Disclosure: I'm the developer of EWRE.
I played the same 1080p, 60 FPS H.264 video as a wallpaper in two engines on the same Windows 11 machine (GTX 1080 Ti) and sampled resource use every second for 30 seconds.
| EWRE | Lively v20262.5.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Processes | 1 | 3 |
| Avg CPU | 2.65% | 6.46% |
| Peak CPU | 9.30% | 18.70% |
| Avg RAM | 98.7 MB | 324.3 MB |
The takeaway: EWRE used about 59% less CPU and about 70% less RAM in this test. It's a single native process (Direct3D 11 + Media Foundation with hardware decoding), while Lively runs a .NET/WinUI app plus an mpv player process.
The fine print: one machine, one clip, one 30-second run. GPU and VRAM weren't measured, and RAM is working set summed across processes. Treat it as one data point, not a final verdict.
EWRE is free on the Microsoft Store. Run your own test and tell me what you get. 👇
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