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Strato with HD TV

rbienstock

Well-known member
I'm staying with friends for an extended period, and I decided to bring my Strato player with me so I could access my movies. My friends have an HD non-4K TV. Most of my movies don't even show up in the menu system. They are on the drive when I connect directly to the internal web server. I, perhaps naively, that the 4K movies would simply play back in HD on a non-4K monitor. I know that I can download HD versions from the store. That isn't my point. I'm curious if I'm correct that 4K movies don't show up in the K menu system if the player is connected to an HD TV. I did notice one weird thing: there are a few 4K movies that DO show up in the Strato, but all of them are 4KUHD and the ones that don't show up are all 4KHDR.
 

It looks like what you are seeing is correct. It will play 4KUHD on a 1080p display but not 4KHDR.
 
The behaviour you are observing is correct. Strato can downscale 4K UHD content to lower resolutions but it cannot convert HDR to SDR. The display device you have connected the Strato to cannot display HDR thus the Strato wouldn't be able to play that content. Our OSD is designed to only display HDR titles when connected to an HDR-capable display.
 
So can you clarify something. I'm using Mockingjay Part II as the example. The entry for the movie has both a UHD and an HDR badge. this also applies to about 2/3 of the movies that are on my list are allegedly both UHD and HDR. So why isn't the UHD available?
 
UHD content is definitely displayable (and playable) on non-HDR-capable displays. Reasons why it could be missing from the on-screen display include:
* The UHD version hasn't been downloaded to the system
* Parental control settings are suppressing it from display
* The list has been filtered (only likely if you are using an IP-based control system that supports the FILTER_LIST: control protocol command)

In your specific case, you mentioned that you took your Strato to a friend's house. When you are at home, is the Strato normally grouped with other devices (another Strato or a Terra)? If so, it's possible that your missing content is actually downloaded the hard disks of the other device(s).

Alternately, it's possible that when you purchased and downloaded these titles, you only actually downloaded the HDR version and not the UHD version.
 
Following up on John’s comments, you say that “the entry for the movie has both a UHD and an HDR badge”. The only places where we show multiple badges are on the movie store. So, that indicates what is available from us, but does not indicate what is on your system. If your normal home environment has an HDR-capable display, then the default behavior of the system would be to download the HDR version of the movie. It would only download the UHD version as well if you had a mix of displays, or if you manually changed the download via the movie store website or the onscreen movie store. Hope that clarifies things a bit!
 
Thanks Mike (and John)!


Jim
 
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