How to enable gpu accelerated decoding in VLC

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 5, 2013
Updated • May 1, 2018
Music and Video
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13

If you are noticing choppy playback in VLC Media Player when playing high resolution video files, you may under certain circumstances benefit from gpu accelerated decoding in the media player to smooth things out. The feature in theory uses the processing power of the graphic card to lighten the load on the processor of the system which in turn makes playback of the video file smoother.

There are a couple misconceptions about this though that need to be addressed first before you can make an educated decision about turning the feature on.

First, according to VLC's GPU Decoding page, it is available for H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV3, VC-1 streams only on Windows. On Mac OS X only H.264 is supported right now and on Linux, it depends on whether an Intel or Broadcom graphics card, or an AMD or Nvidia graphics card is used.

For the former, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Visual, WMV3, VC-1 and H.264 are supported, and for the latter, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Visual (and possibly H.263), WMV3, VC-1 and H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC, are supported.

Second, the data is decoded with the help of the GPU at the decoding stage and then transferred back to the player so that the other stages, filtering and streaming for instance, can be processed. This means that it can under circumstances be slower than before (without gpu acceleration enabled).

Last but not least, GPU decoding is only available for select operating systems. While Windows Vista and newer versions of the Microsoft operating system are supported, Windows XP is not at this point in time. The majority of graphic cards should support hardware acceleration just fine. Make sure you have installed the latest drivers though.

Enabling hardware acceleration in VLC

vlc hardware accelerated decoding

Open VLC Media Player and click on Tools > Preferences or press Ctrl-P to open the settings window of the program.

If you are using the simple settings interface, click on Input & Codecs on the left sidebar and make sure Hardware-accelerated decoding is set to Automatic. If you notice issues, try setting it to one of the available decoding options. On Windows, those are Direct3D11 Video Acceleration or DirectX Video Acceleration.

Tip: you can deactivate the feature here as well if you notice playback issues after enabling it.

If you are using the "all" settings interface select Input/Codecs > Video Codecs > FFmpeg and make sure that Hardware decoding is set to automatic instead to enable acceleration this way.

vlc ffmpeg hardware decoding

Click on the save button afterward and restart the media player to work with the new setting.

Try playing several video files that use different formats to see if hardware acceleration makes a difference in terms of playback. If it does, keep the setting enabled. If it does not, just go back to the settings to modify the option or disable it right away instead.

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How to enable gpu accelerated decoding in VLC
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How to enable gpu accelerated decoding in VLC
Description
If you are noticing choppy playback in VLC Media Player when playing high resolution video files, you may under certain circumstances benefit from gpu accelerated decoding in the media player to smooth things out.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. Anonymous said on August 1, 2010 at 12:43 pm
    Reply

    Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?

  2. Mike J said on August 1, 2010 at 2:58 pm
    Reply

    Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.

    1. Martin said on August 1, 2010 at 3:39 pm
      Reply

      Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.

      1. Mike J said on August 2, 2010 at 2:30 pm
        Reply

        huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
        Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.

  3. myo said on August 1, 2010 at 5:52 pm
    Reply

    yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.

  4. Kishore said on August 13, 2010 at 2:55 pm
    Reply

    Error:
    Buidling font Cache pop-up

    Solution:

    Open VLC player.

    On Menu Bar:

    Tools
    Preferences

    (at bottom – left side)
    Show settings — ALL

    Open: Video
    Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
    Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”

    Save
    Exit

    Re-open – done.
    Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts

    Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc

    1. Martin said on August 13, 2010 at 3:10 pm
      Reply

      Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.

  5. javier said on August 14, 2010 at 1:50 pm
    Reply

    @Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
    I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.

    Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?

    I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…

    /thanks
    /j

  6. Kishore said on August 15, 2010 at 12:38 pm
    Reply

    @ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,

  7. Kishore said on August 15, 2010 at 12:39 pm
    Reply

    @ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.

    No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure

  8. Ted said on October 22, 2010 at 3:57 am
    Reply

    Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me

  9. Evan said on December 8, 2013 at 1:48 am
    Reply

    I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).

  10. Mike Williams said on September 6, 2023 at 1:26 pm
    Reply

    Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?

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