Over the course of the last two weeks, I?ve been digging deep into what the optimal playback setup is for lengthening battery life. Throughout more than 145 hours of testing, I?ve looked at a range of Windows video players, including the stock Windows 8 app, Windows Media Player, VLC and MPC-HC, plus many encoding formats such as H.264, Xvid, and the all-new HEVC format.

This article won't give you a rundown of every possible playback combination on every hardware platform ? testing this would take far too long to be reasonable ? but the results compiled so far are certainly enlightening.