CPU consumption during playback of a 720p H264 video on a 2013 Core i7 MacBook Air with Intel HD 5000 graphics card, running OS X Mavericks 10.9.2:
- MPlayerX 1.0.22.1 (vda): 8% ~ 9%
- VLC 2.1.4: 15% (vda)
- QuickTime Player 10.3: 5% (hwaccel)
- MPlayer OSX Extended rev 15 (mplayer SVN r36986): 30% (no hwaccel), 16% (-vc ffh264vda)
- mpv (git-b0b0e69): 20% ~ 23% (no hwaccel), 5% ~ 7% (--hwdec=vda)
- XBMC 13.0 beta 2: 14% (vda)
(All above programs are x86_64.)
Those numbers on MPlayerX are surprisingly low. AFAIK they use readback (-vc ffh264vda) and shm to move the image to the GUI instead of GL interop like mpv.