New MPEG format paves the way for UHDTV The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has outlined a new video compression standard that will enable the broadcast and digital distribution of ultra high definition TV (UHDTV). High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is said to offer compression around twice as high as for the current video standard of choice, H.264, and was …
My last TV was pulled out of a skip, worked for 5 years after (until I dropped it) and had been in a school since at least the 90's before that.
For the HDTV replacement I bought, I would like (but don't really expect) the same sort of lifetime. Hell, I only bought HDTV because I *had* to as there was nothing else (I've been using "HD" monitor resolutions since Windows 3.1, but I don't need them unless I'm six-inches away from the screen, and I tend to stick the TV on the other side of the room).
I can't "see" HDTV at those distances (whether you can or not, that's a matter for the person in question - I *can't*). I sure as hell won't see 4k or 8k unless I knock down a wall to make a personal cinema (which isn't likely to happen given how little TV I actually watch, and how 0% of it would benefit from 4k/8k resolution).
As far as I can tell, the only people who'll use this are cinemas and movie studios. And I don't really care what they use to project the image, and I'm unlikely to notice if they had 32k, let alone 4k resolution, from the distance you watch a cinema screen from. Hell, I'd go back to old slightly-blurry film projectors if they offered a discounted ticket price for doing so.
Looks like one of those technologies that will linger in the professional market anyway while everyone else just tweaks their H264 or whatever settings.
Lee Dowling - you are right. lets not improve anything as some people dont have good eyesight ;)
why did we ever go stereo sound when some people are a bit deaf ;)
i can see 1080p fine on my 42" screen and can easily spot the difference between 1080 and 720. im looking forward to 4k it will make things look almost lifelike :) it will be a while though.
Video walls, your spouse too engrossed with celebrities to notice you, the youth smashing stuff up for the hell of it. Mechanical hounds (thank, Sony AIBO). Rent a video from your way home from work. Don't use any drugs not approved by your boss or work supervisor. Shut up. Be happy. The greatest enemy of progress is questions.
I can't think of any possible use for a home 4K (or 8K) system personally -- 1920x1080 is plenty for me. And imagine the movie company's fear at broadcasting movies at full theater resolution (movie theater digital projectors run at either 2048x1080 or 4096x2160).
That said, I already love how much h.264 drops my storage requirements for tv shows and movies, compared to even the earlier-generation MPEG-4 formats. So I'll be happy to have HEVC files cut my storage requirements even further (as long as the HEVC decoding doesn't kick my CPU to the curb too much.)
This standard allows an increase in spatial resolution, but what about an increase in temporal resolution - from 30 to 60 Hz? Or, from 30Hz to 30Hz stereo? Personally, I'd rather have either of those before the higher spatial resolution - my current TV can do 1080p60, so with an external decoder I could get some benefit from the higher rate now.
And will we see a BluRay that would support that? While many BluRay players likely cannot upgrade their video codecs, I know of at least ONE that should be able to do so (unless Sony decides that it would be more fun to piss off PS3 owners even more).
The BBC made a late (after receiver hardware had been designed) push to get 1080P50 into the Freeview HD spec. I think it was included in the end. It certainly caused a panic/scramble by manufacturers to check if the chips they had designed their 2010/2011 TVs around could support it.
I think also contrary to some expectations the BBC HD encoders swap between 1080i and 1080p frequently depending on what is most efficient for each scene rather than just between programmes. This upsets my TV when using some picture settings so I get a flash to black on these transitions if set to particular modes.
Good point,
I'd prefer to get 1080p rather than 'i' from Sky HD right now so I can 'sweat' my current set, rather than upgrading to a 4k set which is similiarly hobbled by Sky's technology (possibly) and desire to dial down the bandwidth to support more channels (definitely)
Are Sky going to push a 4k signal for 3D at 1080P or another bunch of shopping channels?
This evening, in the pub, my mechanic asked if I had heard the thing on the radio about frame rates in cinema. I said I hadn't, but mentioned that I had heard Peter Jackson's The Hobbit had been criticised by test audiences... it seems the increase in frame rate made the movie look like a tv show, for some strange psycho-something reason. Hmm, I'd better look at iPlayer...
it's habituation. we're used to seeing motion blur quickly in film and much less in real-life. Reduce it and you feel like like you're viewing a monitor feed ie CCTV, or some other sort of live studio event.
high frame rates are a must for ride-films for this reason - you get a visceral engagement., no this-is-a-film barrier.
