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<\/a><\/p>\nSame goes with computers. If you have a laptop or desktop that has an integrated graphics card, chances are you’ll never be able to play 1080p or 4K HD video without some lag or choppiness.<\/p>\n
Why? Because it takes an a large amount of system resources to play high-definition videos. However, if you have a semi-decent video card with a reasonable amount of memory and at least a dual-core processor, there are ways to get your machine to play HD videos smoothly.<\/p>\n
In this article, I’ll go through all the different methods you can try to get your system to play HD video smoothly. If you have figured out something else not mentioned here, feel free to post a comment and let us know!<\/p>\n
File Location<\/h2>\n
Before I get into any technical stuff, the first thing you should check is the location of your video files. One reason the video was playing slowly on my Windows machine was because I had copied all the videos over to my NAS and was playing the files from there. For the fastest possible playback, you need to keep the files locally on the hard disk.<\/p>\n
The only time it would be better not to use your hard drive is if you have one of those 5400 RPM drives. Then the hard drive could be a bottleneck. In those cases, the videos may lag because of the slow hard drive.<\/p>\n
My suggestion would be to upgrade to at least a 7200 RPM drive. However, nowadays, it’s best to use a solid state drive, which is way faster than a traditional hard drive.<\/p>\n
And if you simply can’t fit them on your computer, then they should be on an external drive that is connected to your computer with a fast connection like Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, Firewire 800, eSATA, etc. If you are connecting an external drive over USB 1.0\/2.0, then your videos will lag no matter how fast your graphics card is!<\/p>\n The second easy thing to do is to make sure that nothing else is using up resources on your computer. Since your CPU will be mostly utilized playing the HD file, it will lag if the CPU has to keep switching to another process on your system.<\/p>\n Close down all programs and shutdown any unnecessary startup programs that may be running in your taskbar, etc. Sometimes a fresh restart can help too. Once you have closed down as many programs as you can, then try to play the video.<\/p>\n Also, you can try changing the priority of the video player to High<\/strong> so that it gets more of the processor power.<\/p>\n I do not suggest changing it to real time as that can cause more problems than fixes. And just change the priority for the process of your video player, i.e. VLC, MPC-HC, etc.<\/p>\n You don’t need to do this if your computer has a dedicated graphics card. However, if you are using the GPU that is integrated with your CPU, then it can be helpful.<\/p>\n If you don’t mind, you can also convert your videos to another format. For example, if your videos are all in AVCHD format, you can convert them to m2ts or a different format like MP4, etc.<\/p>\n You can keep the same high resolution, but playing certain formats is just plain easier and require less resources. Playing back AVCHD videos is very CPU intensive and requires a lot of decoding.<\/p>\n So if you have the time, you can try out a program like HandBrake<\/a> for Windows and Mac and convert your videos<\/a> to M4V and they will play just fine and still be HD.<\/p>\n The next thing to try is a different media player. My favorite for HD video playback is VLC Media Player. It has a lot of codecs and can handle quite a lot of formats.<\/p>\n You can also try other players like KMPlayer, but I have found VLC to be the best. Another lightweight player to try is MPC-HC<\/a> as it supports GPU acceleration too.<\/p>\n One setting you can adjust in VLC Media Player is the post processing routine. If you go to Preferences or Settings in VLC and click on Input & Codecs,\u00a0<\/strong>you’ll see an option called Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding<\/strong>.<\/p>\n By default, it is set to None<\/strong>. You want to change this to All<\/strong>. Now try to play your 1080p videos and see if there is any lag. Hopefully not! This solution worked for me on my MacBook Pro. If that didn’t work for you, then keep reading!<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSystem Resources<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nConvert to Another Format<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nMedia Players, Codecs & Settings<\/h2>\n
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