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.