Lots of bad info in this thread.
Playing back video on a retina mac is a special case, and Apple have accounted for this in their developer documentation. Applications playing back video have the option of playing the video at the video's native resolution, and upscaling or downscaling to fit the *native display of the Mac* (2304x1440 in this case).
In other words, it doesn't matter if your MacBook is running at native, scaled, or some other resolution. When you play a 1440p video, it's going to render the video natively at 1440p then scale it to fit the Macbook's *native* screen.
Note that 1440p is a 16:9 resolution and the Macbook is a 16:10 display. So a 1440p video will not fit properly on the screen without being scaled down to about 2304x1296.