<i>I brought a 2015 macbook pro retina with a hard drive full of videos</i><p>Not clear which exact model you have. Some have a discrete AMD GPU which would take more power.<p>Also it&#x27;s not clear what format your videos were in. If it&#x27;s something like DVD rips, then it could have been MPEG-2. I don&#x27;t think Intel GPUs have any hardware support for playing that back. Also VLC probably doesn&#x27;t take advantage of any CPU support for playing back video.<p>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&quot; claims:<p><pre><code>   Up to 12 hours iTunes movie playback
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Notice they don&#x27;t mention VLC there. :) So you might have to transcode your video into a format that iTunes supports.