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

The last format we have to test is WMV3 on Linux with VDPAU. For this final video clip we used a Microsoft Windows Media Video sample that had a resolution of 1280 x 720.

During the playback of this WMV3 video the CPU usage was constantly above 30% before returning to zero percent after the video had finished playing for a second time.

To no real surprise, VDPAU excelled here again. Without VDPAU we were seeing a CPU usage greater than 30% on this single-core 2.0GHz processor, but with the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix it was less than 5% and at many times not even recordable by the Phoronix Test Suite that it was so low.