Video Playback
Let’s install a GPU utility.
$ sudo pacman intel-gpu-tools
We’re playing a 1080p encoded with H.264.
As you can see, the Video engine is 10.45% busy confirming that the video is playing with hardware acceleration. While the image is showing the GPU using 1.93W, this is spiked by actually taking the screenshot. On average GPU usage is around 1.5W when playing the 1080p H.264 video.
Playing the video on a loop uses slightly more than 5 Wh of energy. With our battered internal battery and our new 72Wh fully-charged hot-swappable battery video playback is more than 17 hours. Going back to the original heavily-used hot-swappable total playback time for the 1080p video is around 6 hours (this includes the internal battery).
How long do the internal/external batteries last when playing a video without the benefit of hardware-acceleration?
With a 1080p VP9 video, energy usage is slightly more than 7 Wh. We got more than 12 hours of playback using our new external battery and battered internal battery. That’s still very impressive.
Playback of both 1080p H.264 and VP9 are silky smooth in VLC with zero lost frames. However, the T470 fares poorly when playing 4K video with very choppy playback making the experience terrible.
Next page: Page 3 – Music Playback
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Video Drivers
Page 2 – Video Playback
Page 3 – Music Playback
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | We spotlight the condition of our refurbished T470 laptop |
| Part 2 | Specifications of the T470 laptop using the inxi utility to interrogate the system |
| Part 3 | Installing the Manjaro distribution |
| Part 4 | We run a series of benchmarks on the T470 and compare to other machines |
| Part 5 | Multimedia performance including power management |