4K Blu-ray discs arriving in 2015

4K Blu-ray discs arriving in 2015

| Source: cnet Author: Mark Campbell

4K Blu-ray discs arriving in 2015

In Berlin at the IFA trade show the Blue-ray Disk Association is almost finished defining the new version of its physical media technology that can handle 4k content. The association will start licensing out the technology in the spring or summer 2015 along with new Blu-ray players to play the new version of Blu-ray disc.

Using physical media instead of relying on fallible and often limited Internet connections means Blu-ray discs can provide the best possible image quality and easily provide the most stable playback. But there's more to 4K Blu-ray than just four times the number of pixels as in today's prevailing 1080p video, the new specification also will improve colour gamut dramatically and offer a higher dynamic range so details in shadows and highlights are visible. The new format also will be able to show 4K video at 60 frames per second another great advantage for us framerate junkies.

Along with 4k resolution video the new standard will offer higher dynamic range, colour gamut, and even 4k at 60fps. The discs are pretty much identical with 50GB capacity but with the changes being how the data is written and read as it is now compressed in H.265/HEVC instead of the old H.264AVC codec.

The HEVC codec takes more processing power to encode or decode video, which means that people will require a new Blu-ray player as the decoding hardware was designed for the less demanding old codec on old Blu-ray players. Given that Current Blu-ray players can only output 1080p images, due to the limitation of today's HDMI cables. Even if older players could decode the discs, they couldn't output the images.

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