I’ve long loved VLC for video playback, mostly for its fantastic ability to play just about anything I throw at it (their codec support is fantastic). In the next version, they’re adding one long-sought feature to boost the performance to levels comparable with other players: GPU acceleration.
Using DxVA2 on Windows Vista and 7 and VAAPI on Linux, the decoding stage of VLC framework can now be done by the GPU.
If you have a compatible GPU, especially an nVidia, it should go way faster. VLC should consume less than 10% of your CPU and your CPU shouldn’t be at full speed anymore.
via On the road to VLC 1.1.0 part 1: faster – Yet another blog for JBKempf.
