Fresh off the block from Computex, Microsoft’s engineers at the Building Windows 8 blog have unleashed another blog post. The new details concern Windows 8′s audio/visual playback engines, format support, and feature sets. As Windows 8 MC Steven Sinofsky notes, video playback has changed considerably in the past few years, and Windows 8 is designed to support the shifting models.
When running on a Windows Certified PC, Windows 8′s video decoding for “common media tasks” will be offloaded to a dedicated hardware subsystem. The company claims that this will dramatically lower power consumption and improve battery life, and has a graph to prove it. The image below shows the purported improvement in CPU usage between Windows 7 and Windows 8 while playing back a 720p VC1/H.264 clip in WMP, HTML5, and a webcam capture preview.