Play 4K UHD video on the Raspberry Pi 4
The Raspberry Pi has disrupted many markets, and one of those is home media. The way we watch media has changed, with online streaming being a key market, that is enjoying explosive growth at the moment, largely thanks to investment in programmes by services such as Netflix. But humble optical media (DVD and Blu-ray) is still popular among home users. Why? Because it means we can have a physical copy that can never be taken from us – unlike streaming services, that can drop content based on licence agreements or just because no one’s watching it or they simply go out of business and you lose all access to the content you’d paid for.
For the home cinema enthusiast a central repository for all of their content can be stored is a dream come true, and the Raspberry Pi has been enabling this since 2012. With 4K now becoming the norm and with the Raspberry Pi 4 having the potential for 4K playback, we decided to take a Pi 4 4GB for a spin and see just how (and if) we can watch 4K media using it.
No to 4K?
To play 4K video content in Raspbian, we need videos using the HEVC (high-efficiency video coding) codec in order to use hardware acceleration. We will also need to play 4K videos in fullscreen mode, as running 4K video (with a bitrate of 110mbps) in a window is rather choppy. If 4K HEVC
