HD Video Playback With A $20 CPU & $30 GPU On Linux

To start with we have our results from the H.264 VDPAU testing. Our first H.264 file was the Grey.ts mplayer sample video that is recorded at 1920 x 1080. Below is the CPU usage over the course of three minutes with playing back the sample video several times.

Now is the result when using VDPAU for the codec and output module.

As you can see from these results the CPU usage had dropped dramatically. Without VDPAU the low-end Sempron was facing a near-constant utilization rate of more than 50% and frequently would spike to 100% usage. When switching to VDPAU, the CPU utilization started out at just under 20% and never went beyond that. Most of the time the CPU utilization was less than 10% and would just jump when restarting the H.264 video file playback.