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Post by Hair Nick on May 14, 2015 15:00:03 GMT -5
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Post by qdtjni on May 14, 2015 16:00:47 GMT -5
But....a 4k unit requires an expensive HDMI 2 graphics card for my PC, as well as a really beefy processor. No, not at all, even an i3 CPU with built in HD-graphics is more than sufficient, at least for movies. 4K gaming is another story.  |
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Post by qdtjni on May 14, 2015 16:04:44 GMT -5
That is why I will continue to be happy with all my 1080P 1:1 Bluray rips playing through my Rasbperry Pi with all HD audio from the disc. I was under the impression that the RPI couldn't passthrough DTS HD MA and Dolby TrueHD. Did that change with the new RPI2? |
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Post by Hair Nick on May 14, 2015 16:09:17 GMT -5
That is why I will continue to be happy with all my 1080P 1:1 Bluray rips playing through my Rasbperry Pi with all HD audio from the disc. I was under the impression that the RPI couldn't passthrough DTS HD MA and Dolby TrueHD. Did that change with the new RPI2? Yes, my RPI2 running Kodi passes DTS HD MA just fine to my XMC-1. I'll have to check on Dolby TrueHD. |
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Post by garbulky on May 14, 2015 16:13:13 GMT -5
But....a 4k unit requires an expensive HDMI 2 graphics card for my PC, as well as a really beefy processor. No, not at all, even an i3 CPU with built in HD-graphics is more than sufficient, at least for movies. 4K gaming is another story. I don't know... I have a dual core athlon 64X2 2.7Ghz processor with a radeon 6800 and it faints doing flash video at 1080p. It can barely hack it on silverlight at 720p. I used to have a nice old intel quad core 2.4 ghz which chewed up anything thrown at it. But I think scaling at those resolutions would be a tough sell for it. Unfortunately I would need to have a robust scaling OS at those resolutions. As this 4k monitor will be sitting in a living room away from the couch. Right now, other than apple, for 4k displays, there's not a very robust (seamless) solution out there from windows. And that's what I hope to be using - windows 10. |
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Post by qdtjni on May 14, 2015 16:15:10 GMT -5
I was under the impression that the RPI couldn't passthrough DTS HD MA and Dolby TrueHD. Did that change with the new RPI2? Yes, my RPI2 running Kodi passes DTS HD MA just fine to my XMC-1. I'll have to check on Dolby TrueHD. That's great. Time to get an RPI2. On a completely other topic. Do you use the RPI as a DLNA/UPnP or squeezelite renderer/player? |
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Post by qdtjni on May 14, 2015 16:18:57 GMT -5
No, not at all, even an i3 CPU with built in HD-graphics is more than sufficient, at least for movies. 4K gaming is another story. I don't know... I have a dual core athlon 64X2 2.7Ghz processor with a radeon 6800 and it faints doing flash video at 1080p. It can barely hack it on silverlight at 720p. I used to have a nice old intel quad core 2.4 ghz which chewed up anything thrown at it. But I think scaling at those resolutions would be a tough sell for it. Unfortunately I would need to have a robust scaling OS at those resolutions. As this 4k monitor will be sitting in a living room away from the couch. Right now, other than apple, for 4k displays, there's not a very robust (seamless) solution out there from windows. And that's what I hope to be using - windows 10. Seriously, an i3 with Intel HD graphics is enough, maybe not with windows but certainly with Ubuntu. The latests Mac Minis can do it too, albeit with an i5 CPU. |
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Post by Nodscene on May 14, 2015 16:33:43 GMT -5
The biggest problem I see coming is that they are going to price 4k discs out of the affordability range of most consumers. They did that with 3D and you can see what's happening there. Hell, they've even done that with good old Blu-ray discs. In Canada it's not uncommon to see $30-40+ blu-rays let alone the 3D version. For example, Age Of Ultron is on sale for $35.54, add shipping and taxes and you are approaching $45-50. How much do you think 4k is going to go for and how many people are going to buy it. If they actually want to keep the market alive and have any kind of sales numbers, blu's should be no more than $10 with the 3D versions being the same or maxing out at $15 and 4K should be around $15-20 at most. Of course we all know that isn't going to happen so the market will die and of course they will blame everyone else but themselves. It makes you wonder if they will even bother with physical media when the next evolution comes along.
