Gadgetory

Canada recently celebrated its 150th anniversary and being good Canucks and all we wondered what better way to show off our raw patriotism and dedication to the maple leaf than some good old-fashioned Netflix 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 chromecast 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 hook available but we specifically requested the i5 variant for a few reasons at under $400 we liked 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 on-board GPU and noise will make for a better home theater experience we configured it in about 20 minutes with a 128 gig Intel 600 P series SSD - 6 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 LGU d88 4k monitors unfortunately while they support HDCP 2.2 we ran into some handshaking issues but it just wouldn't be a video 1 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 B 6p an enormous 65 inch Ultra HD premium certified OLED TV with the now-familiar and awesome webOS interface and gyroscopic remote as usual my message here is the same OLED have I mentioned OLED yet with it's 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 flexible media player VLC 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 HDR 10 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 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 UHD 4k quality as long as we're using Windows tens 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 of store and soon Microsoft's Windows Store and film and 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 5 I promise five playing back UHD blu-ray z' that option was absent four 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 discs bit rate which can nearly triple at that is where our shiny new pioneer BDR 2:11 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 a 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 laserdisc and this along with a five and a quarter inch enclosure is the PSLE resistance of our 4k playback PC it actually worked far more painlessly than you'd expect 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 its movies so can we game on this thing I mean there is a Thunderbolt 3 port on there so this being Linus tech tips of course we grabbed a razor core slapped in a gtx 980ti 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 steams in-home streaming is a thing if you really want to have a gaming PC experience on the couch with the i-5 and you have another gaming PC elsewhere on your network our 4k 60fps gaming stream ran perfect 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 what is 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 it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join