Apple lässt meines wissens keinen direkten Zugriff auf den Hardwaredecoder zu, was eigentlich ein vernünftiges vorgehen ist.

Ich frage mich, ob der "neue" VLC denn dann noch kompatibel zur Handbremse ist...

The new version of Quicktime uses NVIDIA’s VP3 (Pure Video 3) API for hardware acceleration of H.264 video. This is currently only available on the 9400M GPUs in Macbooks and Mac Minis. The actual hardware is a separate decoder chip on the board, not directly using the GPU itself. This differs from OpenCL, which aims to use the GPU as a general-purpose CPU, and is not well suited to video decoding.

Unfortunately the API is only available when using QTKit, Apple’s new Cocoa framework for Quicktime. This means the support is limited to formats QuickTime X supports, which for our purposes isn’t particularly useful. Installing Perian helps by allowing MP4/MOV with AC3 audio to play, but MKV support even with Perian is pretty poor. Surround sound isn’t very well supported either, although future versions of Plex will have the capability to take multichannel sound being played through Quicktime, re-encode it to AC3 and send it to your receiver, in much the same way as the AC3 encoder works now. This may change if Apple broadens the API to allow acceleration of raw H.264 streams.

The other difficulty with QTKit is that rendering is only possible to a QTMovieLayer or a QTMovieView. This makes it incompatible with the current video player in Plex, so QT X support needs to wait for our new player, and is not an ideal solution for all video.