The VideoLAN Forums

play videos in lower quality?
how do you play videos in lower quality if your computer is low specs or running alot of programs? besides closing programs or getting a better computer or upgrading? for example taking a video and having it run at 128kbps instead of 1024kbps using the player without transcoding it? i know theres probably not an answer and this is more of a weird suggestion but any tips on how to play large videos at lower bitrates or more efficiently on a computer with low specs would help too. thank you very much.

play videos in lower quality?

There really aren't magic ways to do that. Some codecs support certain easier decoding methods (like loop filter trick with H.264), but usually only option is to re-encode the video if your computer doesn't have good enough decoding performance.