But that is likely to be the discomfort factor ie "why are we watching these people live?", that will take years to get acclimatised to, much like the editing shorthand of seeing people in different scenes, but not showing how they travelled from one to the other. Early film audiences had to learn that language.
This leads to the question of who is/are the lucky companie/s that own the patents on this mathematical process? Will the people who pushed this through for acceptance and those who accepted it find that their Christmas presents are large and expensive for the next few years.
Oh my goodness, I am so cynical.
Well if you can find a company willing to invest 10's of thousands of man hours for the good of the world, then good luck (don't mention Google, they don't give it away "free", they get paid for the adverts in the products either directly or indirectly, or use it as a method of crippling the opposition)
This may come as a surprise, but some people do like to get paid for their work.
Next week, after £10billion of investment, GlaxoSmithKiline decide to give their cure for the common cold away for free.
"... willing to invest 10's of thousands of man hours for the good of the world ..."
Have you heard of FOSS, Linux, Ogg Vorbis?
" ... GlaxoSmithKiline decide to give their cure for the common cold away for free."
Not the right analogy. How about:-
'WHO, UN, NHS, Medicare, etc; mandate that the only cure for the common cold that may be prescribed is that produced by GlaxoSmithKline.'
Note: Analogies usually fall over if you push them too far and this one is no exception.
The huge, glaring problem with that is that FOSS software often recreates stuff that has already been done and is patented. Ogg Vorbis treads on a lot of patented stuff from MPEG from what I hear, for example. And look at the number of Android OEMs paying license fees to MS because android uses patented features. (And the android/MS situation shows what happens - when it gets popular and people are making money from it, the people who own the patents turn up and ask for their cut - don't confuse "FOSS but not popular enough" with "patent -free").
Whether that's right or not? Depends on how you look at it. If MS invented FAT or whatever, they have some right to tell people not to copy it or to pay them if they do. Android could have used EXT instead of FAT. But then maybe FAT should really be an open standard now.
And the healthcare analogy falls flat too. There's no need for a standard cure for colds, and no point in having one. TV transmissions, on the other hand, need a standard. TV makers need to know what the TV will receive and how to decode it, or you end up with a TV that will work with one channel but can't view others because they all use different codecs. So we have a standard, and force everyone to use it, and we have TVs that can view any channel.
Ogg Vorbis treads on a lot of patented stuff from MPEG from what I hear, for example
Citation definitely needed on that one. I think it was Apple and Microsoft spreading FUD about Vorbis infringing on unspecified patents simply because they wanted to ensure that H.264 got enshrined into the HTML5 spec rather than it becoming an open and royalty-free standard. The Ogg guys have always striven to avoid using any potentially patented technique no matter how stupid or obvious the patent might be.
I've got no problem with your comments about Android and FAT (evidently true), but you'll have to give us something more concrete than just rumours if you want to claim that Ogg Vorbis "treads on a lot of patented stuff from MPEG".
So you call for citations from AC, in the very same sentence as you say "I think it was Apple and Microsoft spreading FUD about Vorbis infringing on unspecified patents"? Where are your citations?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/30/steve_jobs_claims_ogg_theora_attack/
There. Happy now?
And by the way, if you go back and read what I said again, maybe you'll understand it in the way I intended: there indeed have been rumours of Ogg violating patents. I [thought] it was Apple and Microsoft making those [foundless--hence "FUD"] allegations.
Have a nice day, Mr. AC.
"Will the people who pushed this through for acceptance and those who accepted it find that their Christmas presents are large and expensive for the next few years."
You'll find their christmas presents pretty regular i suspect. The license fees for these standards are pretty low (otherwise nobody would bother with the standard). And the money gets split between a *lot* of companies, many of which spent plenty of time to come up with the goods.
Also, the value of these patents is set before the standard is agreed. If I invent some new way of efficiently storing pixels and patent it, that could get used. Problem is, there are about a million other ways of storing pixels, so my patent isn't worth a whole lot. I might get $0.0001 per device sold - enough to make a passable income long term, but far from massive.
It's the patents that *don't* go into a standard that can be worth a lot, because the owners haven't agreed to give them away to anyone who wants them for a minimal price. But then, if they're not required by a standard you're not forced to use them.
Well done with the childish insult. I'm sure it made you feel good in some strange way.
