How can I know if my media player is using hardware acceleration?

I'm using The KMPlayer for my media playback needs, especially because it has faster startup time even with larger media files. But I'm not sure whether it is utilizing hardware acceleration or not (the DirectX Diagnostic Tool shows that hardware acceleration is enabled).

Though I do have not have an issue where CPU usage burns up during video playback as I've monitored task manager while its running, and what I see is that it uses 12 to 18 units as a CPU usage but I don't know what this number suggests, that if its actually using h/w acc. or not.

I've read about Hardware Acceleration and its association mostly with H.264, so does hardware acceleration has anything to do with how video is encoded? I'm having video files in variety of formats like many have, i.e. AVI, MP4, MKV, M4V, etc. So how H.264 and Hardware acceleration work with the media player to play different files?

Kushal

Posted 2011-03-25T18:00:26.200

Reputation: 865

Answers

Fraps shows the current FPS when a game or application uses DX Hardware/Video Acceleration. Also, the Wikipedia page lists some of the applications, KMPlayer is not listed among them, but it's obviously not the full list.

Gani Simsek

Posted 2011-03-25T18:00:26.200

Reputation: 2 510

Thanks!! Fraps worked perfectly, I got up to 27 to 30 FPS during video playback, and upto 55 FPS during game playback (GTA 4), so I guess its using GPU for video acceleration even with KMPlayer. – Kushal – 2011-03-26T02:49:05.967

Frame rate is not any indicator of hardware acceleration, particularly for full-screen video playback. If the content is encoded in 30fps, your frame rate cannot exceed 30 when in full-screen (if it does, then your player/renderer is inefficient). CPU utilization is a better indicator of hardware acceleration than frame rate. – Bala Sivakumar – 2013-06-19T18:19:18.963

Since you're on Windows 7 I would suggest using a simple desktop gadget to monitor GPU usage. If you see that your GPU usage goes up while you're playing a video then the hardware acceleration is working properly. I use this one at home: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=83a44bd6-6b5f-4bc7-ba0f-28758cd9c509&bt=1&pl=1

Diffuser

Posted 2011-03-25T18:00:26.200

Reputation: 118

Thanks for such useful gadget, but I'm on laptop which do not have discrete GPU, instead it has Intel Integrated GPU, which is not supported by this gadget. – Kushal – 2011-03-26T02:34:33.250