Can VLC use external decoders with video hardware accel?

[beagle72]

Hi,

I recently found VideoLan/VLC as a means to play multicast streams over my LAN (source is satellite DVB/MPEG2 streamed from MyTheatre). It works ok, but the CPU usage is high especially when decoding HDTV streams.

With other media players, such as Zoom Player, the user can choose codecs, for example, the NVidia mpeg2 codec which uses hardware acceleration of a capable video card to render even HDTV at a reduced CPU load. However Zoom Player cannot play multicast streams.

Is it possible to configure VLC to use, say, the Nvidia mpeg2 decoder? Or do we have to use the decoders that come with the VLC distribution? I'm on Windows XP.

As an aside, anyone know if a media player that DOES let the user choose decoders (filter graphs) AND can play multicast streams? I can't seem to find one that meets both criteria.

thanks!
beagle

[The DJ]

No it is not, unless you code the support yourself of course

VLC uses it's own decoders, it is what makes it so platform indepandent.

[Gibalou]

It would be really nice to support hardware decoding for HDTV support though.

Windows and Linux have standard extensions for hardware MPEG video decoding so I was wondering if it would be possible to have some kind of common "advanced" packetizer that would parse and format the MPEG video stream data ready to be fed to hardware decoder plugins.
I would have been interested in working on such a thing, unfortunately I don't have anything to test this.

I also wonder if many graphic cards support hardware decoding of HDTV streams. If not then hardware decoding would become a lot less attractive.