Comment by orik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orik | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem holding back adoption for 4k media is vendor lock in. You can't get 4K unless you're on a Sony/LG/Samsung "Smart TV".

There is not a legitimate technical reason why I can't watch House of Cards in 4K on my Seiki through my PC. I watched the trailer in 4K over a dozen times on YouTube.

Gamers want to play games on low input lag 4K screens from brands like Asus, Dell, Acer. 4K is much more easily justifiable when users can buy a single screen for their games and ultra-hd content.

Gaming PC's are about the only units with enough compute for highly compressed h.265 playback without built in hardware acceleration, so I don't understand why the market has not made this content accessible for me to purchase.

You are right there is no technical reason why you can't but there are probably commercial and practical reasons.

The number of people with gaming PCs is relatively small and the complexity of providing it to them might be quite high. I don't know what the availability of stable HEVC decoders is like or what the licensing cost for them is or the difficulty of integrating them with Silverlight or whatever it is that Netlix use.

The Youtube trailer was probably VP9 not HEVC but was possibly using a higher bitrate that could effectively be downloaded rather than streamed for a short trailer.

Basically the complexity of supporting the small group of gamers with the right PC's and 4K monitors was probably not worth it initially especially considering the backlash from customers who's PC's weren't fast enough. It is easier to launch on a set of known devices and then they can expand from there. I'm sure it will come.

> The biggest problem holding back adoption for 4k media is vendor lock in.

That's where that government regulation and ten years of drafting standards mentioned above come into the picture.

No legit technical reason? How about 'user experience'? To my understanding this sort of pilot program is limited to proven-good configurations to keep the kvetching to a minimum before they generalize it for launch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com