Since version 9.2.0-1 the open source Mesa driver supports ATIs UVD hardware video acceleration for h264 videos.
If it was enabled correctly your boot log should contain something like this:
Aug 31 18:55:22 main kernel: [drm] UVD initialized successfully.
You can easily check this with:
# journalctl -b | grep UVD
Now if you want to play a video with mplayer and make use of the new feature, you should append following parameter:
-vc ffh264vdpau
If everything went well you should see something like:
Starting playback...
[VD_FFMPEG] Trying pixfmt=0.
[VD_FFMPEG] XVMC-accelerated MPEG-2.
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [vdpau] 1280x720 => 1280x720 H.264 VDPAU acceleration
after mplayer has started.
And it’s really worth it! Without hardware acceleration the average CPU usage of mplayer was around 20% and it dropped to 1.7%!
This is how I watch dvb-c with mplayer:
mplayer dvb://Das\ Erste\ HD -vc ffh264vdpau -demuxer lavf -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 -cache 8192
See a earlier post of mine about this subject: klick
Used source: klick