What was previously reserved for certain streaming boxes and UHD televisions, now works also on the PC - at least officially. Netflix in 4K is currently apparently only related to Intel's Kaby Lake, both AMD's current Radeon RX series and Nvidias 1000s fail.
Meanwhile, PCs are also to support Netflix in 4K resolution. Officially, however, Windows 10 and Microsoft's edge browser are required on the softwares side. There are also restrictions on the hardware. Because the copy protection measures PlayReady 3.0, SL3000 and HDCP 2.2 must be supported, the 4K playback is limited to Intel's Kaby Lake as well as AMD's Radeon RX series and Nvidia's Geforce 1000 series. In a test of the colleagues of Heise, however, the material could only be played on computers with Intel's iGPU.
Interestingly, this works even without problems, if the affected computers do not even have HDMI 2.0 on board. So one of the tested Mainboard had only an HDMI 1.4 connection. This allows you to play videos with only 30 fps, but the resolution has been correctly streamed.
However, the HDMI 2.0b in the field leading Polaris and Pascal GPUs fails at the display. The colleagues suspect that the necessary copy protection PlayReady 3.0 is not yet compatible with the drivers. AMD said in the middle of the year, the copying protection with a coming driver to want to support. This may not have happened to any of the two GPU providers. Corresponding inquiries would not have been answered by the manufacturers until yesterday.
Netflix, Amazon and Co are also becoming a growing threat to the classic television of a recent investigation. Meanwhile, a quarter of the streaming user can imagine, completely abandon linear television,
says the conducted by Bitkom investigation.
Source: Heise