Will 4K Blu-rays play on 1080p screens? Solved!

There's no denying the importance of 4K Ultra HD when it comes to the future of home entertainment. Offering incredible visual clarity, sensational color reproduction and vastly improved contrast, this technology gives people at home the opportunity to experience films the way they were meant to be seen. As an average consumer, you can purchase or rent 4K Blu-ray from store or Internet to enjoy perfect 4K movies.

Although 4K Blu-ray gets all the buzz these days for its great improvement in video display image on a larger screen application, there are still some 4K playback problems could be anything from hardware demand on your machine, incompatible media player, to bandwidth-intensive and file size issue. We find that a large amount of people complains that when they played 4K Blu-ray on 1080p monitor, just saw a portion of the frame displayed full screen on 1080p screen. Will 4K Blu-rays play on 1080p screens? Is there any way to smoothly play 4K Blu-ray on 1080p screen? An efficient way is to downscale 4K to 1080p with a 4K video converter software.

Best 4K Blu-ray to 1080p converter for Windows & Mac

For that purpose, we prefer Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate (best 4K Video Converter Software Review). It's an easy-to-use and comprehensive utility for downscaling 4K Blu-ray to 1080p and other more useful sizes on Windows, letting you watch them on your computer, TV sets, and portable devices (presets packed in it) smoothly. It also allows you to convert any kind of digital videos/DVDs to your desired format, along with numerous video and audio parameter settings for tweaking on file size and video quality. Besides 1080p, it is able to convert 4K to 720p, 1080p to 720p with less quality loss at super fast speed.

For Mac users, you can download Pavtube iMedia Converter for Mac to rip 4K Blu-ray to 1080p video file on macOS Sierra, Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, 10.9 Mavericks, 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.7 Lion, 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Step by Step to Downscale 4K Blu-ray to 1080p

Windows Version Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate taken as example, Mac Version share the same steps, just keep in mind you have download the right version, Windows platform .exe files cannot be installed on macOS and vice versa.

Insert 4K Blu-ray into an internal or external optical drive. Launch Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate, click "File" > "Load from Disc" button to browse to disc drive and import source movie into this app. Apart from 4K Blu-ray disc, you can also use the program to load 4K Blu-ray folder or ISO image file.

Step 2: Choose output file format

From "Format" bar drop-down list, choose the formats that you want to output for later use. For compatibility consideration, it is idea for you to choose "Common Video" > "H.264 HD Video (*.mp4)" as output file format.

Go head to "Settings" button next to "Format". In the "size" field, you can see the application defaults to leaving the video at whatever resolution your video already is. For our purpose, what you need to do is simply change the original 4096 x 2160 value in the box to 1920 x 1080, as image shown below. 1080p is still HD, but takes up quite a bit less space. You can alter other settings if required including codec, bitrate, framerate, audio sample rate, etc.

Edit (optional)

One very useful feature of the 4K video converter is that it enables you to edit the video to get a good-looking final file. You can trim and crop the video, add effects on it, add image/text/video watermark to it, split a file to several ones and more. To do this, click the "Edit" icon button on the top menu and go to the editing window.

Step 4: Begin the conversion process

Go back to the main interface, click right-bottom "Convert" button to begin the conversion from 4K Blu-ray to 1080p format videos conversion process.

When the conversion is completed, click "Open Output Folder" to pop out the folder with converted files, then you can easily transfer and play converted files on 1080p screen without any problems.