Plex Adds Hardware Accelerated H.264 Decoding

While the Plex dev team works hard on the v9 release, they’ve just managed to integrate the Apple Video Decode Acceleration Framework Reference into v8.

At last the GPU is being employed to decode those lovely 720P and 1080P H.264 videos (kudos Ryan).  Dev team leader Elan Feingold just posted the news on the Plex blog along with a link to the new binary…

“It’s been just a few days since Apple finally released their Video Decode Acceleration Framework Reference, but Ryan has been working hard and we have some exciting news to share with you. He has managed to get Plex integrated with the framework, and for the first time, your GPU is used to decode H.264 video. The results are incredibly impressive, with 720p and 1080p video decoding smoothly with much reduced CPU utilization.

If you have a NVidia 9400M (or the new GT320/330M chipsets), and are running Snow Leopard 10.6.3, take it for a spin! As with the last post, download the binary and install it into Plex.app/Contents/MacOS. Once we get a sense of how well it’s working, we’ll spin an official release.”

plexapp.com   :   Plex and Home Automation

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