Therefore, here we gather 3 best Mac HEVC players to help you play HEVC/H.265 4K 1080p HD videos on Mac without hassle. So theoretically, VLC should have no problem handling HEVC or H.265 video materials. As an all-inclusive video player application, VLC Player has the HEVC support built-in for both the Windows version and the Mac version. Now that QuickTime is not that powerful to play the highly-compressed and high-res HEVC 4K videos on Mac, you have to turn to a much more professional H.265/HEVC player for Mac computer. To put it in a simple way, yes, VLC can play HEVC or H.265 videos. It seems that Apple has set some restrictions to QuickTime for H.265/HEVC playback, so that you have to satisfy such requirements or download HEVC/H.265 codec for Mac to beef up the QuickTime player. While others claimed that when the tag is 'hvc1' and it's a MP4 container with aac audio, QuickTime can also play HEVC on Mac successfully.
Some people said that anything running macOS 10.13 can playback HEVC as long as it's a QuickTime container format.
'So I upgraded my Mac to high Sierra and I was about the H.265 video encoding standard but when I encode a H.264 video to H.265 standard and then when I attempt to open the video using quick time player it shows 'Quick Time player does not support these kinds of videos.'' – from Apple Community