Kaby Lake - Netflix 4K support is here!

[Eug]

But you might be in the same boat anyways with Kaby Lake, or whatever near future CPU, depending on how strong the push ends up being for AV1.

I can a wait several more years for that if I have my Netflix.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Yea, I'm going to torrent all those 4K Blu-Ray remuxes. Oh wait... Hollywood is winning that battle.

This thread is about Netflix not Blu Rays.

4K Netflix and 4K Amazon Prime content has been pirated and is all over the net.

 

[Eug]

I have pirated stuff before, but those things have been few and far between as time passes and yes, the I actually did decided to spend money on the stuff, or at least have the intention of using legal means from here on out, like the freaking public library. But don't tell me that all of the torrenters of media are those who wouldn't have bought it anyway. Gilmore Girls, which is mentioned in the blog post, is an old show has pirated versions at LOWER RESOLUTIONS already(or available through the library system), so if it is matter of whether the show is worth it or not, the "free stuff" is there. But if you want to enjoy that series with the utmost detail, then forking over some cash is something you should be doing.

Gilmore Girls has new episodes coming out in 4K tomorrow. (Not that I care, since I wasn't a watcher of that show.) Actually, not really episodes so much as four 90-minute mini-movies.

You won't be getting any of that legally anywhere except Netflix.

 

[Torn Mind]

Gilmore Girls has new episodes coming out in 4K tomorrow. (Not that I care, since I wasn't a watcher of that show.) Actually, not really episodes so much as four 90-minute mini-movies.

You won't be getting any of that legally anywhere except Netflix.

A cheapskate on the basic plan would get to enjoy it in SD anyway. This is not a matter of getting the media or not, but rather getting the media at a higher resolution, one in which many people have not switched over yet because they just went 1080p on their TVs a few years ago and those TVs should still be chugging. Even more hilarious would be someone wanting to pirate the show to play the 4k video on a non-4k laptop screen or a smartphone.

 

[Eug]

A cheapskate on the basic plan would get to enjoy it in SD anyway. This is not a matter of getting the media or not, but rather getting the media at a higher resolution, one in which many people have not switched over yet because they just went 1080p on their TVs a few years ago and those TVs should still be chugging. Even more hilarious would be someone wanting to pirate the show to play the 4k video on a non-4k laptop screen or a smartphone.

Actually, IMO the bigger reason to get the 4K feeds is HDR. Laptop and tablet screens are going high gamut these days.

But bottom line, if you're buying soon, it makes sense to wait for Kaby Lake. I remember the same arguments way back when, when h.264 was still a relatively new thing. People were saying the older chips were fine because they could decode 1080p h.264 in software. Yeah, they could, but it was a pain because you couldn't multi-task, and you'd get weird glitches, while your fans were at 100%. And the battery life would last 2 hours instead of five. In contrast, if you had hardware h.264 decoding, you'd get a nice silent machine that lasts a long time, and you could even work at the same time with no slowdowns.

Both my laptops, one Mac and one Windows are from that era, and they've lasted this long precisely because they include the hardware video decoding. Now comes a new era, and I'll be buying again soon.

 

[bigboxes]

Sounds like a stupid artificial limit. Don't subscribe to Netflix. Do download their content though!

 

[PhonakV30]

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Inter...-unterstuetzen-4K-Streams-noch-nicht-1214483/

What was previously reserved for certain streaming boxes and UHD televisions, now works also on the PC - at least officially. Netflix in 4K is currently apparently only related to Intel's Kaby Lake, both AMD's current Radeon RX series and Nvidias 1000s fail.

Meanwhile, PCs are also to support Netflix in 4K resolution. Officially, however, Windows 10 and Microsoft's edge browser are required on the softwares side. There are also restrictions on the hardware. Because the copy protection measures PlayReady 3.0, SL3000 and HDCP 2.2 must be supported, the 4K playback is limited to Intel's Kaby Lake as well as AMD's Radeon RX series and Nvidia's Geforce 1000 series. In a test of the colleagues of Heise, however, the material could only be played on computers with Intel's iGPU.

Interestingly, this works even without problems, if the affected computers do not even have HDMI 2.0 on board. So one of the tested Mainboard had only an HDMI 1.4 connection. This allows you to play videos with only 30 fps, but the resolution has been correctly streamed.

However, the HDMI 2.0b in the field leading Polaris and Pascal GPUs fails at the display. The colleagues suspect that the necessary copy protection PlayReady 3.0 is not yet compatible with the drivers. AMD said in the middle of the year, the copying protection with a coming driver to want to support. This may not have happened to any of the two GPU providers. Corresponding inquiries would not have been answered by the manufacturers until yesterday.

Netflix, Amazon and Co are also becoming a growing threat to the classic television of a recent investigation. Meanwhile, a quarter of the streaming user can imagine, completely abandon linear television, says the conducted by Bitkom investigation.

Source: Heise

 

[kaesden]

this should be an example of how to encourage piracy. Artifical marketing gimmicks and greed. Go buy a brand new cpu to watch in 4k!! no thanks, my 6700k is perfectly capable of playing back DRM-free files. The best way to reduce piracy is to make it not worth the effort. What netflix and intel are doing here is making getting the content legitimately not worth the effort.

 

[Black Octagon]

Are they true 4K source from Netflix? I know a lot of "downloadable" 4K content that is just upscaled 1080p. I don't know enough about Amazon or Netflix to make any conclusions, though..

I have heard/read that "4k" Netflix is indeed visibly less sharp than if you watch verified 4k source material...

 

[cytg111]

this should be an example of how to encourage piracy. Artifical marketing gimmicks and greed. Go buy a brand new cpu to watch in 4k!! no thanks, my 6700k is perfectly capable of playing back DRM-free files. The best way to reduce piracy is to make it not worth the effort. What netflix and intel are doing here is making getting the content legitimately not worth the effort.

Get your subscriptions in order, netflix, HBO, Amazon and then pirate everything you would normally watch on those platforms.
... Is what one could do as to make a "statement" .

 

[superstition]

(Insert rant about capped "broadband" here and the USA leading the world as usual by having inferior Internet, as well as sub-rant about how there's very little worth watching on Netflix anyway.)

I have heard/read that "4k" Netflix is indeed visibly less sharp than if you watch verified 4k source material...

4K is silly for HDTV in the first place. If television standards had been intelligently-done it would have been 720P then 1440P — not 1080P at all and not 4K.

1440 with normal viewing distances gives plenty of image quality without the ridiculous bandwidth and compression requirements. And, it wouldn't have led to the death of plasma, the TV tech that still has the best performance.

(4K was chosen because it was easy for TV makers to transition their manufacturing of 1080 panels to making 4K panels. If 1080 hadn't happened then maybe we wouldn't be faced with all the problems the unnecessarily high resolution entails.)