H265 hardware accelerated video decoding on Windows

Discussion in 'Windows Virtual Machine' started by LukasV2, May 8, 2025 at 9:22 AM.

  1. LukasV2

    LukasV2 Junior Member

    Messages:
    10
    The latest Chrome/Edge 136 now support H265 in WebRTC. However, this requires hardware decoder/encoder to make it work. M1/M4 MacBooks do have such encoder/decoder and it works fine on Mac OS. Unfortunately, it looks like the Windows 11 guest running in Parallels does not have access to the HW accelerated decoding on the host, which means that for video playback it uses CPU. This can be easily verified by playing any video file in the VM and checking the CPU usage, for HEVC it is quite high. Can Parallels get access to the host video encoding/decoding hardware?
     

Share This Page