h.264 hardware acceleration

[sjagoddard]

h.264 hardware acceleration

I was wondering what h.264 hardware acceleration you get from VLC, in particular with the Intel GMA 950 graphics (Acer Aspire One netbook)...

I was expecting none – but I recently tried a few DVD rips I have (encoded by myself at h.264 with handbrake) – and found that the playback was only using 25 to 30% CPU – this is on an Intel Atom processor... There is no way IMHO that the CPU could be decoding the whole thing itself with this little CPU, so there must be some acceleration from the GMA950, yes???

I also have an older laptop with a Pentium M 1.4Ghz that quite frankly struggles with the same files, and from what I hear Pentium M should be a much faster CPU...

ta

[patch]

See viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9647
and viewtopic.php?f=2&t=55355

I thought VLC did not use / used limited video card hardware acceleration for h.264 decoding but it maybe introduced with v1.1
I find media player classic does currently support video card acceleration. Might be worth comparing processor load.

[sjagoddard]

I thought exactly the same - until the little test before... I just redid it - checking everything.

The pentium M is actually running at 1.6GHz - exactly the same as the Atom - with a Geforce 5200 mobile GPU (frequency double checked with cpu-z)
The atom is running at 1.6GHz - with the Intel GMA 950 GPU (frequency double checked with cpu-z)

Both running XP sp3 with latest relevant drivers for each system. Both systems settle to 0% CPU when no playback is running.

Running LoTR - Return of the King on the pentium M = 80% CPU usage, sometimes 100% with stutter
Running LoTR - Return of the King on the atom = 30% CPU usage, no stutter

Only conclusion is that either the Atom is considerably faster then the Pentium M (sse3 and sse4??) or there is hardware H.264 acceleration from the GMA950

[sjagoddard]

Oh - and I haven’t tried media player classic because it didn't want to play the file without additional codecs - ie why VLC is so great