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Does watching hq torrents of content I have legal access to count? :) My 960 GPU in the htpc doesn't quite have the bit depth that Netflix wants, therefore it

Does watching hq torrents of content I have legal access to count? :) My 960 GPU in the htpc doesn't quite have the bit depth that Netflix wants, therefore it disables 4k entirely. Bought the GPU at the time as it was the first with hardware HECV, has zero issues playing back a 4k encoding by someone else..

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Wait, can you not play SDR 4K on Netflix? What happens if you play the first season of Stranger Things, which was produced in 4K but not in HDR?
- jasomill 6y ago
  SDR? Sure. But unless something has changed recently, 4K Netflix on PC requires a particular flavor of Windows DRM that is only supported by NVIDIA GPUs starting with Pascal and Intel integrated graphics starting with Kaby Lake‡. On a more technical related note, I'd imagine 4K SDR variants of all Netflix HDR productions are generated on the back-end as an output of the same post-production process used to produce SDR prints at lower resolutions for reasons of both creative control an delivery efficiency; HEVC is just a compression algorithm, after all, and mostly orthogonal to matters of colorspace conversion and tone mapping. See, e.g., https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000588548-Color-Pipeline https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360... and observe that the example Dolby Vision workflow yields three distinct masters, 1. Dolby Vision (HDR + SDR tone mapping metadata) 2. SDR (generated automatically from the Dolby Vision source) 3. DCI-P3 (for potential theatrical exhibition) I therefore assume the requirements for 4K SDR playback of SDR and HDR titles are identical. ‡ If and only if said Kaby Lake iGPU is connected to a video output. I mention this because I can only watch 4K Netflix on my Hades Canyon NUC with the help of a Pascal eGPU, because, while the Kaby Lake iGPU is present and fully functional, all video outputs connect to the NUC's discrete AMD Polaris GPU, which Netflix doesn't support. DRM sucks.
  - sundvor 6y ago
    Excellent reply, thanks very much. My HTPC is ageing, but I like to push the life of my computers to the most. So needing an even better GPU or CPU when it should have been able to downgrade a tad is annoying.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Wait, can you not play SDR 4K on Netflix? What happens if you play the first season of Stranger Things, which was produced in 4K but not in HDR?

jasomill 6y ago
SDR? Sure. But unless something has changed recently, 4K Netflix on PC requires a particular flavor of Windows DRM that is only supported by NVIDIA GPUs starting with Pascal and Intel integrated graphics starting with Kaby Lake‡. On a more technical related note, I'd imagine 4K SDR variants of all Netflix HDR productions are generated on the back-end as an output of the same post-production process used to produce SDR prints at lower resolutions for reasons of both creative control an delivery efficiency; HEVC is just a compression algorithm, after all, and mostly orthogonal to matters of colorspace conversion and tone mapping. See, e.g., https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000588548-Color-Pipeline https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360... and observe that the example Dolby Vision workflow yields three distinct masters, 1. Dolby Vision (HDR + SDR tone mapping metadata) 2. SDR (generated automatically from the Dolby Vision source) 3. DCI-P3 (for potential theatrical exhibition) I therefore assume the requirements for 4K SDR playback of SDR and HDR titles are identical. ‡ If and only if said Kaby Lake iGPU is connected to a video output. I mention this because I can only watch 4K Netflix on my Hades Canyon NUC with the help of a Pascal eGPU, because, while the Kaby Lake iGPU is present and fully functional, all video outputs connect to the NUC's discrete AMD Polaris GPU, which Netflix doesn't support. DRM sucks.
- sundvor 6y ago
  Excellent reply, thanks very much. My HTPC is ageing, but I like to push the life of my computers to the most. So needing an even better GPU or CPU when it should have been able to downgrade a tad is annoying.