Ultra HD Blu-ray specification finalised

[Ross1]

They are the untouched MPEG4 video track and the Dolby TrueHD English audio track, nothing else (unless I needed forced subs, cannot remember if they are burnt-in or a PGS stream). They are the SEs though (so up to 250mins long) and each film came on 2-blurays and I had to stitch them together after ripping each disc separately.

Admittedly, these are probably the extreme examples but they are also the films that AV fans will be screaming for.

~30Mb/s video and 4.5Mb/s audio? Yeah, it gets close to pushing the maximum bit rate for blu-ray, but so do many other blu-ray movies. Its not really an extreme example.

We are going from a current 138 minutes at maximum bitrate on 50GB dual-layer, to 133 minutes at maximum bitrate on 100GB triple layer.

I think if a film is longer than that, reaching for a second disc is not really asking too much. Much better than skimping on picture quality to fit onto a disc, anyway.

H265 might be a lot more "efficient" but given you are quadrupling the number of pixels, as well as increasing the possible colours by 64 fold.... we are going to need every bit of efficiency you can get.

Sometimes Im not sure people understand just how compressed video is most of the time.

[edzieba]

You also seem to be missing that this is a specification change for an existing product not a completely new product, it's still blu ray, just on a higher capacity disc with a different codec in some cases. It shouldn't NEED a new player if it was spec'd properly in the first place

You seem to misunderstand what a specification is. You cannot write "this specification may change" into a specification, have manufacturers produce a device that conforms to the specification written, then yell "Hey, we changed the specification! Make you devices magically change to work with this thing we just wrote!".
Instead, you write a new specification for manufacturers to produce devices to support it. Which is exactly what's happening now.

You want a device that can be upgraded mechanically and in software to support new standards? Buy a computer, then swap out the disc drive and buy new software. You want a standalone device that plays a current format? Then it will continue to play that format, and if a new spec comes along you will need a new device. That's the tradeoff for having a cheaper and less capable device.

[probedb]

I will say 4k won't be as big a revolution, in many cases of older films 1080p is really pushing the full resolution of the original film so the benefits of a 4K transfer aren't going to be much.

Most older films are being scanned at 4K, some even at 8K. Instead of downscaling those 4K transfers they can be released at the native resolution of the scans. 35mm has a lot of resolution.

You also seem to be missing that this is a specification change for an existing product not a completely new product, it's still blu ray, just on a higher capacity disc with a different codec in some cases. It shouldn't NEED a new player if it was spec'd properly in the first place

You do know how old Blu-Ray is don't you? That h265 didn't even exist at the time and neither did the discs being used for the format. How can you possibly include everything that may possibly happen in the future when developing a format? It's a different spec. It's using the same name. My first DVD player doesn't support DTS because it didn't exist when DVDs were originally released. These are new discs which existing lasers won't read.

[shaithis]

The problem with forward compatibility is that to keep the price of players reasonable you historically have had to use ASICs instead of CPUs to perform the decoding....ASICs are set in stone and cannot just be re-programmed via a firmware update.

Obviously, things are a bit different today. With 8 core ARM processors now $10 a pop in bulk, the landscape MAY change going forward but that is an extremely recent development in the great scheme of things and may take the large manufacturers a while to adopt, if they do (ASICs may still have financial benefits that are hard to ignore).

Although with smart TVs already coming with 4/8 core ARM chips in (for smart features), I sure hope the next generation of players do.

And all that is all after the disc has been read......

[LSG501]

You cannot write "this specification may change" into a specification, have manufacturers produce a device that conforms to the specification written,

yes you can actually, it's done all the time. They include these magic little words... specifications subject to change, manufacturing lines are forever changing products during it's lifespan.

You want a device that can be upgraded mechanically and in software to support new standards? Buy a computer, then swap out the disc drive and buy new software. You want a standalone device that plays a current format? Then it will continue to play that format, and if a new spec comes along you will need a new device. That's the tradeoff for having a cheaper and less capable device.

I wouldn't say the new devices were cheap when they came out and I doubt these new 'upgraded' players will be either. Your reasoning and acceptance of this approach is exactly why we have so much e-waste, hardware (did I forget to mention I'm a product designer...) can be designed with the future in mind it DOES NOT need to be made to be disposable. Also like I said I did go the media centre approach but it doesn't change the fact that they could have designed the original spec better in my opinion.

You do know how old Blu-Ray is don't you? That h265 didn't even exist at the time and neither did the discs being used for the format. How can you possibly include everything that may possibly happen in the future when developing a format? It's a different spec. It's using the same name. My first DVD player doesn't support DTS because it didn't exist when DVDs were originally released. These are new discs which existing lasers won't read.

Yeah I do and like I said earlier, they could have designed the hardware differently so that it could manage a change of specifications in a similar way to pcs do. My gpu in my pc does not natively support h265 but it can be used to decode it with the right codec/software because the gpu has support for cuda/opengl/opencl, there is no reason a 'similar' approach couldn't be employed in media players.

The real reason that these new 'specifications' come out are because of one thing, the manufacturers want another easy income boost, it's the same reason that products fail after a few years these days, it's to force you into buying a replacement. I'm not sure if you're old enough to remember how all these old washers/tv's etc used to just work for decades without issue and now they don't seem to last more than 5 years without 'some sort of issue' that requires spares or a full replacement....

