Digital Home Thoughts: VideoLAN Plays HD as Smooth as Butter

"Videolan announced the availability of VLC 1.1.0 a couple of days back. VLC's popularity soared in the mid-2000s when standard definition videos were all the craze, and CPUs were powerful enough to easily decode them. Over the last few years, many people have built up a big library of high definition videos, and one of the complaints against VLC was the fact that all the inbuilt codecs relied completely on the CPU horsepower for decoding. "

GPU acceleration is a topic that is getting hotter by the minute. Recently, there was a report that NVidia's GPUs could process (certain) tasks 14 times faster than the most elite Intel CPU. This excess parallel processing capacity is wasted most of the time, however, it is ideal for playing back video. There have been several other programs or platforms that have done this, from Flash to XBMC, with very impressive results. VLC now joins the club, however, for various technical reasons, only those with relatively current NVidia GPUs will get the accelerated goodness. As AnandTech demonstrates, it definitely lightens the load on the CPU. The only downside is that I am unable to find any mention of whether the acceleration supports the Broadcom HD chip, which would make VLC an ideal client for netbooks that are coming out.