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Johnmcpayne

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 26, 2012
4
0
Hello everyone. :)

So the new VLC is out and I am not very happy with it. Besides some small bugs that I don't mind I saw that the CPU usage rose up 20%.

I did some research and with some help of a very nice VLC developer I was able to fix this by deleting some files in VLC.app, which lowered the quality.
But:
It still needs 30-35% of my CPU.
QT X just needs 14%.

I found out that this is because QT X is using hardware acceleration.
As everyone knows on Lion even with Perian you aren't able to open video files with subtitles in it.

But it seems that no other player is using hardware acceleration, besides Plex and XBMC which are so unhandy and for just watching videos on your Macbook.

Has someone a solution for this? Or any suggestion? I tried to convert my mkvs to mp4s so that QT X is able to open them, but this isn't a very good solution either.

And other players like movist and MPlayerX even need more CPU (up to 70%!). This might not be a problem for people who watch videos on a MacPro or at home but without cable it literally sucks out your battery.

So it seems to me that OS X has no really good way to play videos.
You have to convert your videos or you have to use software decoding players like VLC or movist which can give you good quality but raise your CPU usage to unbelievable high percentage or keep down the quality. :(

This isn't a really satisfying solution I suppose.
 
Tried Movist yet?

You can change the playback engine, though QT is a not as good as FFmpeg:
2012_02_26_pE1_MovistPlaybackChange.png

2012_02_26_pE2_MovistPlaybackChange.png

 
yup. It also has just software decoding and so it has "high" cpu usage at about 40%.
I hoped that maybe someone knows another player besides those media center software that supports hardware acceleration on Mac.
 
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