How to play HD videos in low resolution, faster

Question

I have a 1080p video and I want to play it in a medium configured PC running Windows XP. Since the system don't have much resources, the videos sometimes used to stall, or play in a slow motion. Is there any Software / Tool / Method to play high res videos in low res? Quality may be compromised.

Answer 1

Use vlc player and follow these steps.

H.264 codecs are pretty CPU intensive and VLC can't use multi-cores to decode it yet.

So if your computer is dying when decoding 1080p samples from H264, do the following.

Open the preferences
Tick advanced in the lower right corner
Go to "Input/Codec"
Go to "other codecs" subcategory
Go to "FFmpeg"
Put the "skip-filter for H264" to all
Restart VLC

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=42328

Download vlc from here http://www.videolan.org/

Answer 2

Are you sure you don't have a GPU? Just because you don't have a video / graphics card doesn't mean you don't have a GPU. Most Mainboards have a integrated GPU. If the option isn't greyed out just try it.

But to the core problem itself:
If you have the time before watching the videos: Resize them to a lower resolution. Tools like MeGUI or Handbrake can be utilized for that matter.

Also I recommend the site videohelp.com for issues like this.

Answer 3

Software/Tool requires these in real time:

1. Reading HD video which needs same PC resources with playing HD video
2. Converting HD video to SD video which needs much more PC resources
3. Playing SD video which can be handled by your PC

However you cannot get the last step without achieving first and second steps.

As a result a video tool, which can resize videos, is the best solution for your problem. You can resize your videos with MKVToolNix for mkv files and VirtualDub for others to watch them later in the low resolution.