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posted by on Monday February 06 2017, @01:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the mine-eyes-have-seen-the-glory dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @06:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @06:19PM (#463546)

    Guess that experience isn't from blu-rays or Over The Air (OTA) broadcasts. If it's from cable then that's understandable. They compress the crap out of stations to free up bandwidth.

    Some OTA stations over-compress too. The ATSC standard allows for up to 4 HD channels in one 20mbps slot. 5mbps mpeg2 can have problems with challenging scenes even at 720p and some stations try to stuff 1080i in there too.

    That said, the newer codecs (h264 and h265) are much better at low bitrates than mpeg2. At higher bitrates there isn't much difference - at 20mbps mpeg2 and h264 are practically indistinguishable. So simply moving up to a modern codec is going to help a lot for bit-starved transmissions.

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