I don't mind paying for things I choose to use. (I've paid for seven MS Windows OS licenses so far over the years, even though I have the ability to bypass that payment process). This choice of codec is being mandated by an international authority, which is a different situation. Whatever the cost is, I'll still end up paying for it since I'll be an end-consumer of the products that are distributed using it.
I think he meant steps or possibly waves.
- Steps and waves move forward.
- Cycles go round and round.
Or rather the WHEELS on a cycle go round and round. So perhaps he meant that compression moves ON a cycle, rather than IN a cycle ?
Or perhaps he was just trying to sound impressively knowledgable and insightful whilst merely stating the bleeding obvious.
...to all those that say "oh, HD is enough", seriously, this was like BEING there. Sure, it helped it was in a small theatre, with an awesome sound system, but it really was astonishing.
Of course, it's good to be happy with what we have, absolutely. But don't underestimate how awesome a new technology can be!
Well, I'm one of the many who think even HD is pretty pointless. I don't watch TV much, don't have a massive set dominating my living room, and really struggle to see the difference between HD and SD (I can see it, but in my case it's not so amazing that i'd pay extra).
But I'm also forward-looking enough to see the potential. I'd like to get rid of that TV altogether really, a big black square is an ugly thing. I'd also like a bigger screen for watching movies. So give me say a 100" screen that's either transparent / projected onto a wall (without a big chunk of plastic on the ceiling) or can show a nice picture when it's turned off.
At that size I'd definitely want it to be 4k or 8k. And perhaps by the time these standards happen, we'll have the tech to make a non-ugly telly? We're looking at something that's years away here, remember :)
Last time I looked, SD video was broadcast (BBC) at about 3Mb/s for the video and another meg for audio and ancillary data. HD was considered to be reasonable at 20Mb/s but is broadcast at about 8-10Mb/s.
Where are you going to find space for 90Mb/s, or even 25Mb/s, signals without returning the UK to a three channel country? I can't immediately see a way of doing this as broadcast, and I think it's unlikely that there's the fibre capacity to deliver it online.
Which restricts its use rather more than somewhat - sports venues, cinemas, and that's about it.
"Returning the UK to a 3 channel country".
Fine by me, about 80% of freeview is dross, and I imagine Sky is mostly worse, bar the odd channel like Sky Atlantic or Sky Arts. We could drop all the shopping channels and adult chat crap without most of the population noticing. In fact I already deleted them from my EPG.
Ok maybe not 3, but say 10 channels would actually be plenty, unless you're a complete couch potato. Bear in mind the telly is now competing with streaming movies, youtube and, dare I say, going outside and getting a life.
Indeeed. There can't be more than about 3 channels' worth of NEW content coming along at any moment in time (edited programmes, not live stuff like rolling news) on average, so that would suit me to get the best of new material. Channels which are jukeboxes of repeats could be dealt with as online services.
..when operating in limited bitrate channels, just how much worse will it look when the picture is a screenful of seawater in motion, or thousands of marathon-runners heads? (Or a high-speed zip down the Thames from source to estuary for that matter...?)
And people's eyes looking fuzzy or dark-skinned people's faces loosing all texture (as the codecs apply less sharpness to darker areas of the picture)...
'And people's eyes looking fuzzy or dark-skinned people's faces loosing all texture (as the codecs apply less sharpness to darker areas of the picture)...' - I don't know what is proposed but a non-linear 'brightness to level' conversion could help here perhaps, so the levels are closer together in the black than in the whites.
I have noticed that, mostly with shows like X-Factor, the people with black/dark-brown skin on ITV don't always look right... the textures & colours always seemed a bit wrong, and that is on ITV-HD!
but on the BBC, no problems.. Not sure if its the cameras, the make-up or the compression, but ITV are definitely doing something wrong...
Brave, their newest pic, is being distributed for projectors set to a resolution of 2048x858 - projection.pixar.com/2D/
Anamorphic SD ~1024x576 at 100fps is the same amount of data per second as 2048 X 1152 at 25fps.
DVD encoding strategies settled on front-loading their bit budget on the first quarter of movies. Once the audience gets into the film, the data rate can go down (reminiscent of how the quality of VHS recordings becomes less noticeable as [if] you start caring about the characters).
How dare anyone invent a superior viewing experience that might actually be as good or better than films that I've seen in the Great Cinema Emporium when my 67 year old Etch-A-Sketch is still functional and capable of displaying perfectly good monochrome images at a frame-rate of 1 per minute. Seriously, some of you lot astound me. I'm amazed you ever invested in colour TV let alone HD and if one more person claims they can't spot the difference between 1080p and a 10 year old Nokia phone display then I'll probably have to scream!
