WOW, I just played the newly captured 1080p NBC Olympics content on my 4k TV for the first time, as opposed to just my computer monitor.
I have a 4k Samsung TV (with DirecTV), and plenty of HDMI & USB connections on the back side of the TV that are easily accessible.
I have a USB external portable hard drive device that I can store content on (i.e. downloaded content from my computer, etc.) and plug that into the USB 3.0 port on my 4k TV. It plays the files beautifully, and the pause, rewind, fast forward functions, etc. work very fluidly via my Samsung remote control on my TV using my USB hard drive storage device that I have plugged into the back side of my TV. It's almost like watching it on DirecTV itself in how fluid it goes. This defeats the purpose of burning these files onto a blank Blu-ray disc, which just takes up more time.
My Samsung 4k TV upscales 1080p content beautifully into 4k quality.
It's still not quite "Native" 4k, because it's an upscaled 4k, but it enhances the 1080p picture quality into the 4 times better resolution of 4k video vs. just native 1080p. It looks so much better than 1080p quality on my 1080p computer monitor (which isn't a 4k computer monitor, but I plan to get one soon).
The picture quality of these NBC Olympics files on my 4k TV is just stunning. It's almost as good as watching it in "Native" 4k (but not quite), and much better than 1080p since it's upscaling the picture quality with the Sasmung 4k upscaling engine in my TV. It seems that only 1080p upscales good to 4k on my TV. 720p content doesn't look upscaled or much different from my computer monitor, but with 1080p content to upscale to 4k instead of 720p to upscale, makes a world of difference.
These downloaded files have a better picture quality than watching it on my HD DVR on DirecTV, since DirecTV (and other satellite and cable providers) compress their picture quality. These files that we download from the NBC Olympics site are not compressed, or at least they don't seem that way. These are the best quality files, so get the 7,000 bit rate quality if you can. I did a test, and they are indeed full 1080p files from the NBC Olympics site, and if you have a 4k TV that upscales 1080p content to 4k, watch out.
Beach Volleyball looks crazy in upscaled 4k.
