H.264 Rendering Performance

The Premise

My friend Ben pointed out that VLC uses significantly less CPU power to render videos, so I decided to take a look at various implementations. In this post, I'll take a look at what that means for a particular video to be rendered with consistent platforms, and post the findings.

The Video

I've decided to go with a Google Chrome HD spot. It's decent quality enough, and should be fairly-easy to render.

The Hardware

I'll be using my MacBook Pro (2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo w/6 MB L2 cache @ 1.07 GHz FSB; 4 GB DDR3 @ 1.07 GHz; GeForce 9600M GT w/512 MB VRAM) for the tests.

The Software

I'll be using the latest version of Windows XP (SP3+2600_090203-1234) and OS X (10.5.7+9J61); Quicktime (7.6.0+1290); Quicktime Player (7.6+472); VLC (0.9.9a+7786caa59f; Windows:+f013825670); and the Flash plugin (10.0+r22). The interesting thing about Flash is that all the browsers delivered roughly the same performance utilization on both Windows and Mac (since the Flash plugin does most of the heavy lifting).

The Results

I must be honest, I'm very disappointed with Apple on this one. Below is the CPU utilization (out of 200%, 100/core) for the same video rendered in Adobe's Flash plugin, QuickTime Player, and VLC:

Shorter bars are better: