Originally Posted by SiM
1080p h.264 in VLC
see, the first half isn't a very useful description.
MUCH more important than the resolution is: encoder settings (e.g. whether the source content was written with slices), the bitrate, other encoder settings. for the player, the exact h264 library revision in use makes a big difference (and vlc's decoder is slow). try going into preferences, input/codecs, other codecs, ffmpeg, tick the "advanced options" box, then set "skip the loop filter" to "all"
and i can't find any confirmation as to whether vlc's ffmpeg decoder is built with multithreading support