x86-64 is such an ABI improvement over x86-32 that it's always 10-20% faster, even with the larger size pointers. Win64's ABI is a little worse than other platforms for libavcodec, since it has some callee-saved SSE registers and everyone else is caller-saved, but still true.
Hardware decoding is much more important for power savings than anything else.
Most standard video decoding code uses CPU feature detection and hand-optimized ASM for important bits, so x86-64 doesn't really add anything worthwhile for most video players and encoders - most of the magic is done in SSE/AVX codepaths anyway.
And x86-64 turns those 8 SSE registers into 16! Those handwritten assembly paths are much easier when you don't have to write stack spills.
Hmm, you have a point there - x64 does make writing ASM significantly easier.
I think astrange knows what he's talking about considering he wrote chunks of those encoders and decoders.
What I want to know is if QuickSync support is available on the Mac version of vlc.
The 64-bit Windows binary is getting deployed on the mirror right now.
> Wouldn't that improve performance for something like video-decoding?
64-bit is a tradeoff for video, less CPU usage, but more memory pressure, so the improvements are usually limited... It's more important to have good hardware acceleration, than 64bits.
> Also, it's disappointing to see there's still no native (and automatic) subtitle-seeking feature.
It's a new feature of 2.2.0