Cheap Intel Apollo Lake SoCs Play Netflix 4k Ultra HD

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Funny, I was just working on a new Apollo Lake Celeron based NAS unit from Asustor, when this news popped up. The lads from heise noticed that the new Apollo Lake SoCs can manage Netflix 4K playback properly.



Apollo Lake SoCs basically are Pentium and Celeron processors in two and four core models. Confirmed are Celeron N3450 and J3455 CPUs which both have hardware decoding for HEVC / H.265 on-board. These end up in mini-PCs and NAS units mostly. There is a small problem though. Netflix 4K uses a proprietary anti-copy connection that requires HDMI 2.0, these SoCs do not have HDMI 2.0 compatibility. So in order to playback the content, you'd need a DisplayPort converter to HDMI 2.0 with HDCP 2.2

Ultra HD is, HDR however is not (yet) supported. Thus far only the more expensive 7th ‘Kaby Lake’ CPUs had option to stream Ultra HD Netflix content. But if all that is setup, all you need is the Netflix app or Microsoft Edge browser (I think Chrome now supports it as well though). Netflix uses a H.265-codec that can be decoded over the IGP hardware on Apollo Lake.

Cheap Intel Apollo Lake SoCs Play Netflix 4k Ultra HD


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