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KeithL
Administrator 
Posts: 9,968
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Post by KeithL on May 14, 2015 21:35:06 GMT -5
There's a big difference between gaming and playing video. Decoding and playing video takes vastly different amounts of processing power depending on what specific CODEC a particular video is encoded with. For example, MP4 videos typically are very difficult to decode, so weak machines have trouble with them, while standard MpeG videos are much less so (but they take up more space to store). Since there is a specific CODEC designed to go with 4k (h.265), we can hope that both 4k Blu-Ray discs and 4k streaming content will use it. This, in turn, will incentivise the computer market to support it. High end graphics cards these days support MPeG decoding in hardware, and we can expect the same for 4k. Therefore, what we'll almost certainly see is that, probably by next year, there will be a few $300 graphics cards for your computer that will do 4k - but the good news is that they'll be able to do it without having to upgrade the rest of your computer. Then, as usual with computers, according to Moore's Law, those cards will multiply like rabbits, and the price on those cards will drop to about half of that in the next year or two, then to half again in another year or two. So, with luck, three years from now, you'll be able to buy a 4k graphics card for $75. And, two years from then, the graphics chipset built into every cheap motherboard will support it. Good quality 4k games will be a bit more tricky - because processing power has currently more or less stalled at 3 gHz 4 cores or so (we should be due for another jump). Luckily, increasing the resolution of a game usually entails more detailed textures and such, which are the sort of thing which can be handled by a more powerful graphics card without requiring much of an increase in the processing power of the main processor, so the new graphics cards will probably take care of that as well. (Game designers are already doing pretty well at using as little processing power as possible to get the job done... and, if you think about it, in order to change a nice first person shooter from HD to 4k you need to draw the pictures at higher resolution, but the logic that determines things like when objects touch each other doesn't have to change at all. So that upgrade will be a little easier than you might think.) The hardest thing for computers to do will be upscaling - like from HD to 4k. Unlike games, where you're in charge of creating the pixels, in order to upscale video you need to look at all the pixels in the current video and do interesting and creative things to them. This requires a lot of processing. Luckily (again) most 4k TVs will already have chips for doing this, and those same chips will be able to be used in graphics cards. Unfortunately, however, this will mean a return to specialized video cards specifically intended for upscaling video. (These will be "HTPC cards" as opposed to just "video cards" or "gaming cards" - so how fast they appear, what they cost, and how fast that price drops may depend on how fast the specific market for them appears and expands.) However, don't forget that you'll still be able to pass the HD video you have directly to your TV - since every 4k TV is going to be able to do the upscaling for you anyway. The biggest problem with 4k is going to be with streaming. Right now, only about 1/3 of Netflix customers have enough bandwidth to get decent quality HD. To get "equivalent" quality 4k (by which I mean to get the extra 4x the number of pixels you're supposed to get, with each xx pixels carrying the same amount of information), you would need 4 TIMES as much bandwidth. (It's like when you make a JPEG picture; if you only have a certain amount of bandwidth, then you can only have that much information; you can "blow up" the picture into more pixels, but it doesn't get any sharper or more detailed... it just gets... bigger). In reality, the 4k CODEC is claimed to be between 1.5x and 2x as "good" as the one currently used for HD, which means that, if you're currently "bandwidth limited", the picture you get on Netflix will be "1.5x better" - and NOT the "4x better" you might have been hoping for. This means that "4k on Netflix" isn't going to be as good as 4k on disc, and maybe won't be as good as you'd hoped (it will be better than "HD on Netflix" but only a little bit). However, the difference won't be as bad as you might think, because the new "4k discs" don't hold 4x as much information either (although the new discs do hold about twice as much which, combined with the more efficient CODEC, will get them a lot closer). WHat we will have to hope is that "they" get the trade offs right. (Meaning that we all get a better picture instead of a picture with a lot more pixels that staggers and stutters because none of out Internet connections can keep up.) No, not at all, even an i3 CPU with built in HD-graphics is more than sufficient, at least for movies. 4K gaming is another story. I don't know... I have a dual core athlon 64X2 2.7Ghz processor with a radeon 6800 and it faints doing flash video at 1080p. It can barely hack it on silverlight at 720p. I used to have a nice old intel quad core 2.4 ghz which chewed up anything thrown at it. But I think scaling at those resolutions would be a tough sell for it. Unfortunately I would need to have a robust scaling OS at those resolutions. As this 4k monitor will be sitting in a living room away from the couch. Right now, other than apple, for 4k displays, there's not a very robust (seamless) solution out there from windows. And that's what I hope to be using - windows 10. |
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Post by garbulky on May 15, 2015 0:21:38 GMT -5
Great post @keithl. Much appreciated.
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Post by qdtjni on May 15, 2015 6:39:10 GMT -5
I already run an Intel NUC that scales everything not UHD to UHD and obviously display UHD as UHD There is absolutely no stuttering or delays, whether scaling or just displaying native UHD. The CPU never goes beyond 25 % in total meaning it does not even fill a thread on my little tiny dual core i5. 25% on an i5 is way less than 100% on an i3, mots likely even less than 50%. As for decoding MPG4 is already done in HW in most newish graphics adapters including embedded Intel graphics in Sandy Bridge (nor Celeron and Pentium), Ivy Bridge and Haswell bridge. H265 my be tougher but it seems like smallish i5s and even i3s should be able to cope even if done in SW, i.e. by the CPU. EDIT: Seems like Intel has partial HW decoding of H265 already! techreport.com/news/27677/new-intel-igp-drivers-add-h-265-vp9-hardware-decode-support |
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Post by Gary Cook on Jun 30, 2015 0:32:35 GMT -5
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