I subscribed to a TV series website and it only provides videos to download in 4k version and I have a Core-i7, HD 3000, 8 GB RAM laptop. VLC, Quicktime freeze playing these files. I can only watch the intros because intros are mostly black screen, I think GPU is too old to handle this much pixel to be down-scaled on a 1280*800 laptop 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 thirsty? Any program that can handle this on old GPU's?