VLC GPU Acceleration only works if enabled explicitly

[gordon1348]

I was playing with some 60 FPS videos I shot on my iPhone and noticed that VLC had extremely high CPU utilization - it was pegging an entire core and giving another one a good workout. The same video in QuickTime had about 9% CPU utilization. I went into settings and noticed that "Input/Codecs > Hardware Acceleration" was set to "Default." According to the tooltip, default "allows hardware decoding when available." Seems sensible. Anyway, I changed the setting from "Default" to "VDA" (the OS X video acceleration framework) and restarted VLC. VLC CPU utilization on the same video dropped to about 20%. I changed the setting back and it went back to 130%+ (100% in OS X meaning a single core fully utilized.)

It seems that VLC's auto-detection of hardware acceleration capability is broken. Is anyone else seeing similar behavior?

This is on a mid-2011 iMac with an AMD Radeon HD 6970M (i.e., a card that fully supports VDA.)

[kdean]

I can confirm seeing the same issue with VLC 2.2 Nightly on a Mid-2011 iMac with a AMD Radeon HD 6770M

[dfuhrmann]

This is intentional, even you are right that the UI is quite of confusing. VDA is currently only used if you select it directly. This is because VDA was not stable enough yet.

[gordon1348]

This is intentional, even you are right that the UI is quite of confusing. VDA is currently only used if you select it directly. This is because VDA was not stable enough yet.

OK, good to know this is at least expected behavior. However, there is no way at all you would get this from the dialog. The tooltip doesn't accurately describe the behavior at all, nor do the options even make sense. What is "default?" Apparently in this case Default means always use software rendering. It seems like the logical way to set this up would be to get rid of the tooltip, change "default" to "software" and maybe append "Beta" or "Unstable" to the VDA option so people know there is an actual reason it's not always on. Once the feature is actually being enabled when available, it ought to say "Automatic." Better yet, maybe just change it to a checkbox that says "Use Hardware Acceleration if possible (BETA)" and leave it unchecked by default.

[asoksevil]

Hardware Acceleration doesn't work on my 2010 MacBook Air OS X 10.6.8 while it should be totally compatible (nVidia 320M). VLC crashes automatically when tries to use GPU acceleration with a compatible file format.

It seems to be fixed on VLC 2.2 as I reported here: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 24#p408924