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Streaming hasn't completely killed the optical disc. The Blu-ray Disc Association has completed the Ultra HD Blu-ray specification. New Ultra HD Blu-ray discs will support 3840×2160 "4K" resolution at up to 60 FPS using H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding. It also supports the larger Rec. 2020 color gamut, which allows for colors of greater saturation to be reproduced. 10-bit per channel color depth is supported, increasing the number of possible colors to ~1.07 billion (10243) from ~16.8 million (2563).
The specification defines discs with capacities of 66 GB and 100 GB. This means that the 33 GB per layer, triple-layer technology of 100 GB BDXL discs will reach consumers.
Tom's Hardware notes:
With a new spec also comes new Ultra HD Blu-ray players, which is a bit of a concern. Fortunately, these new players will have backwards compatibility with Blu-ray discs. However, those who have been using a traditional Blu-ray player for some time will just have to replace it with a model that plays Ultra HD Blu-ray, and those who use the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One for Blu-ray content are stuck unless they want to add another space-hogging box to the living room.
Licensing for Ultra HD Blu-ray begins this summer, but just like 4K content and TVs, it will take some time to see wide adoption. The TVs are already here, but the amount of content needs to increase in order for users to justify the cost of purchasing new 4K devices.
[More After the Break]
ExtremeTech describes an optional "digital bridge" feature (read: DRM) that attempts to allow greater flexibility in how users can view the content:
The new digital bridge feature is designed to give customers more flexibility in how they consume content. In 2015, simply having the content on a disc isn't good enough — not when people are used to watching Netflix on a tablet, then transferring to a different device and picking up where they left off. The digital bridge devices contemplated by the draft documents available online don't appear to be systems that consumers could build themselves. Instead, you'll buy a UHD Blu-ray player from Samsung or Sony that offers this feature as standard. It goes without saying that the platform is heavily locked down.
The entire process of validating a disc for digital bridging and any charges associated with accessing the content will be handled via remote servers; DRM functions will not reside inside the digital bridge export function (DBEF). Digital bridging is going to be standard on all UHD discs but isn't mandatory for Blu-rays (conventional Blu-ray discs can support it or not as they choose).
ExtremeTech is more optimistic about the prospect of current-gen consoles supporting Ultra HD Blu-ray:
The hardware itself isn't really the problem. Even the Xbox 360 and PS3 could likely handle H.265 decoding with proper software optimization, and the eight-core Jaguar CPUs in both modern consoles are robust enough to do the job. The problem is the discs themselves. The multi-layer discs that UHD relies on likely aren't compatible with the Blu-ray players in either machine. Assuming that's true, it's the kind of feature both companies could add when they inevitably overhaul their platforms for a new process node and lower power consumption. It might even be possible to add H.265 decode support to the GPU hardware with AMD's help. Neither company has announced plans to roll out a new console variant as yet, but we'd be surprised if there weren't second-generation Xbox One's and PlayStations on store shelves by Christmas, 2016.
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday May 14 2015, @01:31PM
For comparison, DVDs have a maximum data rate of 9.80Mb/s for video. At PAL frame rates that's 392Kb (49KB) per frame. A frame is 720x576 at the highest resolution that DVDs support, which at 3 byte per pixel works out at 1,244,160 bytes, meaning that the compression ratio needs to be 96%, using the same calculation that you've done. Note that DVDs use compression techniques three generations older than UHD (H.262 a.k.a MPEG-2 Part 2). Each jump in the H.26x series yields a noticeable improvement in compression ratio.
It's also worth noting that, as you increase the pixel density and frame rate, there's a lot more redundant information. A lot of photographic images contain large amounts of fairly regular gradients (JPEG made heavy use of this). The amount of information in an 8x8 macroblock of a regular gradient is no more than a 4x4 macroblock of the same gradient. You only see more information at sharp boundaries, in detail. Similarly, 60fps does not contain double the information of a 30fps scene. Very often doing fairly simple interpolation between frame N and N+2 will give you a close approximation of frame N+1 (and this is more likely as you bump up the frame rate, as there is less time for the things in the scene to change). To losslessly reproduce the intervening frame, you only need to store the differences between the predicted frame and the real frame (and we're not doing lossless encoding here). H.265 does bidirectional interpolation, so will use the last and the next keyframe to determine what the current one is (I don't think MPEG-2 did).
TLDR: while the 99% compression ratio is very impressive in absolute terms, it's not a significant jump from previous generations of the technology.
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