The VideoLAN Forums

I get the error message "more than x seconds of late video, dropping frame rate (computer too slow)" with a few movies. I doubt it is because of my computer - I have a G5. According to Activity Monitor, VLC only uses 30% of CPU. Can I boost the performance of VLC, make it more powerful?

Which Mac do you use and which version of VLC? I strongly recommend you to download a nightly build. We will release a new version based upon these nightlies within the next 2 weeks, so this source is quite stable actually.

And if VLC is dropping frames, it automatically uses less CPU. that doesn't mean it has enough CPU to decode.

maybe this will help:

System Preferences/Energy Saver/Options you can choose to set your Processor Performace to Highest.

I shouldn't talk as a binary only user but the best way is probably to compile it yourself with system specific settings to get more performance.