Slashdot Mirror
4K Netflix Arrives On Windows 10, But Only Via Microsoft's Edge Browser (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Netflix 4K streaming is finally heading to Windows PCs this week. While a number of TVs and set-top-boxes already support 4K Netflix streams, the PC has largely been left out of the high-quality streams due to piracy fears. Netflix is now supporting 4K streaming through Microsoft's Edge browser, but you'll need a new PC to actually make use of it. Netflix is only supporting 7th generation (Kaby Lake) Intel Core processors, and there aren't many laptops that actually support both the 4K display required and the new Intel processors. As a result, Microsoft is using the 4K Netflix support as a marketing effort for its Edge browser and to encourage people to upgrade their hardware to watch new episodes of the Gilmore Girls. It all might seem like a bit of a con, but it's largely the fault of DRM requirements from Hollywood studios and TV networks. Content providers have strict controls for 4K playback, so that streams can't be captured and redistributed illegally. The latest hardware decryption features simply aren't available on older Intel processors, and the new Kaby Lake chips now support 10-bit HEVC, a popular 4K video codec.
Did you know that splitters work by using the TV's authentication handshake and therefor sending the unencrypted signal down the other cable?
That is incorrect. There is no "unencrypted signal" in HDCP. Even after the handshake the signal is still encrypted. They work because the HDCP master key was leaked, or rather enough device keys were extracted that the master key was derived by inverting the matrix. I don't know that the HDCP2 master key has been publicly discovered yet.
With HDCP it didn't really matter as you could already go to your favourite parts supplier and buy chips from TI or AD, among others, that had the keys builtin and would output the video as unencrypted LVDS. Connect one of those back to back with an HDMI transmitter IC and you have your HDCP stripper.
I told you this was coming but nobody listened.
the lack of a CDM specification was an intentional action by the companies currently drafting the EME for the express purpose of creating hardware dependance. While the EME does not preclude a system agnostic CDM specification, the companies drafting the EME have a vested financial interest in preventing it. If it's too late in the process to add a CDM specification, then the EME should be withheld from the approval process until an accompanying system agnostic CDM specification is approved.
This has already had real consequences.
Due to the lack of a proper CDM specification, Microsoft was able to make deals with major content providers to require Microsoft Playready 3.0 which uses a CDM that only works on a few browsers, only on Windows platforms and only if you have the latest Intel or AMD CPU. This is also the reason why Linux computers cannot view 4K videos on Netflix website. The only Linux computers that can view 4K content are SmartTVs made by companies that paid Microsoft.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What about Netflix's original content? Last I checked, they still cap the resolution at 720p for people using HTML5 + Widevine, which is how I use it on my Linux laptop.
It is true that basically all video encoding these days is done with a 4:1 luma:chroma ratio. So ya 4k video has 1920x1080 chroma samples. However another, probably more important part when talking Youtube is just bitrate. Youtube is pretty aggressive about the bitrates they use to save on bandwidth costs and play on a wide variety of connections. For 1080p30 it uses a bitrate of about 2.5-3mbps. That's pretty crap, considering Blu-rays are usually more in the realm of 25mbps at the same picture size. More bits = more detail in compression, regardless of how many pixels.
Well it gets a lot better at higher picture sized. 2.5k video is about 8-9mbps and 4k video is about 16-18mbps (these are all for VP9 streams). It's a big jump, more than the resolution increase itself would require for equal quality. Hence, a better output even when downsampled.
In fact if you were to take a 1080 video from a camera, upsample it to 4k at a high bitrate and feed that to Youtube, the result would look better played at 4k and downsampled to 1080 on your screen than if you just uploaded the 1080 video directly to Youtube simply because Youtube will allocate more bits to its compression.