3

I've found that VLC uses ~17% CPU for x264 FHD videos, ~28% for HEVC FHD videos, and ~80% for HEVC 4k videos.

sudo lshw -c video

produces..

  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Cezanne
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0
       logical name: /dev/fb0
       version: c3
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi msix vga_controller bus_master cap_list fb
       configuration: depth=32 driver=amdgpu latency=0 resolution=3840,2160
       resources: irq:40 memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:e0000000-e01fffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:fcc00000-fcc7ffff

Processor: AMD® Ryzen 5 5560u with radeon graphics × 12

Graphics: RENOIR (renoir, LLVM 15.0.6, DRM 3.47, 5.19.0-35-generic)

2 Answers2

5

The solution for me was...

sudo apt remove vlc

then...

sudo apt install mpv

I now get consistent ~8% CPU usage playing UHD HEVC videos vs. ~80% with VLC.

  • 5
    No need to remove vlc, mpv can use hardware acceleration even if VLC is still installed. – pts Mar 13 '23 at 12:43
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    You probably also want to edit ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf or ~/.mpv/mpv.conf with profile=gpu-hq and hwdec=auto if not already enabled. I've been using MPV for years, so I don't know how much of my config file is still needed, but I also had to set hwdec-codecs=hevc,vp8,vp9,mpeg1video,mpeg2video,h264,vc1,wmv3 which is appropriate for my Skylake iGPU. (I much prefer MPV to VLC anyway, with good key-binds for accurate seeking and single-stepping fwd / backward, and very fast startup from the command line.) – Peter Cordes Mar 13 '23 at 17:38
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    @pts Simply removing VLC is probably easier than finding out how that particular Linux desktop environment handles file type associations. – AndreKR Mar 13 '23 at 20:02
  • @PeterCordes I didn't need to specify hardware decoding in the conf file. It just did it automatically. –  Mar 14 '23 at 06:16
  • @deanresin: IIRC, an old version of MPV maybe didn't do it by default for all the relevant codecs, like maybe by default for H.264 and H.265, but IIRC it wasn't doing HW decode for VC1 / WMV3 without manual config. Hopefully that's changed now, and it will HW decode for anything your HW supports. – Peter Cordes Mar 14 '23 at 11:52
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    Also, profile=gpu-hq is a good idea for video quality if your video hardware is fast enough, if the default is only gpu. It'll use a higher-quality scaling algorithm. (You might need to use a faster scaler for 2160p60 videos, if it can't push that many pixels.) That's separate from enabling HW decoding. – Peter Cordes Mar 14 '23 at 14:18
4

To simply cite another site:

  • In Settings/Preferences
  • look for Input/Codecs tab
  • check out the option Hardware-accelerated decoding
  • select the Automatic option and you are fine

( please comment if you have trouble ;) )

Generic User
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  • 2
    I disabled it and I was still getting ~80% CPU usage playing a HEVC 4k video which leads me to believe it is not using hardware acceleration. –  Mar 13 '23 at 01:58