Improve Battery Life when watching Movies and Videos on Windows 11/10

If you always find that your Windows 11/10 device’s battery lasts for a shorter time than you expected, you can optimize Windows 11/10 for better battery life – especially while watching videos and movies on battery power.

Improve Battery Life when watching Movies & Videos in Windows

Let’s take a look at these four methods that will help you optimize and improve your computer’s battery life while watching movies & videos. The basic settings in Windows 11 are similar for Windows 10 and 11 but the positions have changed significantly. If you wish to improve Battery Life when watching Movies and Videos on Windows 11/10, then do the following:

1. Reduce Screen Brightness
2. Turn on Battery Saver
3. Optimize Battery Life via Power Options
4. Improve Battery Life via Settings.

Laptop battery drains fast while playing video games

1] Improve Battery Life by reducing Screen Brightness

Windows 11

To change the display brightness for your Windows 11 computer, the procedure is as follows:

1. Right-click on the Start button and select Settings.
2. In the Settings window, go to the System tab.
3. In the right pane, click on Display.
4. From this menu, you can change the Brightness using the slider.

Windows 10

You can easily increase the battery life while watching movies, videos or doing any other work by reducing the screen brightness. That doesn’t mean that you need to reduce the brightness to the lowest but make sure that your screen is not set to full brightness. You can either use hotkeys on the keyboard or navigate to Settings > System > Display to accurately adjust the screen brightness.

2] Turn on Battery Saver

The built-in Battery Saver feature helps you extend Windows battery life while watching movies and videos by limiting background activities and push notifications.

By default, the Battery Saver feature in Windows 11/10 kicks in when the battery level drops to 20%. You can temporarily turn on the Battery Saver while watching movies for better battery life.

3] Improve Battery Life via Settings

Windows 11

If you wish to improve the battery life via Settings in Windows 11, there’s a direct option for the same in the Video playback section.

1. Right-click on the Start button and select Settings.
2. In the left pane, go to Apps.
3. In the right pane, go to Video playback.
4. Under Battery options, change the option to Optimize for battery life.
5. Reboot your system.

Windows 10

This setting will affect all users on the PC that use the same power plan. Open Settings, and click System.

Click Battery on the left side. Scroll on the right side, and click Change battery settings for playing video.

On the Video Playback settings window that opens, scroll down on the right to Battery options section and select either Optimize for battery life or Optimize for video quality in the When watching movies and videos on battery power drop-down menu.

You can now exit Settings.

4] Optimize Battery Life via Power Options

Right-click Power icon in the notification area on the taskbar, click Power options, click Change plan settings link to the right to open the advanced power settings for your current chosen power plan.

Click on the + sign for Multimedia settings to collapse it. Click on + sign for Video playback quality bias to collapse it. Now set On battery to what you want, and click OK.

When optimized for battery life, Windows 10 will play HDR movies as SDR videos. Otherwise, it will play them as HDR videos but drain your battery faster.

I hope you get more battery life while watching Movies & Videos on Windows 11/10.

Why should we focus on battery life while maintaining performance while watching movies and videos?

Most batteries can be recharged a limited number of times. While they work well over years, this little exhaustion adds up and causes a lot of strain to the battery’s durability over time.

Since videos consume the maximum battery power after games, it is worth limiting the power consumed by them.

Is the Battery Saver power plan best for maintaining battery life while watching movies and videos?

The battery saver plan is best for saving the battery, not for movies and videos specifically. For that, you could consider the balanced plan.

Read next: Laptop Battery Usage Tips & Optimization Guide for Windows.