UHD panel , playing back 24FPS on it.

[Les Dittert]

I thought I'd start this thread for looking at issues related to playing 3840x2160 footage at speed on the now available UHD tv sets such as the Seiki.

I am getting pretty good results with mine. I play Cineform encoded ( setting 'high' ) with mpc-hc64 player. Graphics card is GTX670 with 2gig. CPU is SandyBridge E.
Playing from Samsung 256 SSD.
I see some stumbles in the frame rate here and there still, I have gained some smoothness by playing with some of the playback options in the player.

What else are people using ? How smooth is the playback ?

 

[Derek Morrison]

Here's what i've tried so far.

I have a Macbook Air 11" 2012
1.7GHz Core i5 processor
4GB of RAM
Intel HD4000 Graphics

I've been able to get 3840x2160 at 17hz via Belkin MiniDP to HDMI adapter. It looks stuttery, but it works for personal projects right now, to get a reference on clarity. Would never show a client in that state. I've searched and the latest HD4000 graphics should output at up to 30Hz as of recently. I believe a software update could be in order from Apple soon as Intel has just released new drivers as of March 22nd.

I've also tried my Mac Pro 1,1, old I know, but still my workhorse beast of a machine.
2.66 Dual Core Xeon
7GB of Ram
AMD 5770 1GB Ram

I've managed to test the display port and DVI Dual Link at a resolution of 3840x2160 @ 20Hz. A bit better, but still not smooth, and you can tell its struggling somewhere because the video freezes some places. I should mention it also does on the Macbook Air.

Not as powerful as most systems, but they have worked fantastic for 1080p over the past few years. I'm curious if anyone else has achieved anything better on either of these two graphics cards.

 

[Les Dittert]

Derek, what format is the media you are playing ?

 

[Derek Morrison]

4k prores exported from redcinex from some Epic Footage

 

[Les Dittert]

So is everybody happily playing back 3840x2160 at 24fps without any stuttering at all?
I'm guessing that is the case, as there is little posting anywhere on this topic.
Or are they looking at stills only?
I'm getting some judder , maybe once a second or so. Other that that, it looks beautiful on the UHD tv.
1080 looks soft after looking at my footage. I'm jaded now.

 

[stephenv2]

So is everybody happily playing back 3840x2160 at 24fps without any stuttering at all?
I'm guessing that is the case, as there is little posting anywhere on this topic.
Or are they looking at stills only?

Mine is in the box awaiting replacement - never got to test much motion.

 

[Mike O]

Still waiting on mine to arrive, I tested a 60mbps 4096x2304 file on my older mini-itx htpc (q9450 4gb ram, 8800gt) to a 1080p display and windows media player stutters like crazy, the older vlc version I had couldn't handle it either. Once I upgraded to the newest vlc, and disabled the use gpu accelerated decoding setting, it played back super smooth with the cpu usage between 40-70%. Hopefully when I get it the dvi - hdmi method works with this old card to drive it at 4k. The file was playing over gigabit from a network share.

 

[Les Dittert]

Good info Mike. What kind of encoding on the file?
I'll try VLC some more as well. Media Player Classic is working OK for me, but I still get some frames hanging here and there. There are a lot of playback tuning options in there. Like a big combination lock to get the needed settings .
At this point in time I think most people are playing uncompressed out of RAM, not good for long play obviously.

Still waiting on mine to arrive, I tested a 60mbps 4096x2304 file on my older mini-itx htpc (q9450 4gb ram, 8800gt) to a 1080p display and windows media player stutters like crazy, the older vlc version I had couldn't handle it either. Once I upgraded to the newest vlc, and disabled the use gpu accelerated decoding setting, it played back super smooth with the cpu usage between 40-70%. Hopefully when I get it the dvi - hdmi method works with this old card to drive it at 4k. The file was playing over gigabit from a network share.

 

[Eric Z]

Les,
I have lots of experience with MPC-HC 64bit.
I recommend installing the K-Lite Codec Pack 64bit.

If your MPC-HC player is configured to playback those UHD 4K files with LAV Video decoder, make sure to go into it's settings and enable the NVIDIA CUVID hardware acceleration and tick the box next to UHD (4K).
I'm using the Intel built-in GPU to play all sorts of 4K material (Intel i5-3570K overclocked to 4.0GHz, and GPU overclocked to 1.35GHz).

In the screenshot below I have Intel QuickSync selected, but you should select NVIDIA CUVID for your GeForce GTX670.

