5 Ways to Watch 4K Content on the PC
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,172 words · ~5 min read
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Canada recently celebrated its 150th anniversary and being good kuks
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and all we wondered what better way to show off our raw patriotism and
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dedication to the maple leaf than some good oldfashioned nflix and chill but
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watching 4K content on the PC is not as
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simple as you might think so when Intel reached out to sponsor a video featuring
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their seventh generation Nook we jumped at the opportunity to cover how exactly
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it works and it is going to be such a
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wild ride that your knuckles are bound
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to be white by the end of it okay that
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last one was a bit of a stretch stretch like this
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the reasons for hooking your TV up to a PC rather than a lower cost HDMI stick
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like a chomecast or a streaming box mostly come down to flexibility you can
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run whatever software you want interface seamlessly with storage devices on your
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network and even use the media PC itself
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as a file server for the rest of the household with external storage so here
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then is the PC we chose this isn't the
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fastest Nook available but we specifically requested the I5 variant
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for a few reasons at under $400 we like
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its balance of features performance and cost the I5 Nook is quite a bit shorter
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and more Compact and its lower power
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consumption partly thanks to offloading video decoding to the onboard GPU and
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noise will make for a better home theater experience we configured it in
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about 20 minutes with a 128 G Intel 600p
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series SSD two sticks of crucial ddr4
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memory and a fresh copy of Windows 10
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now when we first did our proof of concept testing for this video we turned
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to our tried and tested LG ud88 4K
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monitors unfortunately while they support hdcp 2.2 we ran into some
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handshaking issues but it just wouldn't be a video on Ultra HD without a problem
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with DRM would it thankfully our Bros
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over at LG hooked us up with a much more recent not to mention bigger screen to
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play with the LG OLED 65 b6p an enormous
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65 in Ultra HD premium certified OLED TV
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with the now familiar and awesome web OS interface and gyroscopic remote as usual
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my message here is the same OLED have I
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mentioned OLED yet with its unbelievable contrast is the future and I'm actually
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really glad that we're using this for our UHD testing instead so with the
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hardware out of the way let's get into our first method of 4K content
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consumption local playback of normal computer files while there isn't much
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legitimately out there at the moment we can handle both freely available test
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files and any consumer 4K video capture
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thanks to everybody's favorite Flex POS media player
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VC number two everybody's favorite free
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streaming site YouTube first demoed 4K playback in
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2014 and that was without requiring any
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elaborate hardware-based DRM more on that in a moment and they added hdr10
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support in late 2016 though it should be
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noted that very little HDR content is available at this time our CPU usage on
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our Nook stayed at between 5 5 and 10% thanks to that GPU decoding that I
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mentioned earlier number
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three all right so this box has full
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support for the controversial software
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guard extensions for playback 3.0 DRM
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that's been spearheaded by the content production industry which lets us access
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then streaming services like Netflix and
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Amazon Prime video at full full UHD 4K
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quality as long as we're using Windows
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10's edge browser though it should be noted that the native Netflix app also
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supports UHD playback number four there
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are also digital stores like Sony Pictures store and uh soon Microsoft's
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Windows store and filming TV app both of
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which if you have the DRM compliance
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built into your PC will support 4K
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videos but none of the stuff I've mentioned is especially new and all of
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it is either Limited in terms of content availability or in terms of sound and
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image quality so what about method number five I promis five playing back
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UHD Blu-rays that option was conspicuously
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absent for months after the launch of 4K
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Blu-ray and there is a significant and very noticeable difference in quality
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between an internet stream running at about 6 megabytes per second versus a
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disc spit rate which can nearly triple
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that that is where our shiny new Pioneer
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bdr 211 ubk comes in imported straight
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from the Land of the Rising Sun it's the world's first and at this time only
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Ultra HD compatible PC Blu-ray Drive and
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given the decline in physical media use in modern computers it's likely to
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retain its title for some time with
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support for almost literally every major
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disc based format sort of like laser disc and this along with a 5 and a/4 in
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enclosure is the piesta resistance of our 4K playback PC it actually worked
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far more painlessly than you'd expect
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but but like our UHD streaming services
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it doesn't work without Hardware support
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and a software install for the software guard extensions
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DRM so then we are now able to consume
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virtually any content that we can go to
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a store or online and buy as long as
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it's movies so can we game on this thing
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I mean there is a Thunderbolt 3 port on there so so this being lineus Tech tips
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of course we grabbed a razor core slapped in a GTX 1080 TI and plugged it
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in to see what it would do the answer
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well from my experience the much higher
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clocked core i7 variants of Intel's mobile chips are quite a bit more potent
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for this use case the good news though is that steam's inhome streaming is a
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thing if you really want to have a gaming PC experience on the couch with
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the I5 and you have another gaming PC
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Elsewhere on your network our 4K 60fps
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gaming stream ran perfectly over a standard gigabit wired network
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connection so in summary then we basically been looking for an excuse to
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buy one of these new blu-ray drives and test UHD compatibility on the latest PCS
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with the hardware DRM support and hopefully seeing it all pretty much
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working outside of some question marks with respect to monitor hdcp
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compatibility was as interesting for you guys as it was for
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us so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if
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it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in
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