VLC is draining your battery.....Here is how to fix it..!
Many tests and researches have shown that Windows 10’s Movies & TV app offering more than double the battery life of VLC and other video players. This is because Movies & TV uses hardware acceleration, VLC also supports but we just have to enable it first. Then, you’ll be able to enjoy the advanced features of your favorite video player without the battery draining.
>>What Is Hardware Acceleration?
Before I tell you about the feature....firstly know what is hardware acceleration.There are several different ways to play back a video. One is through “software decoding”. A video player reads the video file and decodes the information using your computer’s processor, or CPU. Modern CPUs can handle this and provide smooth video.
Hardware accelerated decoding, however, is much more efficient. With hardware acceleration, the CPU hands off the decoding work to the graphics processor (GPU), which is designed to accelerate the decoding (and encoding) of certain types of videos. In a nutshell, the GPU can do certain types of math faster and with less electricity required. That translates to longer battery life, less heat, and smoother playback on slow computers.
Unfortunately, many modern video players–VLC included–don’t bother using hardware acceleration by default, even if they support it. So you need to turn it on yourself.Here is how one can do it...👇👇
>>How to Enable Hardware Acceleration in VLC
You must enable hardware acceleration if you’re using VLC on a laptop or tablet. The only reason not to do so is that this may cause compatibility problems on some old systems, particularly older computers with buggy hardware drivers. If you encounter a problem with playing video in VLC, you can always disable this option later.
To enable hardware acceleration in VLC, head to Tools > Preferences.
Click the “Input / Codecs” tab, click the “Hardware-accelerated Decoding” box under Codecs, and set it to “Automatic”.
VLC lists the video codecs it can accelerate. On Windows, H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV3, and VC-1 are all hardware accelerated. On a Mac, only H.264 is hardware accelerated. Videos that aren’t hardware accelerated will play normally.....VLC will just use your CPU and you won’t get any battery life improvement.
>>Movies & TV is also not a bad option..!
If you want to save battery life, you can always use the “Movies & TV” application included with Windows 10.It is the default video player on Windows 10, so just double-clicking a video will open it in Movies & TV, assuming you haven’t gone out of your way to install a different video player and set it as your default video player.
While you might assume that, Movies & TV would be slower and heavier than a traditional desktop application like VLC, you’d be wrong. It’s designed to provide properly hardware accelerated playback for optimal battery life on laptops and tablets, while VLC isn’t.
>>Enable Hardware Acceleration in Other Video Players
If you have another preferred video player, be sure to poke around in its options–or perform a web search for the name of the video player and “hardware acceleration”–to ensure you’ve enabled the hardware acceleration option. If the video player doesn’t offer hardware acceleration, you probably shouldn’t use it while your laptop is on battery power.
0 comments: