Comment 13 for bug 1103236

Getting flash/youtube to work well is unfortunately wishlist territory since they have yet to enable hw acceleration.

In theory, gstreamer is meant to support the video decode engine inside your Ivybridge GPU using va-api. I believe VLC also has a va-api mode, but last I checked it was using an inferior GL engine. mplayer -vo xv uses the last amount of acceleration (the GPU is only used for colorspace conversion and rendering of the result), and amusingly it is the one that uses the least CPU on my system.

So my Sandybridge mba can manage playing the 2k Sintel mp4 with plenty to spare. Can you grab the 2k mp4 and the 1080p mkv versions of Sintel and use that to baseline performance of your system? For example, mplayer -benchmark -frames 500 -nosound $sintel