I've seen this technology in Japan and it blows what you're used to clean off the planet. Have some aspirations for a change!
I saw the technology demonstrated at IBC last year with prerecorded material - very vivid colours and a distinct impression that someone had finally produced a passive 3-d display that was glasses-free and position independent. It was that good - and I had been assessing video for the BBC for many many years - but of course the material had been selected for it's ooomph potential.
There was also a live feed from London which was impressive for the detail, but with natural (dull on the day) lighting the 3-d effect went though the resolution was still there. A live studio feed, where it was possible to compare the scene (female presenter) with the image showed again very good detail but there was a definite feeling of 'so what' - the resolution gets below what the eye can resolve and there's no point going further. There's an odd subjective effect for me where I'm aware that there is more detail there than I'm expecting, but I can't consciously see it without getting close and peering, which rather does away with the effect.
As some said.. 25 to 50mbps+ for one channel.. given the ridiculous state of internet speeds in the US and the astronomical prices we pay for a fraction of the bandwidth as most other countries, we're a looong way off from having the bandwidth to handle one channel like this. I believe Japan, South Korea, most of Europe, Australia and probably many third world starving nations will be able to handle these speeds far sooner than the US given all the crap the cable companies do to prevent any sort of decent internet speed. Thanks to all the MPAA (and others) and piracy, the US is in such shambles with regards to internet speed each person will have to pay for their own direct fiber to the house. I am betting on true 4G, or possibly even 5G speeds surpassing land speeds in a few years, although that's not much better.. given the unbelievable restrictions of 2GB per month all the carriers are putting on, it's pointless to even get a device with 4G or 5G.. who wants to run out of bandwidth after an hour of HD. I don't understand how the country that invented a lot of this stuff is by far one of the most backward/behind with allowing the customers to actually enjoy it. $200 a month (USD) for a 20Mbps connection, my 4G on my phone is faster most of the time (I am thankfully grandfathered in to the last "unlimited" plan until Verizon decides to stop that supposedly sometime soon, going back on their word as well). A friend of mine in Japan pays the equivalent of $22 a month for a 100mbps to the house with unlimited bandwidth... South Korea is cheaper I think I read.
Besides all that crap, it's going to be years before the standard is finalized and put into place.. 2014 is when they may come to a rough idea of the final spec.. a good couple years after that before we see it implemented and start being used, and mind you, besides bandwidth issues, you have CPU issues. Present day PCs might be fast enough if the encoder/decoder were mulit-threaded and used all the cores. What they need to do is put a simple chip like they do on blurays or what not that decode movies, into computers so it's separate from the main cpu/gpu, but that probably won't happen.
Interesting no mention of the audio format.. 4K/8K is supposed to usher in the 22.2 surround sound format as well. 4K is what most digital movies are shot on.. 8K is typically for IMAX (which is actually usually 5K or so). 22.2 surround is just nuts.. speakers below you, above you, to the sides, back, several in the front. Not sure any home could accommodate the 22.2 spec short of building a custom home theater room. I just finally put my 7.1 together and it sounds really good, can't imagine how much better 22 speakers is going to make it short of very few movie scenes where something goes under me and I can pin point the pan of the sound as it goes under me.
"A friend of mine in Japan pays the equivalent of $22 a month for a 100mbps to the house with unlimited bandwidth... South Korea is cheaper I think I read."
You will find they are also a lot SMALLER. You try running a high-speed fiber-optic line from Miami to Seattle (about as long a run as you can get in the continental US, and that includes crossing several big rivers including the Mighty Mississippi and the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains). You'll find it won't be cheap. Not to mention the population isn't as dense as the far east, especially once you get into the heartland where a whole lotta farmland and not a lotta people. So trying to do a high-bandwidth telecommute between New York and Los Angeles (a realistic proposition) will take some significant up-front investment.
Why isn't the US as wired up as the rest of the world? Simple: geography gets in the way.
1080p TVs are already "retina displays" as explained here: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/07/why-your-hdtv-is-already-a-retina-display/
For example, unless you sit within 5.2 feet of your 40" TV (which is ridiculously close), you will not be able to see individual pixels so there is no point in upping the signal resolution for consumers.
Obviously, this won't stop the companies from marketing the crap out of this new technology making consumers believe they need it just so they can line the fat cat's pockets.
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