Purpose: This environment intentionally rejects 4K/UHD content by default. This is not due to technical limitations or lack of appreciation for quality, but a deliberate design choice grounded in efficiency, scalability, and real-world usability.
This system is built to serve a growing library with minimal ongoing maintenance — not to curate a boutique, cinephile archive.
—
4K content introduces significant costs that rarely translate into proportional real-world benefits.
These costs include:
In many cases, these tradeoffs deliver marginal visual improvements on typical viewing setups.
—
Consider the long-term storage impact:
At scale, this results in:
For episodic content, the inefficiency compounds rapidly.
—
Not all clients handle 4K equally well.
Common issues include:
1080p content, by contrast, is:
—
On most viewing setups:
The perceptual difference between a clean 1080p encode and a 4K encode is often negligible — especially once compression, streaming, and client limitations are factored in.
The return on investment simply isn’t there.
—
4K complicates automation:
This environment values:
4K actively works against those goals.
—
4K is not forbidden — it’s opt-out by design.
Exceptions may include:
If enabled, 4K should be:
—
Rejecting 4K is not about settling for less — it’s about choosing the most efficient point on the quality curve.
A clean 1080p library:
For this environment, that balance point is exactly where we want to be.