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A couple of weeks ago in news of someone coming out with 8K resolution televisions, I left a comment to the effect that I have a 4K TV, but there's no 4K content, so an 8K TV was a bit silly. Someone said they thought Netflix had a couple of 4K offerings.
I recently ran across news that I'll have 4K content in the nebulous future. The FCC [US Federal Communications Commission] is taking its first steps toward over the air 4K broadcasts. but it appears that it may be a while before I see it.
There's more about it here at CNet. But all three articles raise questions that aren't answered, primarily, what about bandwidth? It seems to me that without extremely tight lossy compression, it would take four times the bandwidth of 1080p. Will quality be much better than 1080p after they compress the signal?
How will they get around that? Will I lose some side channels? What do you folks have to say?
(Score: 2) by jcross on Monday February 06 2017, @02:18PM
That's called chroma subsampling, and it's already being done. I think to get additional savings while moving up to 4K, we're going to need to come up with novel compression strategies, like converting frame bitmaps into vector graphics with procedural textures or something, so that it turns back into a bitmap only on playback. This would allow us to make use of the display's sharpness without necessarily including full detail for *everything* down to the level of pores and such, and without needing to broadcast a stream at the full resolution of the display. Consider how anti-aliasing makes vector art crisper as display density increases, even if no more detail is added to the vector paths. By analogy, this would mean we'd still get some advantage from an 8k display even with 4k content.