[jerf]

Out of curiosity, how good is the streaming UHD? I've always wondered how the tension between bandwidth consumption and "actually looking better than 1080P" would pan out.

Last week with some Christmas funds we bought a 24" TV. Even at the point-blank range it is sitting at, 1080P isn't worth much so I got the nicer (and non-Smart!) 720P Samsung rather than the off-brand "we have 1080P!"-bullet-point-feature brand. We also got a Amazon Fire stick to stream to it. We took perverse glee in making the first thing we streamed to it Netflix's 4K Fireplace stream: http://www.netflix.com/title/80092839

[soylentcola]

On bigger screens and/or ones closer to the viewer it's definitely a noticeable improvement. It's obviously compressed and not up to the standard of a really high bitrate 4k video file but I guess it's equivalent to how "HD" on cable doesn't look as good as HD over the air but it still looks a lot nicer than standard def or DVD.

One major downside is that you can't stream 4K Netflix or Amazon to your browser so even on my 27" 2560x1440 monitor (or if you have a fancy 4k or 5k display) you won't get the option. It's only available on various streaming "sticks" or TV-based "apps" at the moment. As far as I know, it's only really meant as a roadblock to casual ripping of 4k content since it wouldn't be difficult to determine whether a viewer's computer had the proper hardware decoders to ensure smooth playback. Unfortunately for viewers, it means you can't get those higher quality streams without buying a device or using a "smart" TV. And last time I checked, there's no shortage of pirated 4K content out there. It's currently one of the only ways to do it if you don't want to rely on a Fire stick, another set top box, or some possibly-secured TV app platform. Not a huge deal on my 2560x1440 monitor since it's not too big and 1920x1080 looks fine. But I'm likely picking up a 4k TV in the next month thanks to a $500 gift card and wanting to game at those resolutions. It's a shame I'll have to either pirate 4k shows or plug in the ethernet cable to the TV when I want to stream legit.

[Fargren]

I also have a 27" 2560x1440 monitor and while the content looks fine, the video gets really choppy if I don't configure my monitor to 1920x1080, as if it's struggling to resize the video. Does this not happen to you?

[soylentcola]

Sorry for the late reply, but whenever I stream from Netflix, Amazon, or Youtube, I just let it stream at whatever their site determines as the max my connection can handle and it never looks choppy in fullscreen. The only time there's any issue is when bandwidth is limited for whatever reason and the site needs to drop down to a lower quality stream.

I assume you've already covered this but just in case, do you have the most recent drivers and software for your GPU? I know in the past that (on Windows systems at least) using the default "mostly works" driver that comes with the OS, I'll notice issues with performance because I'm missing any hardware acceleration that the Intel/nVidia/AMD GPU can do.

Typically I notice it on work machines that just got reimaged with a generic OS image and don't have the relevant GPU drivers installed yet. Moving windows around, resizing, and other windowing tasks are a bit choppy until I download the appropriate package.

Again, I assume you already thought of this if you're specifically buying a higher resolution display than the average cheap PC comes with. Still, it's the only thing that I've had affect framerate/refresh in fullscreen video in the past.

[towb]

It's clearly a step up from 1080p at a distance of about 3,5 - 4 meters at least. But then, a lot of it is the difference of a 5 year old 40" vs. a new 55" tv.

The beginning of "Narcos" is filmed from a helicopter down on some streets in a city, that was the first thing I ever saw in UHD, pretty cool! Now I've gotten used to it haha

[mpeg]

I have a 50'' 4k tv and can definitely notice the increase in resolution when watching from close enough, and deeper blacks.

However, it's not that big a deal when watching from 5-6 meters.