Media player performance on Mac

[David DeHaven]

> I just put a MediaView with a MediaPlayer into a FlowPane and displayed it.
> Playing a Full-HD H.264 file consumes between 40 and 60% of CPU. Playing
> the same file in Quicktime consumes about 3-4% CPU. What is the reason for
> the dramatic difference? Is the player subsystem not using hardware
> acceleration for decoding h.264? Is it something else intrinsic to
> MediaPlayer oder MediaView? I thought 8u40's media support was build on top
> of the AVFoundation framework and thus could compete with native players.
> Can I set a flag to force hardware acceleration? Is something being done
> about this? I am a bit worried that an application built on top of this
> would just eat up our users' battery like crazy.

Can you link a sample of a movie that’s causing that much of a performance difference? There will always be a slight difference, but it should not be that much.

Could also be helpful to know more details about the environment you’re running in. Keep in mind the new AVFoundation code is only supported on 10.8 and later due to the lack of certain required APIs in 10.7 and 10.6.

-DrD-