I have a dual booted laptop (Lenovo G550, Pentium T4300, 6 gigs of RAM) running Opensuse Tumbleweed and Windows 10 Education N(64 bit).

Now, when I try to play a x265/HEVC MKV video file:

• If it's 720p and I use MPC-HC on Win10, it plays perfectly
• If it's 1080p and I use MPC-HC on Win10, it drops frames rarely but is still very much watchable
• If it's 720p and I use VLC on OpenSUSE, it drops frames more often than MPC did for the 1080p video, but is still (just about) watchable
• If it's 1080p and I use VLC on OpenSUSE, it can't handle it at all and freezes almost completely

Why is there such a difference in performance?

The only reason I can think of is that I have installed TLP and Powertop on the openSUSE, which don't let the system consume too much juice? [My battery life is ~45min on Win10 (brightness 80%) and ~2hr 40 min on openSUSE(lowest brightness)]. Is this the reason?

Secondly, does it vary from Distro to Distro? Will Ubuntu/Mint/Debian perform better (with TLP and Powertop)?

Also, as you can infer, my basic problem is that Windows is powerful but doesn't last long without power, and openSUSE has much better battery life but is underwhelming in performance (not just videos, even in stuff like web browsing, the performance difference shows). So, is there any config/distro/software/anything that will give me the best of both worlds(or something like that)? Any other advice?

Thank you very much in advance! Cheers

hevc/x265 relies on hardware accelaration.
without that, some players seem to fall back into software rendering, which will most likely give unsatisfactory results no matter how good the hardware.

so the question is:
- what gpu
- what gpu drivers on linux (i have zero interest in the windows part) (*)
- have you tried with different media players, e.g. mplayer and mpv

(*) for this, the output ofcould be helpful.

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Thanks, did some googling regarding what you said and it's much better now. Appreciate your help!

For what it's worth, vp9 is a heck of a lot better, as codecs go, and plays really nicely with practically everything.

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