you want to stress you system a little more try a blue ray resolution movie with H.264 encoding.

On X, VLC uses XVideo or Direct3D, which lets the GPU do chroma conversion (YCbCr->RGB) and scaling in hardware. In principle, we also have XvMC for hardware-accelerated MPEG2 Motion Compensation, but obviously not on Windows.

At least here, I get over 50% CPU usage when doing chroma conversion and scaling in software (and that's with a P4 HT/2,8GHz), compared to a few percent with XVideo.