Yesterday I went to Staples and bought a 64 GB Lexar USB 3.0 "Superspeed" flash drive for about $35. There were 64GB USB 2 flash drives and 32 GB USB 3.0 drives for twice as much. So this was a good buy. I put my 14GB 4K .mp4 file on it.
Today I went to Best Buys and tried to play the video on four different 4K televisions. First we tried it on an LG 665UB9500 65". In all cases we tried to play the file directly form the USB drive. The store personel are not allowed to put a file onto the 4K server. I am not even sure they have access to it. Most of the 4K televisions were being fed 1080 signals via HDMI. I think the 4K server was feeding only a couple of televisions.
The store personel were easily able to fuind the file and start it playing. unfortunately the file played back at a low frame rate, I would guess something like 5 frames per second. It would ocassionally play back smoothly at full speed for up to about 1 second.
We then tried playback on an LG SSEC9300, an OLED set with probably the best picture in the store. This is a very thin curved television. This unit was apparently locked in demo mode and they could not get it to show a directory or play the file. It was the same for a Sharp LC 60TQ15UTQ. We tired two other sets, but their USB ports could not be reached.
The only other set we were able to try was a Sharp UN 55HU8550FX24. The playback on this TV was similar to the other. Playback was jumpy and the frame rate was slow. But it did play back smoothly every several seconds, for about a second. Even though playback was not smooth, people still enjoyed the time lapse video we were playing. It looked pretty good and would look great if it played smoothly. It looks great in 1080.
There is one thing that I did that could possibly affect playbackl. I never know what settings to use for target bitrate and maximum bitrate. I have learned I can maximize these settings for a DVD or a 1080 Blu Ray disk, and so I do since certainly i always want the best possible quality. For this 4K file I maximized the maximum bitrate and set the target bitrate at about 66% of full. It seems possible that if I had used lower settings here it might have helped with playback.
Perhaps I need to get one of these video servers. The Sony is $700, so not something I would buy right away. It seems odd that it has only a 1TB hard drive when 3TB is the current norm. And I don't know what else it can and can't do, like 3D, and like playing back a 3-D playstation movie. The WD servers don't appear to play 4K. An external hard drive might be fast enough, especially a solid state one, to play back 4K, but I still don't know if a 3.0 USB port would be fast enough and of course an external hard drive would have a USB port, not an HDMI.
Can a video server record HD video from an HDMI input ?
To be honest, I can't see a difference between 1080 and 4K on a typically sized store LED television. I usually watch 1080 via a Panasonic projector, on a 7 foot wide screen. I think that we would only see that 4K is better on a 5 foot wide screen or larger. Of course if we get real close with a magnifying glass 4K would look much better. At Best Buy we don't always know if what we are watching is 4K, or 1080. Some demo recordings look much better than others. What I watched on an OLED was very carefully selected and produced. This was the best looking TV I saw today.
