MacOS – Old GPU (HD 3000) Can’t Play 4K Videos

4k-resolutiondecodinggpumacosvlc-media-player

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.

Best Answer

The slowest and most unelegant way is the only generic way I can think of: transcoding.

You can experiment with FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -i <4K-FILE> -vf scale=-1:1080 -c:v libx264 -intra -crf 20 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset veryfast -c:a copy myfile.mkv

This should, in theory, be quite fast, as it copies the audio stream and does not do too much in the sense of compression. Note that x265 tends to be faster with larger contents (above 720p) than x264, though I am not sure if your hardware can keep up to that.

The files, however, will be big. It could well be that with those settings, you will get files that are bigger than the original files.

Therefore, you can try to either increase the -crf-value, which will worsen the quality but decrease the bitrate, using another preset which will cost time but increase compression (though there might be a sweet spot in compression vs. fps), or, if that is an option to you, you can further decrease the output file's resolution and the conversion, e.g. to 720p.

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