That long bar on top? That’s the look of Microsoft’s Movies & TV player kicking everyone’s butt. In our video player shootout, Windows 10’s default video player rolls up the competition and puts them in the trash. One look at this chart should prove my point. I mean a massive, undeniable advantage in battery life that even a diehard fan couldn’t deny. And by win, I don’t mean squeaked ahead by a few minutes, like how Media Player Classic HC noses out VLC. The winner here is Windows 10’s built-in Movies & TV player. Microsoft Movies & TV: Boring, but stupidly more efficient The winner here by a huge margin is Windows 10 Movies & TV player. If you had to pick something that isn’t establishment, Media Player Classic HC would be it. It’s also slightly more efficient than VLC in battery life. Like VLC, PotPlayer and others, it’s flexible, powerful and tweakable. Yes, it’s designed to mimic the look and feel of Windows 95. That’s no surprise when the player itself is an homage to Windows Media Player 6.4, which shipped with Windows 95. You download Media Player Classic Home Cinema and then nod to others about how cool you are. If you want to be a tech hipster, you don’t use VLC. Media Player Classic HC: Is that retro look and feel worth it? Media Player Classic HC is what the cool kids use. PotPlayer actually makes a point of touting “enhanced hardware acceleration that provides the maximum performance with the minimum resource using DXVA, CUDA, QuickSync.” For my test, I used the default settings, and in battery life it was only slightly better than VLC. The UI is polished and it has overwhelming, head-spinning options. It also has a nifty feature that lets it record screen captures along with Picture-in-Picture mode, and it supports 3D glasses. It claims to be able to play more files without the need for third-party codec packs. When it installs, it will prompt you to fetch additional video and audio codecs for installation. Like VLC, it can play files with missing or corrupted portions. I’ll admit I’d never heard of PotPlayer before researching this article. PotPlayer has a head-spinning amount of things you can tweak, even when compared to its contemporaries. Maybe in addition to targeting Adobe Flash for public ridicule, you should also flog the QuickTime player now and then? At least Apple doesn’t force you to download it with iTunes anymore, but it seems odd that Apple would hurl stones at Adobe while sitting inside of a house made of shimmering non-Gorilla Glass. I considered just dropping it from the test, but I decided it’d be a worthy public service advisory to remind people just how much of a fail QuickTime 7 is. mov file, which is Apple’s own QuickTime file format. I actually gave up after several attempts to make it work. On the Radius 12 with its Core i7 Skylake CPU, it could not even play the video file without constantly dropping frames. This has been a horrible player for years, and it hasn’t gotten any better. The fail boat was boarded by the QuickTime 7 player. The QuickTime Player is still horribly broken, and Apple doesn’t seem to care. On my laptop, when battery life matters, I’ll have to skip it. VLC’s subtitle support is great and I’ll still use it, but mostly on my desktop. MOV file with a resolution of 3840×1714, encoded in H.264 using the high 5.1 profile. For my test, I wanted to keep the video expectations very high, so I used the same 6GB UltraHD 4K Tears of Steel video (open-source) that I used in my MacBook Pro 13 vs. I know from the excellent testing that ’s Tim Schiesser ran two years ago that lower resolution and lower bit rate increases battery life. I actually wanted a laptop with a modest battery life rather than, say, Microsoft’s Surface Book, which can take half a day to zero. Even if another laptop has a larger battery, or a smaller screen, however, I believe the results should scale.įor my video rundown test, I used the 4K version of the free open-source Tears of Steel short movie. Our rundown test used a Toshiba Radius 12 with a Core i7 Skylake CPU and 12-inch UltraHD 4K resolution screen.įor my testing platform, I picked Toshiba’s new Radius 12 running Windows 10. The laptop gave me Intel’s latest Skylake CPU, a moderately sized battery, and, with its 4K panel, the low end of run time.
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