VLC video playback CPU usage improvement

Community Guides
1

Hi,

You certainly noticed playing a video in VLC draws a lot of CPU. There is a setting that could be changed to drastically reduce the CPU usage.

In my test, I reduced the CPU usage from 150-200% to 10-40%, this makes a huge difference. I used VLC from Flatpak.

In VLC:

  • click on “Tools” in the menu
  • Select “Preferences” (you could just do Ctrl+P)
  • Click on the tab “Video”
  • In the field “output”, select “X11 video output (XCB)”
  • Save
  • If you started to play a video, you need to stop and start again to apply changes

By default, I guess VLC uses OpenGL which uses software rendering on Qubes OS, which draws even more CPU.

12 Likes
2

:rofl:

3

This was actually already low given there is no hardware decoding and my test video is x265 10 bits encoded.

1 Like
4

If you still curious about performance, you can compare it to smplayer (it has mpv backed) or pure mpv? I use X11 there, too.

5

You are my hero

By the way, it would be nice if someone compiled these minor (in terms of implementation) optimizations into a single quality-of-life post/thread so people won’t have to browse through and open a hundred different posts further down the road. Ideally these posts would be organized into sections, give credit, have links, and condense things so they’re as compact as possible

Video playback

1 Like
6

My word. Wish I knew about this years ago. I leave several videos up paused, and they eat up like 10% CPU each doing nothing. This dropped it down a lot.

1 Like
7

For anyone reading this in the future:

1 Like
8

See also:

1 Like