How to determine if videos are playing via Hardware acceleration or not?

[kylstrem]

I'm no video expert but have been given a task to find out if MPEG-2 encoded videos are being "played" using the hardware decoding on the video card or being "played" through the CPU.

I'm just not sure where to start.

As an example, one of the media players that will be playing these videos has an AMD Radeon HD 6320 video chipset.

I understand the Codec must support it, and we are somewhat flexible on the codec being used.

But once the video is started playing, is there any utility I can use to determine if the video card is decoding it or if it is just being brute-forced by the CPU and codec.

Thanks.

 

[kylstrem]

Oh yeah... the OS is XP.

 

[ericloewe]

The software doing the decoding should tell you what it's using. Other than that, I can only think of checking the CPU usage in Task Manager. If it's relatively high while playing the video, it's most likely using the CPU.

 

[Selenium_Glow]

The software doing the decoding should tell you what it's using. Other than that, I can only think of checking the CPU usage in Task Manager. If it's relatively high while playing the video, it's most likely using the CPU.

This.

To be more accurate about it. In the task manager go to the "Processes" tab. Check for CPU% column for the application running the video. For example, I use Media Player Classic, which shows as mpc.exe as image name and CPU column is between 5% to 8% when the codec is using video card. If it is more then it is definitely using the CPU. My Phenom 9550 hits 30% to 40% usage and i5-2520M hits 25% to 35% when using CPU decoding.