Postby thmtrxhsu » 23 Apr 2019 03:39
It is annoying to see lack of intelligence behind some of the VLC builds.
What does he mean.
Well, Macs have very specific hardware configurations, there is simply no reason for VLC not to perform its best from the the getgo yet it does not.
There should be no need for users to configure the options. I would say the VLC team could identify the cpu and gpu for every OS and apply a preset for all, but in fact there is no need to do so for OSX. Because I am a mighty power user, and I will provide the best options possible for VLC 3xxxx series balancing detail, color and providing maximum performance under the worst circumstances. These have been tested under Mohave with activity monitor.
I am using a 2009 mid Macbook Pro with Mohave (impossible as per Apple, but possible otherwise) and I changed the battery, put an SSD and now the memory is 8GB and it runs as good as when Snow Leapard was installed if not better so it has a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (a piece of --please stay polite--) and a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB an even bigger piece of --please stay polite--. Two things should stand out from this from VLC's point of view, hardware acceleration isn't going to work and therefore the VLC performance will be dictated by CPU so any performance tweaks should be applied.
Mac OS X Mohave VLC 3xxxx series Tweaks (copy and use this as baseline for future builds):
In preferences, select Show All,
Audio should be set to SRC Resampler with Sync Function Fast.
Video, checkmark everything in between embedded video to mouse events
show video title for 0 milliseconds
show mouse cursor for 3000 milliseconds (to prevent mouse triggering performance degradation, that's why 3 seconds as opposed to 0)
uncheck display video snapshot preview
check video auto scaling and fix HDTV height
uncheck window decorations
deinterlace off
do not use any video filter as this takes a performance hit.
Subtitles / OSD uncheck everything
Output module, easy the only one that works with VLC 3.0 + Mohave is Mac OS X Open GL Video Output (drop down menu option)
Selecting the Mac OS X panel in output modules,
disable open gl hardware converter, set rendering intent to perceptual and tone mapping to hard clip out
Input / Codecs
scroll down, file caching 60 000 ms
Demuxers
Matroska: check preload mkv and preload clusters
FFmpeg (used for HEVC) check direct rendering, uncheck show corrupted frames, check hurry up, set skip frame to non-key, and skip IDCT to 4
allow speedtricks, skip the loop filter for non-ref, hardware decoding disabled
Access Modules: you should find Matroska and FFmpeg, just quickly verify that the settings are configured as previously indicated
FYI Stream output is for web streaming.
Now go back to simple view of options by clicking show basic and verify
Video that deinterlace is off
Subtitles, that enable OSD is off
Input Output Codecs that default caching is set to Higher latency (puts less stress on CPU), hardware decoding is off, post processing is set to 1,
skip the loop is set to non-ref and skip frames is enabled.
Done. VLC 3.0 will now give you maximum performance. Also there should be a link within VLC that goes to a page documentation supported GPUs for hardware acceleration, and the required drivers (propriety, linux).
If you want to give the best experience for mac users, above is the perfect baseline.
It is also what should be copied (where possible) for linux and windows unless there is incontrovertible reasoning to the contrary.
The problem with windows and linux is the former has a massive hardware pool and the latter the same in addition to a massive software pool.
In addition VLC has too many hardware acceleration options (its too complicated and needs to be agglomerated); basically there should only be one hardware acceleration option in simple view and one in the show all view, and second beside each of these there should be a link documenting under which circumstance hardware acceleration works (OS, Drivers, Hardware...).
