How to Watch Videos With VLC without Using Much Battery Life




To make your computer system battery last long while watching movies with VLC player, you just have to enable Hardware Accelaration.

What Is Hardware Acceleration?

There are different ways to play back a video they are: 

Software Decoding: In this mode 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 just fine, but the CPU isn’t really optimized for doing this type of math.

Hardware accelerated decoding: This mode 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.
Hardware acceleration is only available for certain video codecs. In general, when you rip or download videos, you should use H.264 (which is pretty popular these days, so it shouldn’t be hard to find). These often have the .mp4 file extension. Hardware acceleration is most widely available for this type of video.

VLC and other modem video players dont use hardware acceleration by default, even if they support it. So you need to turn it on yourself.

How to Enable Hardware Acceleration in VLC:

The only set back about enabling hardware acceleration is some older devices do not support it. so if you encounter any issues while playing a video in hardware acceleration feel free to turn it off because your device those not support it.

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”.



Videos that aren’t hardware accelerated will play normally, VLC will just use your CPU and you won’t get any battery life improvement.

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