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.
Related Stories
Sony Releases Quad-Layer 128 GB BD-R XL Media
Sony is about to start selling the industry's first 128 GB write-once BD-R XL optical media. The discs will also be the first quad-layer BDXL media formally aimed at consumers, but bringing benefits to professionals that use BDXL today.
Although the general BDXL specifications were announced back in 2010 for multi-layered write-once discs with 25 GB and 33.4 GB layers, only triple-layer BDXL discs with a 100 GB capacity (generally aimed at broadcasting, medical, and document imaging industries) have been made available so far. By contrast, quad-layer 128 GB media has never seen the light of day until now.
As it turns out, increasing the per-layer capacity of Blu-ray discs (BDs) to 33.4 GB via a technology called MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) was not a big problem, and most of today's BD players and optical drives support the BDXL standard. However, increasing the layer count to four while ensuring a broad compatibility, signal quality across four layers, yields, and some other factors slow downed release of 128 GB BDXL essentially by eight years.
Related: Ultra HD Blu-Ray Specification Completed
Samsung stops releasing Blu-ray players in the US
Did you notice that Samsung hasn't made a peep about Blu-ray players at CES or other recent trade shows? There's a good reason for it: the company is exiting the category in the US. Samsung told Forbes and CNET that it's no longer introducing Blu-ray players for the country. It didn't provide reasoning for the move, but Forbes sources reportedly said that Samsung had scrapped a high-end model that was supposed to arrive later in 2019.
Related: Ultra HD Blu-Ray Specification Completed
Sony Launches Quad-Layer 128 GB Blu-Ray Discs
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 14 2015, @11:49AM
The old BluRay players will continue to play the old BluRay disks, just as the DVD players still play DVDs. It's just that you won't be able to play the new disks, just as you cannot play BluRay disks on your DVD player.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Thursday May 14 2015, @11:50AM
I'm sure it'll look great, but if they are sticking a 2 hour long 4K video on a 100 GB medium, it is going to be ridiculously compressed.
(3840 x 2160) pixels per frame * 24 bits per pixel * 60 frames per second = 5.375 TB/h.
For a 2 hour movie, that works out to greater than 99% compression rate.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 14 2015, @12:17PM
Using units based on base 2^
Raw data rate: (3840 * 2160 * 24 * 60 * 3600) / (8*2^40) = 4.888 TB/h
Or in GB/h = 5006 GB/h
So they would need 50 times compression or 98% reduction.
According to a TDK announcement in 2006 HDTV 1920 x 1080 @ 24 bpp 30 fps requires 32 Mbit/s storage. That implies 46 times compression or 97.86% reduction. So it should be doable to accomplish 50 times for UHD BluRay. So it can be done. The question is if the quality justify the expenses and complications.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @12:40PM
You forgot to multiply 5006 GB/h with 2 hours. That leaves you with 99% reduction.
From looking at movie torrents, good quality encodes usually come in around 6 GB/h and that's at a fourths the resolution and 24fps. Just multiplying this up would require 60GB/h for 4k at 60fps.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @12:54PM
> According to a TDK announcement in 2006 HDTV 1920 x 1080 @ 24 bpp 30 fps requires 32 Mbit/s storage.
I don't know what announcement you are referring to.
I do know that typical bluray bitrates are in the 20mbps to 40mbps range with the lower end being more common.
The pirates aim for about 9mbps but they often use x264 settings that are out of spec (more aggressive) than the bluray standard.
99% of time the pirate versions are indistinguishable from the original bluray sources.
UHD uses a new codec as mentioned above - h265 aka HEVC - which is roughly 2x to 4x more efficient than h264.
Also, pixels for motion video are not 24-bit. They are encoded with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling [wikipedia.org] where the color resolution is only 25% of the physical resolution. For example a 3840x2160 image only has 1920x1080 worth of color resolution) effectively cutting the bandwidth of the uncompressed signal in half.
(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.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Thursday May 14 2015, @01:58PM
This is nowhere near detailed enough for a per pixel/second comparison. You've not taken the varying colourspaces into account - as mentioned, Blurays usually use 4:2:0, DVDs generally use YUV of some kind and UHD uses... god only knows. But whatever, it greatly affects the amount of data to be encoded.
However, for a simple comparison, ignoring the whole colour space thing, the transition from DVD to Bluray did very little to affect the bits per pixel-second available to the encoder, but dramatically improved the resolution and codec features - even though some of the juicier parts of the H.264 spec weren't implemented in the BR spec - and looks great as a result. UHD is x2 to x4 the quantity of pixels per second (depending on frame rate) against Bluray, and has double the space to store it in - 100GB for a triple layered UHD disc against 50GB for a double-layered standard Bluray. While that basically means (in a *very* loose manner) that UHD has at best the same b/ps available as Blu-ray, it also picks up a new codec just like BR did against DVD.
The back-of-a-matchbook maths would seem to indicate that, even though we've already been compressing the **** outta everything for decades, evident quality of UHD won't be any worse than Bluray. I've kicked a Bluray through a projector onto a 110" screen many times, that's when the bitrate hike over streaming/pirate *really* comes into play, I'm guessing UHD will be even better for that kind of high end home cinema usage case.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:23PM
The 100 GB discs support up to 128 Mbps video (not sure if that includes audio). That's 57.6 GB an hour, or 1 hour and 44 minutes for 100 GB.
