I brought a 2015 macbook pro retina with a hard drive full of videos Not clear which exact model you have. Some have a discrete AMD GPU which would take more p

I brought a 2015 macbook pro retina with a hard drive full of videos Not clear which exact model you have. Some have a discrete AMD GPU which would take more power. Also it's not clear what format your videos were in. If it's something like DVD rips, then it could have been MPEG-2. I don't think Intel GPUs have any hardware support for playing that back. Also VLC probably doesn't take advantage of any CPU support for playing back video. You should do a little more research. Your reported performance seems disappointing. You should be able to do much better. For example the current model 13" claims: Up to 12 hours iTunes movie playback Notice they don't mention VLC there. :) So you might have to transcode your video into a format that iTunes supports.