VLC video playback CPU usage improvement
- Original forum link
- https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/23363
- Original poster
- Solène R
- Created at
- 2024-01-01 14:50:07
- Posts count
- 8
- Likes count
- 21
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.