The problem with forward compatibility is that to keep the price of players reasonable you historically have had to use ASICs instead of CPUs to perform the decoding....ASICs are set in stone and cannot just be re-programmed via a firmware update.

the first blu ray player wasn't expensive in the slightest lol, it was like £1000...for what is essentially a £60 device these days

[shaithis]

The real reason that these new 'specifications' come out are because of one thing, the manufacturers want another easy income boost, it's the same reason that products fail after a few years these days, it's to force you into buying a replacement. I'm not sure if you're old enough to remember how all these old washers/tv's etc used to just work for decades without issue and now they don't seem to last more than 5 years without 'some sort of issue' that requires spares or a full replacement....

No it isn't. It's to do with cost of components and how much grunt you can get in an STB.

There is no way that 10 years ago you could produce a chip for under £100+ that could decode h265 in realtime....hell, Bluray released in 2000, at that time Intel were manufacturing the P4 still. Even a P4 cannot decode H265 in realtime.....so even if they did use a meaty CPU in the players (like they did with the first HD-DVD player which came with a P4), a firmware update today would still not work.....and the cost of the player has doubled thanks to using a high-end desktop cpu in it.

As the decoder hardware gets more powerful, so the compression algorithms can get more complex.

[abaxas]

Don't they still sell more DVDs than Bluray?

So for most people, they simply don't care.

[LSG501]

No it isn't. It's to do with cost of components and how much grunt you can get in an STB.

you clearly missed the bit about me being a product designer... it's called planned obsolescence. It's a deliberate design process to force a product to 'fail' or require upgrading after a set period of time. EVERYTHING can be designed with the future in mind, it's just that companies/working groups etc choose not to, it's not like 1080p was the highest resolution when blu ray came out, you could already do much higher on old crt screens so it was pretty obvious you'd need support for higher than 1080p in the future... but even that wasn't included in the specs.

I can't be bothered arguing anymore but if you lot want to keep going round in circles feel free.

[shaithis]

you clearly missed the bit about me being a product designer... it's called planned obsolescence. It's a deliberate design process to force a product to 'fail' or require upgrading after a set period of time. EVERYTHING can be designed with the future in mind, it's just that companies/working groups etc choose not to, it's not like 1080p was the highest resolution when blu ray came out, you could already do much higher on old crt screens so it was pretty obvious you'd need support for higher than 1080p in the future... but even that wasn't included in the specs.

So explain how a BluRay player could have been made in 2000-2005 with future support for h265? When there weren't any processors around at that time that had enough grunt to decode h265....

While I don't doubt that "planned obsolescence" exists, in the case of content decoding there are tech limitations that trump all.

[edzieba]

Obviously, things are a bit different today. With 8 core ARM processors now $10 a pop in bulk, the landscape MAY change going forward but that is an extremely recent development in the great scheme of things and may take the large manufacturers a while to adopt, if they do (ASICs may still have financial benefits that are hard to ignore).

Even cheap ARM chips are not going to change things much. those cheap ARM chips can ONLY decode h.264 because they have dedicated h.264 decoder fixed-function-blocks, which are designed to decode up-to-and-no-more than certain h.264 profile levels (generally High Profile at Level 4.1 for recent chips, or Main Profile Level 3 for older chips like in the early iPods). Even a modern high-power ARM chip cannot hope to decode even 1080p24 h.264 in software. They simply don't have the processing power to do so. Decoding h.265 at UHD resolutions is out of the question. With UHD h.265 files, particularly at above 24fps (e.g. 60fps), even modern high-end CPUs struggle to decode in real-time.


You simply cannot put a socketed i7-4770 into a BD player and hope to make it cheap enough to compete with players that used fixed-function decoders. The cost to upgrade the CPU alone (let alone the drive hardware and electronics to go with it, and the system board too because system architecture changes over the period of a decade) would be far more than purchasing a whole new player. Plus the power consumption is dramatically higher, and the operating noise greater due to trying to evacuate a whole lot more heat.

[tygrus]

The BDXL format allowing 100 GB and 128 GB write-once discs was defined in June 2010 with PC burners arriving the following year. I think the need for 4K should have been identified back then. A higher datarate H264 could have been included in 2011 but would have been superseded by this years H265 anyway. While the data/video format doesn't matter for use with a PC it does for BluRay players with ASICS/SoC and their use of custom decoding blocks which are not flexible. An Android tablet with a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 was demonstrated on the 29th Feb 2012 with early H265. The H265 version 1 open release April 2013, version 2 accepted in late 2014 but released January 2015. They obviously were waiting for the version 2 of the H265 spec before making it apart of this next gen BluRay spec. It should be much easier to support with todays CPU/GPU's compared to 4 years ago.

[tygrus]

The only way they could have made the BluRay players of the last few years upgradeable would be including support for BDXL and have a replaceable CPU or room for new PCIe attached GPU. You may as well save the consumer now and make a 2nd sale in 2 to 4 years time (similar overall cost). Even the HDMI spec has been updated in the last 4 years.

[Brian224]

I hope it isn't the last format......100GB discs is not enough to keep all future releases on a single disc.

Then perhaps it is best if this is, as the article suggests, the last disc-based format. Given the increase we are already seeing in streaming, the volume of physical sales in 5-10 years time might not justify development costs, whilst falling flash memory prices might lead to new content delivery methods that don't need expensive and delicate mechanical drives.