Lets see if VLC has finally added sane output support... /me checks http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=av http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat

Lets see if VLC has finally added sane output support... /me checks http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=av http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=av Nope. sigh [X11, SDL, FrameBuffer] These are all basically dumb framebuffers. [XVideo] Ahh, the X Video Extension... from 22 years ago. It only accelerates some specific parts of the process such as the final colorspace conversion. [ASCII Art] I assume they mean libaa. How last decade. Besides, everybody knows the Cool Kids all moved on to libcaca's seductive ECMA-48 color escape sequences anyway. :p In all seriousness, I've used mplayer{,2} because it brings my CPU usage down into to the <1%-2% range on most videos thanks to pretty much all of the work being done on the video card by way of VDPAU. How much do I care about this? Well let's see: (100% == one fully ussed core of my old 3GHz Core2, gpu is a 9800gtx) video is: 1280x720 23.976fps h.264 High profile L4.0 (no audio) CPU usage w/ vdpau: mpv 2.8%, /usr/bin/X 5.2% CPU usage w/ x11: mpv 10.4%, /usr/bin/X 36% [aside]Wow; it seems mpv has improved the software rendering engine. mplayer{,2} used to be about 10% to 15% higher![/aside] Even on non-Nvidia hardware, the software has always had a very strong focus on efficiency. Their GL output drivers are great, and even the bad, old Matrox G200 I was stuck for far too long was fully supported. I wouldn't have been able to watch some videos without the hardware-assist. There are other reasons I've always liked mplayer too, but the fact that it actually plays the videos that were a slideshow in vlc (and most other players) made the choice obvious.