Netflix streams 4K video using H.265 at 15.6 Mbps.
That's 7.02 GB an hour. 14 hours and 14 minutes of video on a 100 GB disc. Plenty of room for a full season of shows (at 4K!). From what I've seen, 10-bit color depth does not massively increase file size. Other features, especially 60 FPS, might.
66 GB discs support up to 108 Mbps video, 50 GB discs support up to 82 Mbps.
Keep in mind these are Blu-ray's limits, not a blank data disc's limits. If you were to use 100 GB discs as blank media, you could put H.266 7680x4320 video on them in the future. Maybe no UHDBD disc reader will be able to read faster than 128 Mbps, and that's how they determined the limits.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Thursday May 14 2015, @12:21PM
Is this a reliable technology? Bit errors galore..
So when will the home writable variant of this UHD BluRay technology be available to consumers?
What will the cost of writers and discs be?
Can it be used for plain storage or will it be messed up with backdoors and DRM?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Thursday May 14 2015, @12:55PM
Yes. As long as DRM is involved, it will always be messed up
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 14 2015, @01:54PM
Is DVD messed up then? because they can be used as plain block storage devices..
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:14PM
WizardFusion is just doing that thing where he's advertising his membership in a group (in this case the group of anti-DRM people) and the actual content of his words don't matter. If you read it as "rah rah sis-boom-bah DRM sucks!" it makes more sense.
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Thursday May 14 2015, @03:31PM
So when will the home writable variant of this UHD BluRay technology be available to consumers?
Not sure about the encoding spec, but the BDXL writers are already available - I've got one.
Link: http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Professional/Computer-Drives/BDR-206MBK [pioneerelectronics.com]
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 5, Informative) by SrLnclt on Thursday May 14 2015, @12:34PM
15 years ago if I got an audio CD I would stick it in my computer, rip the contents, and put it on a shelf for several years. I do the same now with DVDs. All my audio and video is on my NAS box or streaming. I still don't even own a device capable of playing Blu-Ray discs. I'm about as interested in Blu-ray as I am in HD-DVD. I doubt this changes anything.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday May 14 2015, @01:34PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Friday May 15 2015, @07:50AM
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday May 14 2015, @03:46PM
I doubt this changes anything
for you, and therefore by extension no-one else?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bziman on Thursday May 14 2015, @12:44PM
The problem with the BluRay standard is that they periodically "update" the DRM keys on new media. So you have to connect your player to the internet in order to get those updates to watch new disks. But, those updates can also revoke old keys "if they get cracked or pirated too much", thus making the player incapable of playing media you already own. No thanks. DVD is fine for me, and if they ever stop making DVDs, I still have bittorrent.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @01:04PM
> those updates can also revoke old keys "if they get cracked or pirated too much", thus making the player incapable of playing media you already own.
That is not how key revocation works. [financialcryptography.com] Even players with revoked keys can continue to play discs that were pressed before the revocation occurred.
Sure, a firmware update can do anything including brick the player, but the official AACS key revocation process does not rely on firmware updates.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @01:07PM
This technology is completely worthless until they remove all DRM. Until then, any of its ignorant users will be subjugated.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mendax on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:05PM
I have a Blu-ray player. It's a Sony portable player which I occasionally plug into a computer monitor with an HDMI cable when I want to watch a Blu-ray disk. The quality of picture I get from the monitor is more than adequate, and that is a point I want to make. The first time I saw a Blu-ray disk played on a hi-def TV I thought it was awful. Not because of the quality of the playback but because of that quality. It found it to be distracting.
I think this comes from the fact that most of us here grew up with movies being captured on photographic film and its inherent graininess. Older television shows, such as my old favorites the original Star Trek and Mission: Impossible series, were put on 35 mm film, and newer ones were often captured on video tape. But newer productions are using digital cameras and we old-fogies are just not used to seeing the very, very high resolution images.
In any case, this raises an important issue. How realistic does a movie have to capture reality? Some food for thought.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:31PM
At a certain point quality of the video no longer matters. Put any crap movie in the highest resolution possible, and its still crap.
But its good for those selling this thing (and the next versions they are working on). They get paid for the same thing many times without adding value. Capitalism in action.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:17PM
In any case, this raises an important issue. How realistic does a movie have to capture reality?
And a semi-easy answer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism [wikipedia.org]
What got me thinking is "why is that not the right question... and what is the right question?"
I suspect it has something to do with the nature of what is being portrayed, the intent of the capturing, and how the realism does or does not cause enjoyment in the consumer... but I really have no idea what the right question is.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 14 2015, @08:02PM
I also remember the first time I saw a computer displayed through an RGB cable, rather than a composite video connector. It was clear and crisp and ugly, and I prefered my early-80s UHF for game playing (Bitmap Brothers' Xenon, those were the days!)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday May 15 2015, @04:41AM
It's interesting that you talked about the recent Hobbit movies. The first Blu-ray I saw on a true high-def TV was the first Hobbit film. And it was not all that great. I recently rented (and ripped) the third one. I'll watch it one of these days... right after I watch the second one... which may be never given the quality of the first and the horrid reviews I've read on the third. Perhaps I'll go back and read the book.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1) by throwaway28 on Thursday May 14 2015, @08:39PM
Side channel non video data. Does watching an explosion on ultra-ultra-hd 16384x9200 result in shrapnel to your face ? The smell of smoke to your nose ? Loss of blood due to fresh wounds ?
