VLC hardware acceleration on Mac

[JohnMcPayne]

Hey guys.

I know you are busy, but I think a lot of people would like to have this feature in VLC as Mac remains the last OS where hardware acceleration isn't supported.

In 2010 Apple released information to VDA video decoder module. And since then only Plex and XBMC integrated this into their player, resulting in 30%!! fewer CPU usage.
I found a ticket #5320 in your tracker where someone claims to use this in VLC through a patch and I hoped that this will get implemented into 2.0 but it wasn't.
Is there a nightly build or an easy way to get this patch? Are you planning to support hardware acceleration in VLC?

This is something very important for a lot of people out there. Apple shows us with Quicktime X that with a CPU load of just 9% you can watch 1080p videos on a Macbook Pro.


It is a matter of battery life. A matter of portability.

[jlaham]

I second that request and was hoping for it to show up in 2.0 as well... I personally hate using Quicktime, i dunno, I'm allergic to it I guess, but it's really frustrating to know that I'm forced to have 30-40 % CPU usage when watching H.264 MP4 HD videos on my MBP, when it can easily be offloaded to the GPU.

The VDA Decoder library is detailed here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac ... index.html

I don't have much experience with Mac development, and not really sure how much it differs from iOS development, granted they should be pretty similar, but this really doesn't seem that hard; from what I understood from just reading it briefly is that it's a pipeline procedure, create-decode-destroy.

PLEASE try and add this feature soon.

P.S. I love the new UI for VLC 2.0 on OS X.

[JohnMcPayne]

Hey jlaham.

They already know about this but it seems that there are problems or incompatibilities. I can't use VLC during the daytime because I need my battery and I don't like to carry my charger around.

So this is really important. I hope the developers find a way to implement VDA decoder.