[bloopletech]

As someone who currently uses a different player (mplayer2) which shares an upstream (ffmpeg) with VLC, how much of the codec/format improvements are due to/push to the upstream projects?

I really hope all these great improvements are shared between the media player projects as much as possible.

[aktau]

Not quite sure myself, but I've been tracking the development of mpv, a fork of both mplayer2 and mplayer, and its development is going fast, very fast.

For example, intel VA-API support was ported and integrated into master in about a week. With support for VA-API VPP (video post-processing), so deinterlacing comes free too (just like for VDPAU).

That means that on my weak intel boxes, decoding 1080p content takes about 3-5% CPU and 25MB. Which means I can play 16-32 simultaneous videos in a grid at the same time. You should've seen the look on my clients' face when they saw me pull that one off, where the former developer couldn't even do one HD clip without lagging horribly.

It is, in a word, awesome. Just like this new VLC, which I use on my mac. Also awesome. I actually looked at the new VLC plugin code to make my own browser plugin for mplayer/mpv. Though in the end I didn't decide to support a windowless interface like VLC (because I couldn't really, mplayer-likes don't support that). That's fine though, windowed mode was far easier to code.