Canada recently celebrated its 150th anniversary and being good kuks
and all we wondered what better way to show off our raw patriotism and
dedication to the maple leaf than some good oldfashioned nflix and chill but
watching 4K content on the PC is not as
simple as you might think so when Intel reached out to sponsor a video featuring
their seventh generation Nook we jumped at the opportunity to cover how exactly
it works and it is going to be such a
wild ride that your knuckles are bound
to be white by the end of it okay that
last one was a bit of a stretch stretch like this
the reasons for hooking your TV up to a PC rather than a lower cost HDMI stick
like a chomecast or a streaming box mostly come down to flexibility you can
run whatever software you want interface seamlessly with storage devices on your
network and even use the media PC itself
as a file server for the rest of the household with external storage so here
then is the PC we chose this isn't the
fastest Nook available but we specifically requested the I5 variant
for a few reasons at under $400 we like
its balance of features performance and cost the I5 Nook is quite a bit shorter
and more Compact and its lower power
consumption partly thanks to offloading video decoding to the onboard GPU and
noise will make for a better home theater experience we configured it in
about 20 minutes with a 128 G Intel 600p
series SSD two sticks of crucial ddr4
memory and a fresh copy of Windows 10
now when we first did our proof of concept testing for this video we turned
to our tried and tested LG ud88 4K
monitors unfortunately while they support hdcp 2.2 we ran into some
handshaking issues but it just wouldn't be a video on Ultra HD without a problem
with DRM would it thankfully our Bros
over at LG hooked us up with a much more recent not to mention bigger screen to
play with the LG OLED 65 b6p an enormous
65 in Ultra HD premium certified OLED TV
with the now familiar and awesome web OS interface and gyroscopic remote as usual
my message here is the same OLED have I
mentioned OLED yet with its unbelievable contrast is the future and I'm actually
really glad that we're using this for our UHD testing instead so with the
hardware out of the way let's get into our first method of 4K content
consumption local playback of normal computer files while there isn't much
legitimately out there at the moment we can handle both freely available test
files and any consumer 4K video capture
thanks to everybody's favorite Flex POS media player
VC number two everybody's favorite free
streaming site YouTube first demoed 4K playback in
2014 and that was without requiring any
elaborate hardware-based DRM more on that in a moment and they added hdr10
support in late 2016 though it should be
noted that very little HDR content is available at this time our CPU usage on
our Nook stayed at between 5 5 and 10% thanks to that GPU decoding that I
mentioned earlier number
three all right so this box has full
support for the controversial software
guard extensions for playback 3.0 DRM
that's been spearheaded by the content production industry which lets us access
then streaming services like Netflix and
Amazon Prime video at full full UHD 4K
quality as long as we're using Windows
10's edge browser though it should be noted that the native Netflix app also
supports UHD playback number four there
are also digital stores like Sony Pictures store and uh soon Microsoft's
Windows store and filming TV app both of
which if you have the DRM compliance
built into your PC will support 4K
videos but none of the stuff I've mentioned is especially new and all of
it is either Limited in terms of content availability or in terms of sound and
image quality so what about method number five I promis five playing back
UHD Blu-rays that option was conspicuously
absent for months after the launch of 4K
Blu-ray and there is a significant and very noticeable difference in quality
between an internet stream running at about 6 megabytes per second versus a
disc spit rate which can nearly triple
that that is where our shiny new Pioneer
bdr 211 ubk comes in imported straight
from the Land of the Rising Sun it's the world's first and at this time only
Ultra HD compatible PC Blu-ray Drive and
given the decline in physical media use in modern computers it's likely to
retain its title for some time with
support for almost literally every major
disc based format sort of like laser disc and this along with a 5 and a/4 in
enclosure is the piesta resistance of our 4K playback PC it actually worked
far more painlessly than you'd expect
but but like our UHD streaming services
it doesn't work without Hardware support
and a software install for the software guard extensions
DRM so then we are now able to consume
virtually any content that we can go to
a store or online and buy as long as
it's movies so can we game on this thing
I mean there is a Thunderbolt 3 port on there so so this being lineus Tech tips
of course we grabbed a razor core slapped in a GTX 1080 TI and plugged it
in to see what it would do the answer
well from my experience the much higher
clocked core i7 variants of Intel's mobile chips are quite a bit more potent
for this use case the good news though is that steam's inhome streaming is a
thing if you really want to have a gaming PC experience on the couch with
the I5 and you have another gaming PC
Elsewhere on your network our 4K 60fps
gaming stream ran perfectly over a standard gigabit wired network
connection so in summary then we basically been looking for an excuse to
buy one of these new blu-ray drives and test UHD compatibility on the latest PCS
with the hardware DRM support and hopefully seeing it all pretty much
working outside of some question marks with respect to monitor hdcp
compatibility was as interesting for you guys as it was for
us so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if
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