www.makemkv.com

I've got a 2015 NUC which I think is too old, hardware-wise, to properly play back UHD rips when connected to otherwise appropriate display hardware (i.e. new Denon AV amp and new Samsung UHD TV).

The reason I say this is because everything I've read about correct HDR playback suggests that HDMI 2.0 or later is required and, as far as I can tell, that only got introduced on 2016+ Intel chipsets. I'm pretty certain that my NUC is only HDMI 1.4.

Assuming I replace the NUC with one that does support HDMI 2.0, what else am I likely to need to resolve? I'm uncertain, for example, about Kodi's support. It seems that you have to configure it to use an external player in order to get the HDR bit working and, although I haven't tested it yet, there seem to be scripts to automate switching from Kodi to the external player and back again. I *think* I just need to make sure that the MKV file has "hdr" somewhere in the filename.

Is anyone else using a similar setup? Not necessarily matching on the amp and TV but at least driving an external display from a Windows 10 PC? I don't mind buying a new NUC (got the wife's approval ) but I don't want to do that if it is going to be a dead-end. I *do* need to keep a Windows 10 PC connected to the TV for other uses and my wife is used to using Kodi but I could switch to another 6 ft playback interface if there is a better one for this use-case.

Thanks.

Hello, Im a bit of a newbie to UHD ripping etc but Ive done plenty of BD's etc. One thing I can say is that I cannot find a player for Win10 that will play a full UHD rip via HDMI to a 4K TV. Everything I have will play BD perfectly but not UHD so I half-sized a rip with Handbrake and that played OK but it didn't come up as UHD so maybe I'm doing something wrong. My PC is a recent build on an AMD Ryzen 2700X with 16G RAM and a NVidia GTX 1070 graphics card so to say Im disappointed is an understatement. However, I can watch an H265 file over my network and Kodi on an Nvidia Shield, which doesn't seem right somehow! Im still learning so hopefully I can be a bit more helpful sooner rather than later.

Since posting, other research I've done suggests that smooth UHD playback pretty much requires hardware support for HEVC (the video compression used by UHD). I only have a partial understanding of when Intel have started adding this and, in some situations, it appears to be a partial implementation - whatever that is supposed to mean.

The DVXA checker (http://bluesky23.yukishigure.com/en/DXVAChecker.html) can help because it shows what hardware support there is for decoding.

While trying to use Kodi to play back a UHD rip I'd just made, the CPU was at 100% which is why playback on my current NUC was so poor.

I'm currently trying to find out more about the new Islay Canyon NUCs, which use a Radeon GPU instead of the Intel integrated GPU, to see what that might be like. Some people don't like them because the memory is soldered on and fixed at 8GB, but that is fine for content playback.

As far as HEVC goes the card I have goes up to 8K so that's a plus. Another thing I've noticed (amongst many) is that Plex is very poor when trying to watch anything encoded with H265 even in a single stream whereas Kodi just plays it effortlessly.

Well it looks like the first rip I tried was corrupt somehow. Just tried another rip and got it to play to my 4K TV linked to the PC via HDMI so things are looking up. Went to the other TV and played perfect on that too from PC>network>Shield>Plex so I'm getting somewhere at last, at least with full size rips. Plex def doesn't like H265 but I will try on Kodi later. Not sure if this is helping you any but I hope it is somehow.

I've no issue with h.265 on my shield with plex. Just an FYI.

I just seem to get occasional stutter on 265 encoded material but otherwise looks great.