How to enable gpu accelerated decoding in VLC
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
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.
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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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
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.
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.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
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
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@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
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ 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
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
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).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?