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Comment by johnduhart | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone who knows technology knows the computational and image-processing capabilities of even an average PC or Mac far outstrip those of a streaming box, set-top box, or smart TV by several orders of magnitude.

It's quite possible these TVs or STBs are shipping with a special hardware decoder that supports this format that they're using.

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It's actually quite interesting to me that many 2014 AV receivers support HDMI 2.0 (Fully capable of 4K video pass through) but DO NOT have HDCP 2.2 implemented.

They are technologically fully capable of providing the desired service (4K video) to the customer but as soon as HDCP 2.2 Blu-ray players and 4K content come out they are fully obsoleted.

"As of this update, among the major manufacturers of AV receivers only Onkyo/Integra offers such AV Receivers that support both HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 as will be needed to support certain of the high quality 4K/UHD video sources, such as the upcoming Blu-ray 4K/UHD players." [1]

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Blu-ray_Disc_and_HD_DVD_pl...

or hardware DRM

>They are technologically fully capable of providing the desired service (4K video) to the customer but as soon as HDCP 2.2 Blu-ray players and 4K content come out they are fully obsoleted

You're assuming that's a bug. It means that users will have to buy a new box to access all that content, which means the manufacturers may see it instead as a feature.

It reminds me of the non-HDCP HDTVs that used to be available (especially projectors IIRC). We know this stuff is guaranteed to be obsolete, but people are buying it anyway. At least most of those receivers don't cost $10,000.

They are - dedicated silicon support for HEVC. That's how they can do it with such a small form factor and power budget. However a software codec on a modern PC should have no problem with HEVC due to the huge amount of available CPU.

Well, Adobe hasn't added support to Flash yet. Plus, given their massive display pipeline performance problems, it's quite possible that they won't be able do 4k 10-bit HEVC when it's finally added.

They would also have to pay the added HEVC licensing cost for Flash Player, which is substantially more than H.264 was.

It exists but it's slow which is why it's not standard in many video editing platforms yet. Encoding speed for 4k using the Divx encoder is <1fps. So a 2 hour film owuld take about 48 hours on an i7. I think there are some commercial codecs that are a bit faster like the Cinemartin one, but they're about $500. Makes sense if you have a small rendering farm, but limits demand at the bottom end of the market.

Of course you can just distribute the decoder, and of course the decoder is much faster (Divx is 28fps ont he same Core i7 IIRC). But the # of people with 4k displays right now is really tiny compared to the install base for HD, like I'd guess <<1%.

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