If you can download the actual video file and play it outside the browser, you may be surprised how efficiently it can be played by mpv[1] or maybe vlc. 5 year

If you can download the actual video file and play it outside the browser, you may be surprised how efficiently it can be played by mpv[1] or maybe vlc. 5 years ago I had a desktop computer that was 5 years old, and it plain couldn't handle std-def hulu video at the time and struggled a bit with youtube, but could play good-bitrate 720p h264 smoothly with mplayer - without hardware acceleration. I'm sure hardware acceleration helps, but it seems to partially make up for the inefficiency of the browser-context rendering. [1] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv