My PC is fast enough to run 4K video smoothly with a single Radeon 7950 GB and a six-core Phenom II PC, but with a few caveats that some of the next-gen videos files use today. The website Hd-trailers uploads free HD video clips movie trailers. 1080p files are often available, but they've offered a handful of 4k video, all of which have run smoothly on my PC, until now, when they uploaded two more recently: After Earth and Samsara here: http://www.hd-trailers.net/ultrahd/ These files use 4:4:4 color space instead of the typical 4:2:0 "compression." As a film geek, I've played some open-source video files in 4:4:4 and uncompressed color space/sampling before, and they've also run surprisingly smoothly in 1080p in YUV format. Some samples here: http://media.xiph.org/ Here, I wonder if there is either just an inefficient codec that was used, or there is some bottleneck somehere in my PC like my Phenom II when running nearly lossless compression codecs. Needless to say, if you have an i5, i7, 6 or 8 core AMD processor and would like to help out with a little 2 minute video test, try out these two 1GB mp4 files from Hd-trailers and let me know if you're able to run them smoothly or not, along with your specs- whether it's an intel, amd, DDR4 or DDR3, amount of RAM, and type of SSD or HDD, and whether it's SATA II, III, or M.2, etc. A 4k monitor is not required to run the video; if it runs smoothly, it will run smoothly on almost any monitor.
http://videos.hd-trailers.net/SAMSARA_TLR-2-UK_EN-XX_OV_51-4K-HDTN.mp4 (Edit: make sure to right click the file and press "save as" to download. It won't work via web player (and it would likely run slower than from a native video playback program like VLC).
http://videos.hd-trailers.net/AFTER-EARTH_TLR-D_GEN_EN-XX_INTL_51-4K-HDTN.mp4
I did compress one of these files using Handbrake to 60% compression using a default profile in only 12 minutes (thanks multicore CPU) and was able to run it smoothly in 4k. It changed the file to 4:2:0, however. The output file size was around 600MB.
Thanks for reading!
http://videos.hd-trailers.net/SAMSARA_TLR-2-UK_EN-XX_OV_51-4K-HDTN.mp4 (Edit: make sure to right click the file and press "save as" to download. It won't work via web player (and it would likely run slower than from a native video playback program like VLC).
http://videos.hd-trailers.net/AFTER-EARTH_TLR-D_GEN_EN-XX_INTL_51-4K-HDTN.mp4
I did compress one of these files using Handbrake to 60% compression using a default profile in only 12 minutes (thanks multicore CPU) and was able to run it smoothly in 4k. It changed the file to 4:2:0, however. The output file size was around 600MB.
Thanks for reading!
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