Introduction
Various months ago I had hardware problems. To debug this and because I wanted a small server I bought an Intel NUC5PPYH. It’s a really small low power PC. Using this I discovered that my hardware troubles weren’t related to my SSD. Since that time I’ve been using the NUC as my main machine. My previous machine had upgraded parts, but GPU/motherboard and memory all were from around 2007. A slow low power 2015 NUC is somewhat in the same performance range as that 2007 machine (50% slower in some things, faster in others) while using way less power. My previous machine had 2 cores, the new one has 4.
My previous machine already had difficulty with some of the super high quality videos. Depending on the settings, some videos can use a very high amount of CPU. The CPU of the NUC is slightly slower to play videos.
Initially the various GNOME video playing bits crashed when trying to play video. Those crasher bugs got fixed, but Totem never properly played anything. I quickly discovered that mpv didn’t have any problem with hardware accelerated video playing, so used that and stopped filing bugs.
It helped me to improve the Mageia mpv package. Ensuring it had an OSD, was compiled with vaapi support, etc. Then recently gstreamer-vaapi 0.7.0 was released and gave me the idea to try Totem again. I’m guessing that change made things work, though not exactly sure.
Hardware accelerated video playing
Two frames from Tears of Steel showing Koen Martens, GUADEC 2010 organizer (together with Vincent and Reinout). First screenshot shows Totem with 6-7% CPU usage. The second shows MPV with 3-4% CPU usage. System Monitor itself uses around 20% CPU. Now that it works nicely, I’m working on having Mageia 6 automatically install VAAPI for you if your system has a similar GPU as mine.
Secret bonus: Polari
If you look at the CPU usage, you’ll not spot something. I’m also running Polari on a different workspace. It previously used 10-20% even when idle. I filed a bug but the developer couldn’t reproduce. Now I cannot reproduce as well — 0% CPU!! 😀