ffplay how to play HEVC or H264 with hardware acceleration on Mac?

Question

In FFmpeg, I can specific encoder by -c:v h264_videotoolbox to use Videotoolbox with GPU acceleration to do transcode.

But I don't know what commands I should give to ffplay to utilize Videotoolbox with hardware decoding?

ffplay -hwaccel_flags my.mp4 // no GPU usage up
ffplay -pixel_format videotoolbox_vld my.mp4 // Option pixel_format not found
ffplay -decoders | grep "box" // only decoders with (AudioToolbox) shows
ffplay -buildconf // the --enable-videotoolbox is showed

Solution

You can pipe the result of ffmpeg to ffplay. I tested on an 1080p video using VAAPI acceleration, the CPU rate decreased about 10% altogether.

See HWAccelIntro here. It talks about ffmpeg, but you can pipe the result of ffmpeg to ffplay.

For example, play test.mp4 using VAAPI on Linux:

ffmpeg -hwaccel vaapi -hwaccel_device /dev/dri/renderD128 -i test.mp4 \
-vcodec rawvideo -acodec copy -f matroska - | ffplay -i -

Use rawvideo for video encoding, and use -f to specify a container. Videotoolbox should be similar. If you managed to decode a video with Videotoolbox in ffmpeg, just pipe to ffplay in this way.

Comments

[Gyan]

What's the output of ffplay -decoders | grep "264"

[Chen OT]

only one row: "VFS..D h264 H.264/AVC/MPEG-4 AVC/MPEG-4 part10". It does not indicate whether it support HW or not. ffplay/ffmpeg is installed from brew. I also tried static build from official site and build from GitHub source code in 4.2 branch. Those seems the same.

[Chen OT]

My platform is iMac 21" 4K 2019. Tested another App, when playing the HEVC on VLC app, the I have GPU rate raised to 70%~80%.