Lubuntu 16.04.2 LTS HWE (4.8 kernel & mesa 12) on an AMD 5350 Athlon.
So just upgraded from 16.1 to 17.1 now that the commercial-skipping bugs have been fixed.
Kodi 17.1 had incredibly high CPU usage, like 60% on all 4 threads. Fortunately, the very helpful (o-key) info screens showed that it was using *software* mpeg-2 decoding. WTF?
Turns out I had to install mesa-vdpau-drivers. Now it’s using hardware VDPAU decoding and all is well.
Which leads to some weird questions …. (I don’t have any logs from 16.1)
1. I had very low CPU usage the whole time on 16.1. Assuming it was using software decoding, was 16.1’s software mpeg decoding significantly better and used less power than 17.1’s?
2. Or could 16.1 use VDPAU hardware acceleration without the mesa-vdpau-drivers package? Or use VAAPI, again, without a specific mesa driver installed?
Conclusion:
It would really be helpful if in the GUI when you try to select VDPAU or VAAPI decoding, if it would yell at you if Kodi didn’t detect the mesa drivers at startup.