Ultra HD Blu-ray specification finalised

[HEXUS]

Will this be the last major disc-based movie format?

Read more.

[shaithis]

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

Hell, each of my 1080p LOTR rips is 60GB-70GB......how large are they going to be at 4K, 48hz, stereoscopic with HDR and ATMOS?

[scaryjim]

....how large are they going to be at 4K, 48hz, stereoscopic with HDR and ATMOS?

Depends on the compression methods used: it could well be that the next target will be more efficient compression rather than bigger and bigger storage, particularly with streaming likely to make up an increasing proportion of the market.

[LSG501]

lol, so in theory that could be bdxl dual (66GB), triple (100GB) and later quad layer (128GB) blu rays being used.. got to love the way they want to keep making us waste money on another device because you know the old devices won't be compatible, they'll likley force ANOTHER upgrade on us when they decide they want to use the quad layer discs...

[cheesemp]

I've got to be honest I rarely bother with blu-rays despite being an early-ish adopter (I was also a fairly early adopter of DVD). For most films compressed 1080p streaming or DVD quality is good enough. Sure 1080p bluray looks nice but is it worth the 50% price premium? Not to me. It probably doesn't help I'm cash strapped and although I have a 1080p TV its only a 6 year old budget sony. I can see streaming only improving so I really don't see much of a future for purchased media (after all most films you buy and watch once).

[cjs150]

"each of my 1080p LOTR rips is 60GB-70GB"

Mine are only 30Gb per film and that is without compression, are you simply copying whole disc rather than main film only?

In my, limited experience, size of the file is heavily effected by sound track file - 5:1 best quality sound takes up a lot more space than 2.0 at MP3 quality.

My, uneducated,guess is that uncompressed copy of 4k film at 5:1 sound will be around 70GB, just beyond capacity of dual layer disks. Of course if upscaling from 1080p to 4k is very good the obvious question is going to be why bother upgrading your Blu-ray collection

[edzieba]

lol, so in theory that could be bdxl dual (66GB), triple (100GB) and later quad layer (128GB) blu rays being used.. got to love the way they want to keep making us waste money on another device because you know the old devices won't be compatible, they'll likley force ANOTHER upgrade on us when they decide they want to use the quad layer discs...

As opposed to sending out magical fairies to swap out the laser focussing module in your BD player, write a new firmware for the drive seek, and squeeze and extra h.265 fixed-function-block decoder onto the BD ASIC?

You want to keep playing BDs? Keep buying BDs. DVDs have still stuck around.

[Percy1983]

I know better compression is in the spec (h265).

I will say as a HTPC user my current HD-DVD/Bluray drive is perfect (I own many films in both formats).

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.

On the filp side imax footage will look epic.

Personally I currently have a 47" TV and I can't see 4k really adding much to my viewing at that size.

[shaithis]

"each of my 1080p LOTR rips is 60GB-70GB"

Mine are only 30Gb per film and that is without compression, are you simply copying whole disc rather than main film only?

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.

[HavoCnMe]

I'm just glad they got it finalized. Now they can finalize HDMI 2.0B with all the enhancements they mention above.

[ZaO]

This just makes it even more apparent how internet speeds are seriously lagging behind the needed standard these days. Compression is a horrible thing.

[LSG501]

As opposed to sending out magical fairies to swap out the laser focussing module in your BD player, write a new firmware for the drive seek, and squeeze and extra h.265 fixed-function-block decoder onto the BD ASIC?

You want to keep playing BDs? Keep buying BDs. DVDs have still stuck around.

no but the simple fact is we knew that higher res video was coming before bd was announced so they could have thought ahead but that never happens does it

And actually in my case it is just a new codec/driver hopefully, my bd already supports bdxl because I didn't buy a blu ray player, I added it to a media pc

[abaxas]

Sod all of this.

One thing to remember is that all the old skool ac3/dts kit is cheaper than chips now. Especially the ultra top end.

Enjoy you films, not the specs of it.

[edzieba]

no but the simple fact is we knew that higher res video was coming before bd was announced so they could have thought ahead but that never happens does it

The first BD device was demonstrated in 2000, and the first consumer device shipped 2006. VCEG didn't even begin preliminary research into the CODEDC that would become HEVC until 2004, and the HEVC Joint Project Group wasn't formed until 2010. Good luck mandating the inclusion of a decoding block for a CODEC that doesn't exist yet!
Heck, Rec.2020 wasn't published until 2012. Good luck designing your standard to accommodate video specifications that won't exist for nearly a decade in the future.
Or maybe you want to bitch about DVD not being forward thinking enough? DVDs started shipping in 1995 after Hi-Vision broadcasts had started.

There is ALWAYS a 'new High Definition System' (the initial name for the B&W EMI-MArconi 405-line system that replaced Baird 240-line, prior to PAL) 10 years away. Holding off on designing your new media for a decade because it'll no longer be adequate in a decade is moronic. You design media for the content that is avaialb,e to the standards that are available.

[bert7]

....how large are they going to be at 4K, 48hz, stereoscopic with HDR and ATMOS?

Depends on the compression methods used: it could well be that the next target will be more efficient compression rather than bigger and bigger storage, particularly with streaming likely to make up an increasing proportion of the market.

compression is h265 instead of h264

[LSG501]

The first BD device was demonstrated in 2000, and the first consumer device shipped 2006. VCEG didn't even begin preliminary research into the CODEDC that would become HEVC until 2004, and the HEVC Joint Project Group wasn't formed until 2010. Good luck mandating the inclusion of a decoding block for a CODEC that doesn't exist yet!

no but they could have designed the spec to h264 and larger capacity/physical size discs or made it so that the hardware/software was upgradeable to support different codecs by using a different method to decode files (ie similar to how a pc works).

Or maybe you want to bitch about DVD not being forward thinking enough? DVDs started shipping in 1995 after Hi-Vision broadcasts had started.

blu ray was supposed to supersede dvd as a more future proof product with support for higher resolutions (anybody with an ounce of design knowledge would have realised that screen res would increase), it's not like they didn't exist back then, IMAX had been around commercially since the 1990's if not before. DVD was basically an alternative to video.

There is ALWAYS a 'new High Definition System' (the initial name for the B&W EMI-MArconi 405-line system that replaced Baird 240-line, prior to PAL) 10 years away. Holding off on designing your new media for a decade because it'll no longer be adequate in a decade is moronic. You design media for the content that is avaialb,e to the standards that are available.

You don't hold off, you design your product so that it can be updated without the need for new equipment each time the spec gets changed, it's not exactly a hard concept to understand... even Samsung have started to understand this to a point in their high end tv's (you can just replace the smart tv bit not the whole tv).

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