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I subscribed to a TV series website and it only provides videos to download in 4k resolution and I have a Core-i7, intel HD 3000, 8 GB RAM laptop. VLC, Quicktime, MPV, WMP all freeze playing 4K. I can only watch the intros because intros are mostly black or white , I think GPU is too old to handle that much pixels to be down-scaled on a 1280*800 screen. I can play FHD fine on my laptop though, but of course my GPU isn't powerful enough so I can't convert the files to FHD.
Any idea how to make the down-scaling process possible?
Any workaround to play 4k on my laptop without freezing to death?
Is really down-scaling that power hungry? Any program that can handle this on old GPU's?
Playing FHD videos, CPU usage is about %15 up to % 150 and playing 4K videos, CPU usage is about %300 up to %400 according to Activity Monitor of Mac. MPV player plays the 4K files at 5 FPS which means unplayable.
The GPU graph doesn't show much usage for playing FHD files, but shows usage for 4K files.
Codec of files are H264 MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1) according to VLC.
Specs:
Apple Macbook Pro 13" Late 2011, Running El Capitan 10.11.6. Upgraded RAM from 4GB to 8GB and replaced the HDD with Samsung Evo 850 250GB SSD
UPDATE:
I had 2-3 FPS boost using movist (for MAC).
I tested and played these 4K files on my Android phone (LG G3) and they play very smoothly, it's just shocking to me that a laptop with core-i7 + intel HD 3000 is not able to play 4K but an android phone is. Just unbelievable.
Only for Linux? Well I've been thinking about moving to Ubuntu actually. – Shayan – 2018-03-18T21:16:01.750
It would be worth asking the TV series website if they also have the videos available at lower resolutions. There might be some setting to enable that which isn't obvious. – Andrew Morton – 2018-03-18T21:45:27.440
Oh no.. I contacted them and they said I have to pay an extra fee to access all resolutions of episodes. – Shayan – 2018-03-19T08:19:23.987
1Instead of wildly guessing, did you actually look at the CPU and GPU load while trying to play those files? What encoding are they? – Daniel B – 2018-03-19T08:24:56.870
Updated the question with the relevant information. – Shayan – 2018-03-19T10:49:52.000
1I see. So your CPU is too slow. // I very much doubt the files are MPEG-4 (AKA DivX, Xvid, ...). Please run the files through
ffprobe
to get the actual codecs used. VLC can also display them, though I can’t tell you where exactly. – Daniel B – 2018-03-19T11:26:18.130Checked with VLC, they seem to be MPEG-4 files. – Shayan – 2018-03-19T11:38:57.640
Some more details about possibilities for playing back videos with hardware decoding under macOS here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/115162/efficient-mkv-h-264-player-with-gpu-decoding-for-mac-os-x
– slhck – 2018-03-19T11:56:11.187@slhck thanks for the link, Movist plays better than MPV, VLC and QuickTime, but still plays at low FPS (around 8) – Shayan – 2018-03-19T14:22:18.997
Please provide your notebooks exact make (Apple?) and model. – Daniel B – 2018-03-19T15:45:37.090
Apple Macbook Pro 13" Late 2011, Running El Capitan 10.11.6. Upgraded RAM from 4GB to 8GB and replaced the HDD with Samsung Evo 850 250GB SSD. – Shayan – 2018-03-19T16:23:55.667