4K is a pain in the ass

[Snorlax]

So... Here's my rant and my ask for help.

 

I love 4K. I've had a 4K monitor for almost 3 years and it works great.. with my powerful desktop PC. I've recently helped my dad with his Panasonic CX725 TV and Denon AVR-X2100W receiver, as we want to watch some 2160p content. Now here comes the issue: How on earth am I going to playback a 26GB MKV file? Here's what we have tried:

 

• HDMI: Connecting HDMI to my Macbook Pro limits to 2160p @ 30 Hz. Why? Because my Macbook Pro is limited to 1.4b (as far as I know). 30 Hz is fine for 24 FPS content, but it stutters like a.. a lot. Like my Macbook Pro can't handle it. However, it looks stunning on my screen but when I look at the TV, the stuttering is absolutely insane.
• USB: When I place the 26GB MKV file on a USB 3.0 HDD and plug it into the TV, everything works great!!.. until it starts stuttering in a few different scenes. The TV basically says "Oh there's an encoding error here, let's either stutter or crash the player". Quality and FPS looks 1:1, however.
• Chromecast Ultra: It's the wrong container (MKV) and Plex only supports one container, one codec, one audio codec, and so on.. It's a pain in the ass. But that's not a problem, as I can just transcode it.. right? Nope, I can barely keep a charge on my batteries while charging... Literally 100% CPU all the time, and the quality is really hurt. Oh, and the receiver doesn't support HDCP 2.2, so the Chromecast Ultra has to connect to the TV, and then we lose the surround sound. But hey, it works.. at a high price cost.

What on earth can we do? I would hate if we had to purchase a PC (like a barebone/NUC/BRIX) just to test if that could solve it. It would run through HDMI 2.0 then, which would mean 2160p @ 60 Hz. Thanks for reading my rant.

[OsuMasterz]

We haven't set the standard for 4K as the normal so it's a little more towards the users that have the setup to do so I guess..

 

Gotta Catch em all!

ぽけもん！

[Princess Luna]

A pain in the ass is reading what you wrote while using black theme, I had to select it all

 

I suppose you'll need a good PC to make it work nice, or buy an xbox 1 s or 4k bluray player.
 

[Shiv78]

The real pain in the ass is your text color on dark theme 

 

[Shiv78]

1 minute ago, Princess Cadence said:

A pain in the ass is reading what you wrote while using black theme, I had to select it all

 

 

1 minute ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

Your formatting is an equal pain in the ass for night theme users

I feel your pain guys.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Princess Cadence said:

A pain in the ass is reading what you wrote while using black theme, I had to select it all

 

I suppose you'll need a good PC to make it work nice, or buy an xbox 1 s or 4k bluray player.
 

I know right. I had to underline it with my mouse...

 

[Emmien]

HDMI isn't an issue, for playing this 24FPS content.

The stuttering is probably because your MacBook's graphics card can't handle it.

 

Buy a 4K BluRay player.

MKV files are BluRay files. They are H.264 MP4 files in a different container.

[Snorlax]

Damn, sorry for the black text. I copied the style from Reddit and I guess it took the color as well. My bad!

 

16 minutes ago, Emmien said:

HDMI isn't an issue, for playing this 24FPS content.

The stuttering is probably because your MacBook's graphics card can't handle it.

 

Buy a 4K BluRay player.

MKV files are BluRay files. They are H.264 MP4 files in a different container.

That's my guess as well. Well shit. What could the issue be with the TV's player stuttering when playing the files through USB? I can clearly see when it happens, because it's normally panoramas, aerial shots, and so on.

[Emmien]

2 minutes ago, Snorlax said:

What could the issue be with the TV's player stuttering when playing the files through USB? I can clearly see when it happens, because it's normally panoramas, aerial shots, and so on.

I am not 100% sure, but it could be because the USB drive is not fast enough.

 

The drive may be USB 3.0, and the TV USB 2.0.

 

If some data doesn't get through, the TV won't be able to understand it, possibly leading to it showing a codec error.

[mariushm]

If your Macbook Pro has a displayport connector, you can buy an DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0 converter, which will support 4K at 60 Hz.  It's about $15-35 on Amazon.  But I wonder if the macbook pro even has the decoding power to smoothly decode 4k content.

 

You can easily convert your media to MP4 with tools like MeGUI and MKVToolnix (included with MeGUI). 

 

Go in MeGUI, in the menus you have HD Stream Extractor, open the MKV file and select the video and audio tracks you want and maybe subtitle, if needed choose to recompress audio to AAC or AC3 (whatever your TV supports best) and hit extract. I have to do this for my sister's tv (an older Phillips 42" which can't play DTS audio tracks, have to convert sound to AC3 or AAC Stereo / 5.1 for anything I give her).

 

Then go in same menu and select Muxer and mux the video and audio (original or new) to MP4 container.  It's no recompression (unless you want to recompress audio), it's done in minutes (depending on hard drive speed) .. but you will need a bunch of hard disk space.

[Snorlax]

1 hour ago, Emmien said:

I am not 100% sure, but it could be because the USB drive is not fast enough.

 

The drive may be USB 3.0, and the TV USB 2.0.

 

If some data doesn't get through, the TV won't be able to understand it, possibly leading to it showing a codec error.

It's a 26GB file and the length is like an hour or so. That means about 7 MB/s for an hour. Any USB 2.0 device can do that. Also nope, it's USB 3.0 all the way through.

59 minutes ago, mariushm said:

If your Macbook Pro has a displayport connector, you can buy an DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0 converter, which will support 4K at 60 Hz.  It's about $15-35 on Amazon.  But I wonder if the macbook pro even has the decoding power to smoothly decode 4k content.

 

You can easily convert your media to MP4 with tools like MeGUI and MKVToolnix (included with MeGUI). 

 

Go in MeGUI, in the menus you have HD Stream Extractor, open the MKV file and select the video and audio tracks you want and maybe subtitle, if needed choose to recompress audio to AAC or AC3 (whatever your TV supports best) and hit extract. I have to do this for my sister's tv (an older Phillips 42" which can't play DTS audio tracks, have to convert sound to AC3 or AAC Stereo / 5.1 for anything I give her).

 

Then go in same menu and select Muxer and mux the video and audio (original or new) to MP4 container.  It's no recompression (unless you want to recompress audio), it's done in minutes (depending on hard drive speed) .. but you will need a bunch of hard disk space.

I can play it smooth on my screen though.

 

Convert to MP4 without losing any quality relatively fast? I doubt that. Compatible with Plex for direct stream?

[Shiv78]

15 minutes ago, Snorlax said:

I can play it smooth on my screen though.

 

Which MBP do you have? Regardless, its not 4K

[Snorlax]

1 minute ago, Shiv78 said:

Which MBP do you have? Regardless, its not 4K

Best mid 2014 model. 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM one. It might not be outputting 4K to the screen, but it is still playing the file fine at 2880x1800 on my Macbook, while the 4K stutters on the TV. Definitely a bottleneck around the cable/output.