Gone are the days, when computers were only used for work. Now, people are more and more spending time on the computers to fulfill their entertainment appetite. Nowadays, people are more and more downloading and watching videos on their laptops and VLC has been a go-to Media Player for ages.
However, there are times when you want to be entertained by watching videos but are not near any power supply. In this article, we are going to discuss Hardware Acceleration, a feature in VLC Media Player that allows you to watch videos without having to worry about the charge of the battery.
What is Hardware Acceleration
Hardware Acceleration is an efficient video decoding mechanism. Without Hardware Acceleration, CPU does all the decoding work but the problem is that the CPU is not optimized for video decoding and therefore is not efficient in this task as it consumes more power.
However, with Hardware Acceleration, the decoding task gets transferred to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) which is optimized for this task. Therefore, the job will be done in no time and the GPU and CPU of your computer will be less active.
The only caveat is that not all video codecs support Hardware Acceleration. One of the supported formats is H.264, so, you should try to download MP4 files as they work fine with Hardware Acceleration.
Read: How to use mouse gestures in VLC Media Player.
So, if you want your battery to last longer than usual then activate Hardware Acceleration in VLC.
Activating Hardware Accelerationin VLC is pretty simple. You just need to obey the following steps and you will be good to go:
- Launch VLC Media Player
- Click on the Tools tab
- Select Preferences
- Or just hit Ctrl + P to launch Simple Preferences.
- Go to the Input / Codecs tab
- Change Hardware-accelerated decoding to Automatic
- Click Save.
Read: How to play video with VLC using Command Prompt.
Bonus Tip: Use “Movies & TV” to really save battery
If you really want to save your battery then try using Movies & TV. It is a Windows subscription service and a media player. The best part about this app is that unlike previous attempts by Microsoft it is not slow and has all the essential features that a media player must-have.
And since it is developed by Microsoft it is perfectly optimized to work on the Windows platform.
Accessing it is pretty simple, just double-click on a video and it will be launched with “Movies & TV”.
But if you have already used VLC Media Player then you need to right-click on the video and click Open with > Movies & TV.
Hopefully, this has helped you in saving the battery while enjoying HD videos.
