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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Right! Ok this makes sense. Any clue on why content owners do this? It seems a bit arbitrary.

Fortunately I'm the opposite of a videophile - I don't even know how High the Definition of our TV is. But I see your point, so indeed, a 4k dumb TV won't be able to show most Netflix content in 4k, correct? That's a major shame and pretty ridiculous.

edit: I just noticed that Netflix actually supports UHD on the Windows 10 app and on Microsoft Edge[0]. So running Windows on the media center PC appears to be a practical option.

[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

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> Netflix actually supports UHD on the Windows 10 app and on Microsoft Edge

Still a closed platform :)

It's the DRM problem. They insist on these limitations as an anti-piracy measure. Fundamentally the only way to decode 4k in real time is to pass it fairly-unmodified to the video hardware, and at that point in a non-closed system a driver could steal it. Or just record it off the screen from the inside.

> Still a closed platform :)

Sure, but not a smart TV and that's the part I personally care the most about. I doubt Microsoft, even with all their telemetry nonsense, will ever include something as ridiculous as samba.tv. Also, they employ more than 0 UI designers.

Thanks for the explanation btw. So it's basically the 4k video version of copy-protected CD's. And that was a great idea that totally worked!

> will ever include something as ridiculous as samba.tv

Pleasant surprise:

Microsoft Store -> "..." button -> My Library.

Sadly it just drives people to piracy instead when they cannot watch what they paid for.

>a 4k dumb TV

Is there even such a thing ? Honest question, because i looked for a "dumb" 4K with HDR10 support TV and i haven't found anything.

There's a lot of projectors that support 4K (see http://www.projectorcentral.com ) You can usually turn a smart TV into a dumb TV by not setting up the internet.

The 4K quality is tied to some pretty specific hardware and drivers as far as I remember. And 1080p is also different in my experience in the Windows 10 App and in Edge. I was able to get 1080p for some content in Edge, but not everything. The only way to consistently get 1080p quality was to use the rather crappy App. The search and filter features were worse than the website in my experience, and I ran into quite a few bugs when I used it.

Drifting off topic, but fwiw their Windows app got a bit better lately. I think there's finally a team on it again.

The Windows 10 Netflix "app" is utterly abysmal

I had it running on my second monitor as background noise while I was working on a project

Every time I'd use Alt+Tab, the entire window would go black. Presumably as part of its inane DRM

Unfortunately, the only way to get it to work again was to close and relaunch the entire app!

Right, but a HDCP 2.2 capable graphics device is required which currently is only nVidia GTX 10 series and newer Intel graphics.

Which the insane video card prices recently getting 4K output is an expensive issue.

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