That sounds a bit off to me. > writing to the framebuffer in an inefficient way Fun fact you can memory map /dev/fb0 and make changes to it directly. Decodin

That sounds a bit off to me. > writing to the framebuffer in an inefficient way Fun fact you can memory map /dev/fb0 and make changes to it directly. Decoding video frames is much more expensive, than rendering them. The source of the slowdown could be software decoding the video frame. Where the X video player might have been using a specialized chip for this, i.e. GPU or Intel graphics, depending on the setup.