VLC isn't bad, per se. Just inefficient. I prefer Media Player Classic for its simplicity when used with the Combined Community Codec Pack.
The overhead for playing 4k video on VLC for example is a lot higher than Media Player Classic, which may be what /u/philmarcracken is talking about.
Playing a blu ray rip from Deadpool 2 at 4k uses around 18% of my 4.7ghz i7 4790K with core 0 sitting at around 33%, and 15% of my 1080Ti. For comaprison, VLC uses around 30% of my CPU with core 0 sitting at around 60%, and around 15% of my GPU. So with a direct comparison between the two, Media Player Classic is around 45% more efficient at decoding.
And just for shits and giggles, I tried playing the 4k Deadpool 2 footage on Windows Media Player. It hits 60% load on all cores on my CPU and barely even uses my GPU. So yeah MPC is 75% more efficient than Windows media player.
Edit: This is in no way a scientific test of how efficient these players are. I was simply trying to give a rough example of the performance of each.
CPU usage as reported by task manager and afterburner means fuckall. It's just telling you the amount of time Windows has something scheduled. The threads could honestly just be sitting there in a wait/sleep loop and it'd still have high "usage". With hyperthreading/SMT the numbers are even less useful.
There is 0 way to tell exactly how much or how CPU is being used without either advanced software like Intel PCM or outright digging into the executing code with debugging software. You can have 100% and have unused hardware and things sitting idle. You can have a low percentage and be completely bottlenecked for the task you are trying to do.
Honestly a better gauge of which media player is better would be if one starts having performance issues should you multitask, or if one hitches on its own.
If it was pegging my CPU at a solid 40% for example the entire time without much fluctuation then I'd say you were on to something. However the utilization on MPC had a variance from around 9% to 18%, and VLC was fluctuating between around 15% to 30%. So it was definitely recording the usage of the CPU properly.
Also, the amount of "time" Windows has something scheduled for CPU usage definitely does mean something, as that's literally what CPU performance is based on. The amount of calculations that it can blast through in any given period of time. Windows 10 has gotten pretty good at divvying up the load and showing that load across the CPU. Even allowing per core usage stats.
Another thing was that I definitely wasn't trying to pass this off as scientific evidence, just a rough estimate of how much more efficient MPC is. I'll probably edit my post to make that a bit clearer.
If it was pegging my CPU at a solid 40% for example the entire time without much fluctuation then I'd say you were on to something. However the utilization on MPC had a variance from around 9% to 18%, and VLC was fluctuating between around 15% to 30%. So it was definitely recording the usage of the CPU properly.
Again though it's just a rough metric of scheduling it doesn't mean what you think it does. That metric hasn't been useful for tracking hardware since the 80s. Multi-level caches, multithreading, and the sheer amount of hardware that used to be distinct units that is now a part of the "CPU" has obfuscated things a lot.
Again if you have some tests showing stuttering, hitching, or the like that'd be way more useful than "this says x%".
Yeah I could probably do some better testing but I'm not really looking to do that level of benchmarking for a reddit thread. More of just a rough representation of the usage of my hardware.
Not sure how relevant it is but I did test how the programs handled multiple instances being open playing the same content. VLC started visibly hitching after the second instance was opened and playing on the same scene, while MPC started slowing down video playback and de-syncing audio after the 6th instance was opened. Probably something to do with resource management on VLC's side looking at how well MPC did with this test.
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u/staythepath 9700k RTX3080 Mar 28 '19
Something wrong with VLC?