You may have seen that 2160p videos, aka 4K videos, are starting to appear more and more often in The Fun House and elsewhere.
If you are frustrated by playback on VLC and elsewhere, join the club. I’ve read every tip on the internet for playing 4K on VLC, and there are many of them, but none of them worked for me. The videos would stutter, or the video playback would stop while the audio continued, or the audio and video would be out of synch, or the playback would just freeze. I just assumed that my old but trusted computer just didn’t have the necessary processing power.
Then I got frustrated, and ambitious to try other solutions. It turns out that Media Player Classic handles any 4K video with ease. MPC is an extremely light-weight, open source media player, which unfortunately, runs on Windows only. It supports all common video and audio file formats. I’ve had it sitting on my computer for years, but rarely used it, because VLC always did the job. Until now.
However …
Since the MPC itself comes with no native 4k playback ability, you will have to install the K-Lite Codec Pack before you can play 4K videos with it. This is a breeze. MPC uses very little processing power and, once you install K-Kite, handles 4K like a dream. It is the cat’s pajamas. (And it also takes good 3840×2160 screenshots using ALT-I.) I tip my cap to the open source guys who keep MPC and K-Lite up to speed and gain nothing from doing so!
Perhaps some of our contributors will offer other solutions for other operating systems.
Mac users needn’t look any further than IINA. It plays everything, is free, and has a much cleaner and native-feeling design.