Plex for Mac OS X adds hardware h.264 video decoding

Exciting news from Plex, the media center for Mac OS X that won my heart a long time ago. The devs have announced that they’ve integrated Apple’s new video decode acceleration framework into the latest build. In English, that means all h.264-encoded video—and there’s a lot of it out there—can be sent to your GPU for decoding, giving your CPU a bit more breathing room. It should make for significantly better 1080p video performance.

There’s a few hardware and software requirements. You’ll need a Mac with an Nvidia 9400M or GT320/330M GPU, and you need to be running the latest version of Snow Leopard. If either of these don’t apply to you, well, sorry about your luck. (But I’m in the same boat, so no worries!)

You should note that Plex is the first such media center for Mac OS X to offer hardware-assisted h.264 decoding, so well done to the Plex devs.