Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray Specs Complete, Logo Unveiled

[admin]

Specifications for Ultra HD Blu-ray discs and playets have now been formally completed, the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) announced this week.

The BDA also unveiled the official logo for Ultra HD Blu-ray, as well as details on the audio and video specifications used for the next generation disc format.

Ultra HD Blu-ray discs will require a brand new Ultra HD Blu-ray player capable of reading and playing the video content, which is now up to 3840x2160 (up from the 1920x1080 of standard Blu-ray discs). The discs themselves will be available in capacities ranging from 66GB (dual layer) to 100GB (triple layer) - these increased capacities means that existing Blu-ray players and reader drives will not be able to read these discs.

In addition to the 4K resolution increase, UHD Blu-ray will also incorporate other picture quality enhancement compared to the current Blu-ray format (which was launched back in 2006). These enhancements include support for expanded color ranges, high dynamic range support and support for high framerate movies such as The Hobbit trilogy (up to 60fps).

In the audio space, the BDA also announced that UHD Blu-ray will be supporting "next-generation immersive, object-based sound formats", formats such as Dolby Atmos and DTS:X (the specific standard being supported has yet to be announced).

There will also be an UltraViolet like "digital bridge feature", that will allow a single disc purchase to enable viewing on a wide range of digital only devices.

Licensing of UHD Blu-ray products will start in the North American summer this year, says the BDA, with consumer products expected to hit the market before the end of the year.

[drfsupercenter]

You know, I have to wonder how effective a 4K disc would really be.

Even with 1080p, something I noticed is that with settop boxes, when you try to fast-forward or rewind a movie, it lags a lot - not because of the CPU or RAM of the player, but just because of how much information it has to process, the laser lenses can only read so much data per second.

It works much better with hard drives, as you can seek by just clicking on certain points, and that's less I/O on the disk.

I wonder if you'd be able to seek on 4K discs more than 2x speed...

[admin]

Of all the Blu-ray players I've used, the PS3 (and possible the PS4 I assume, don't know for sure as I don't have one) is the snappiest player I've used, hardly any lag at all. So I think a lot of it still has to do with processing speed, maybe also data caching as well. Most Blu-ray players will only provide the bare minimum hardware for playback, and I think that will probably be true of most UHD Blu-ray players too.