 

[Les Dittert]

Thanks Eric,

Is the K lite codec pack the best way to install the LAV decoder ? I'm always worried that some other things might get messed with.

I like the statistics overlay on MPC-ht , it is rich with info to help diagnose things. I notice that the frame draw time jumps to 40ms when the video has it's playback glitch.
Also for some reason turning off 'Aero' during playback seems to help as well. I'm not understanding what the alternate vertical sync does yet, but I haven't looked closely at documentation yet.

 

[Eric Z]

I think you can install the LAV decoder on it own. Get it from here.

But be aware that when you playback CineForm files, they are handled by the Cineform codec, and not by LAV.
And I find that these Cineform .AVI files play best in FirstLight, with which you can scrub back and forth with ease, as it's probably highly optimized specifically for the CineForm codec.
In MPC-HC, they don't scrub as well as FirstLight.

 

[Les Dittert]

Here is a screen grab from the mpc-hc 64 player , with the stats info overlay on as well.
Eric, Do you know what the graph at the lower right is about ? I guess it is frame render time, as the green line does spike up when I get a stutter.

Screen grab link ( 3840 x 2160 jpg , image from India. ) : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/61349012/mpc-screen-grab.jpg

I encoded this stream as 70 Mb Xvid, seems to keep the detail fairly well, even though this is a very detailed 4K picture.

Something else I noticed is that the video plays smoother on the 30" monitor. As if it has a harder time with all the extra pixels for the UHD screen.
So if you play smooth on the 30", that does not mean it will play equally well on the UHD.

 

[Eric Z]

For those who don't know, these overlay stats can be displayed by pressing CTRL+J in MPC-HC while a video is playing.

The graph on the lower right tells you how smoothly the video is playing.
Both lines should be as flat as possible, which means the video is playing buttery smooth.
If they exhibit large amplitudes, it means the frame-rate is not constant and/or some frames are getting dropped.

By the way, you can display another Statistics window below the video by pressing CTRL+4, which will show you information about dropped frames and jitter.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Has anyone played back UHD content via a USB 3.0 flash drive on the Seiki?

Not sure it's possible, but if it is, who's up for putting 64GB of UHD content in their pocket...

Cheers - #19

 

[Les Dittert]

Shouldn't be a problem, a 70 Mb file would only need 10 MB a second or less. A USB 2 drive could do it in fact.

Has anyone played back UHD content via a USB 3.0 flash drive on the Seiki?

Not sure it's possible, but if it is, who's up for putting 64GB of UHD content in their pocket...

Cheers - #19

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Shouldn't be a problem, a 70 Mb file would only need 10 MB a second or less. A USB 2 drive could do it in fact.

In theory, but doesn't there need to be a player in there somewhere? Just curious if anyone with the Seiki has tried it. Might have to experiment with Tonaci's of Neil's next week.

Cheers - #19

 

[Les Dittert]

For player I've been using MPC-ht ( Movie player classic , home theater ). It has a lot of tuning options for decoders, etc.
Most good players should work, in theory. After all, it's just an MOV or AVI that is played.
No Magic player needed.

Now, if you are talking about a paid distribution scheme, now you need some rights management to make it harder to copy for free.
No easy solution for that right now, at least for UHD media.

In theory, but doesn't there need to be a player in there somewhere? Just curious if anyone with the Seiki has tried it. Might have to experiment with Tonaci's of Neil's next week.

Cheers - #19

 

[Bill Sepaniak]

My best "guess" is that it won't work going directly in the Seiki via USB. The manual mentions audio (MP3) and picture (JPEG) support via the Seiki USB input. While I would be happy to be proven wrong .... I think if you want to feed it video via USB ... then the USB will have to be connected to something like an OPPO 103 or a Sony BDP-S790 and the HDMI from the player will have to be connected to the Seiki.

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[L. Langer]

Has anyone played back UHD content via a USB 3.0 flash drive on the Seiki?

Not sure it's possible, but if it is, who's up for putting 64GB of UHD content in their pocket...

Cheers - #19

There's no video decoder chip inside the Seiki to decode video from what I've read and none of the 4K h.265 hardware decoders that you'd find inside a TV or media player or cable box will be on the market until the end of 2014/early 2015 according to the latest information.

 

[Mark Pavy]

I tested the LG 84" with a 4k H.264 5.1 file via direct USB- no go, I don't think any of the present 4K panels have the built in hardware to play 4K with a direct USB connection.