How can I know if my media player is using hardware acceleration?

Question

I'm using The KMPlayer for my media playback needs, especially because it has faster startup time even with larger media files. But I'm not sure whether it is utilizing hardware acceleration or not (the DirectX Diagnostic Tool shows that hardware acceleration is enabled).

Though I do have not have an issue where CPU usage burns up during video playback as I've monitored task manager while its running, and what I see is that it uses 12 to 18 units as a CPU usage but I don't know what this number suggests, that if its actually using h/w acc. or not.

I've read about Hardware Acceleration and its association mostly with H.264, so does hardware acceleration has anything to do with how video is encoded? I'm having video files in variety of formats like many have, i.e. AVI, MP4, MKV, M4V, etc. So how H.264 and Hardware acceleration work with the media player to play different files?

Answer 1

Fraps shows the current FPS when a game or application uses DX Hardware/Video Acceleration. Also, the Wikipedia page lists some of the applications, KMPlayer is not listed among them, but it's obviously not the full list.

Answer 2

Since you're on Windows 7 I would suggest using a simple desktop gadget to monitor GPU usage. If you see that your GPU usage goes up while you're playing a video then the hardware acceleration is working properly. I use this one at home: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=83a44bd6-6b5f-4bc7-ba0f-28758cd9c509&bt=1&pl=1