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Which for FullHD just drops every three out of four pixels (in every direction - hence you'll get every 16th pixel in a plane). In mplayer or mpv this can be achieved with: $ mpv -vf scale=480 -sws=4 Then try to scale the picture down: on slow desktop systems, I found it often helps to reduce the frame resolution. First try another files with similar bitrate. I would suggest first trying to rule out other things like broken file, display driver speed etc. To re-encode it while minimizing the picture quality loss would take significant amount of time even on a fast machine. However, changing the bitrate means re-encoding the whole video - I take it you are playing something like FullHD. To keep a stream in file intact while transforming it with avconv (audio in your case), use -codec: copy - thus -codec:a copy or -acodec copy in your particular case (see the avconv(1) man page).
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