Humans are not completely visual; we have smell, taste, motion, and touch; in addition to eyes.
Beyond a certain point, absence of that side channel non-video data, breaks immersion far more than lack of pixels. Why does that actor onscreen smell like popcorn and cigarette smoke instead of smelling like she looks ? Why am I not bleeding, when the main character gets hurt ? Why are my hands not burnt ? Why did I not get a concussion ? Why does the blue sky smell like popcorn and cigarette smoke ? etc, etc.
I love that display technologies are improving; I love that decoding speed is rising, I love that hd cameras are falling in price.
But in the end, I'ld rather use that all, to read soylentnews with beautiful fonts, than watch a movie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2015, @12:07AM
When I first went hidef bluray I had the same issues.
Turns out the TV was smashing out any contrast. So everything looked like a soap opera.
My 3rd bluray I found something interesting. It was no better than the DVD it replaced. It was a straight transfer with a little less compression. The original scan was exactly the same...
Later blurays are pretty good. But I only bother with action movies with it. Then only ones where there will be some interesting details going on.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:16PM
So how long will it take to burn one of these Ultra 100GB things? Weeks?
Full disclosure: I had a BD-R burner once. It never worked. I never got a single disk to burn successfully. I gave it to someone else and never heard anything about it. Dunno if he got it to work. But the disks took hours to burn, and they were regular BD-Rs.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:19PM
You probably had a first gen burner.
First gen CD burners were slow as hell and quality of media was paramount. I remember Taiyo Yuden [wikipedia.org] blanks were the creme de le creme, but you had to know which brands were really secret rebranders of taiyos if you wanted to get them in the US.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:54PM
I read twenty comments, and not a single one pointed out that courtesy of Google Fiber and unlimited data caps, nobody in the universe would ever want physical medium, making the whole idea of a new standard completely stupid...
Dang, I miss the old Blu-Ray/HD-DVD/Streaming inane arguments...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:40PM
Are you one of the lucky few that have Google Fiber or are you just musing?
If you have/had Google Fiber, would you upgrade your computer to take advantage of it? For example, a laptop with a better resolution [google.com], CPU, GPU, faster PCIe SSD to take in gigabits, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:55PM
I was one of the people sitting on insanely show US DSL when people went vocal about the futility of HD disks. Even with good fiber today, I know I'm the exception, not the rule. Most people can't stream at actual high-rez, and maybe the internet commenters have finally learnt that.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:16PM
Of course, because Google laying fibre in a few towns in Murica means the entire world can suddenly pull down 100GB in an hour... idiot. Besides, I like owning physical copies of things - people can't censor them after I've paid for them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:29PM
Also, Ultra HD Blu-ray will be a good way to get 4K rips for 4K torrents.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:46PM
Excellent point - without high quality source material, all those kickass rips wouldn't exist. Maybe you could scan a film print if you owned a cinema and had the time between shows, but with the print ID schemes in use these days, along with the shift to digital film distribution, not to mention the cost of print hire and physical degradation of the medium, it simply isn't practical. Digital rips are almost free by comparison, in terms of time, cost per film and startup cost.
(I was a chief projectionist for a cinema)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:11PM
> Excellent point - without high quality source material, all those kickass rips wouldn't exist.
You don't need physical media for a high quality rip. There are some really good netflix rips floating around. For example, Daredevil in 1080p [google.com] looks fantastic.
(Score: 2) by Daiv on Thursday May 14 2015, @08:44PM
Except those of us who still like to sell/swap/borrow discs on a regular basis with friends/family/co-workers.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 14 2015, @10:23PM
I'll refer you to my reply above, which clarifies that I failed at conveying my sarcasm.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:47PM
First, harddisk vendors define 1GB as a billion bytes, now 4K is only 3840? WTF? And who is going to make up a new word for the old K=1000 prefix and then shoehorn it into every single wiki article?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:06PM
Well, the true marketing term for 3840 x 2160 or 2160p is UHD/Ultra HD.
4K is also used to refer to that resolution but cinematically, it is 4096 x 2160.
720p is HD. 1600x900 is HD+. 1080p is Full HD. 1440p is Quad HD (4 times the amount of pixels in 720p). 7680x4320 is Full Ultra HD (yes, FUHD).
Looks like the 5120x2880 displays that are starting to appear are Ultra HD+.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#Overview_by_vertical_resolution_and_aspect_ratio [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:07PM
it's side-effect of 1920x1080, which was a consequence of decisions made 60 years ago...
To help justify the name, the 4K ecosystem includes DCI (cinema) at 4096x2160. Consumers won't see that resolution, but the workflows for professionals are designed to support both.