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Ultra High Definition Video
hovermike writes "This story about UHDV (Ultra High Definition Video) comes from the NY Times. Here are a few specs from the article: 'picture size of 7,680 by 4,320 pixels'; 'UHDV's beefed-up refresh rate of 60 frames per second (twice that of conventional video), projected onto a 450-inch diagonal screen with more than 20 channels of audio'; '22.2 sound: 10 speakers at ear level, 9 above and 3 below, with another 2 for low frequency effects'; AND THE KICKER, 'All those sound channels and all those image pixels add up to a lot of data. In test, an 18-minute UHDV video gobbled up 3.5 terabytes of storage (equivalent to about 750 DVD's). The data was transmitted over 16 channels at a total rate of 24 gigabits per second.' Don't think I'll wait to buy regular 'old' HDTV..."
I wonder how long it will be before the local utility offers a 24 Gb/s connection. (of course it will all be for naught if the uploads are still snaily)
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
The power of modern GPU's could be put to use with this resolution, and we could once again have a resolution war between the various chip makers.
Let's learn to "walk" with images of this resolution, before we try and run.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
It looks like movies for this are about as useful as the 35TB RAID-0 array they'll come on
I expect you to give the quote "640k ought to be enough for anyone", and you are right, but by the time anyone can store this much data, we'll probably have holographic projectors, and 3D tv.
And would you like Ultra-High-Mega-Super-Happy-Fun Resolution 2D tv, or SDTV quality 3D.
Why do I bother asking....
I say perhaps, but subtle movements of your eyes make them more suited to catching small details. Try looking through a dense mesh (like the door on an IBM SP, or perhaps a microwave oven. If you hold your head still, you will be pretty much unable to make out any details, but if you move your head around just a teeny weeny bit, you'll se things in almost full detail...
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
i have to disagree. my folks have a 51" HDTV, and i can still see the pixels. definitely room for improvement.
...not that one usually watches their 50" TV from such a distance, but maybe we would if it looked good up close
consider that a 17" WXGA screen is 1440x900- you could definitely go up to, say, a 50" screen with this resolution and have something really photoreal, even when you're standing up close to it.
i'd argue that the 20 channels of sound would be much less noticably better than the higher resolution...
... if they'll still use interlacing as they do (in live broadcasts) for HDTV...
I want to see this applied to OmniMAX and IMAX films.
My biggest problem with [Omni|I]MAX is that at 24fps, scenes with slow pans get very jumpy (fast pans blur enough to not be noticable). However, if you just ran the film at 60fps, the size of the reels would be unmanagiable, and the speed of the film through the transport would be dangerous!
But imagine a [Omni|I]MAX theater with 100TB of storage (not a big deal nowadays) and a DMD/DLV projector at these kinds of resolutions and refresh rates. They could play any movie they have pretty much instantly, they could have longer running movies, and the movies would be absolutely immersive (esp. for OmniMAX movies - on a 120 degree screen pretty much your entire field of view would be the movie.)
Of course, they'd need to make sure people understood the "If you feel yourself getting sick, just CLOSE YOUR EYES AND BREATH!" a bit more.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...When we were doing text, people thought having 100kb pictures would keep them from sharing.
...When we were doing pictures, people thought having 3mb music files would keep them from sharing.
...When we were doing music, people thought having 100mb applications would keep them from sharing.
...When we were doing applications, people thought having 700mb movies would keep them from sharing.
...When we were doing movies, people thought having 12TB/hr HDTV would keep them from sharing.
Information (as in raw bytes/sec) will continue to become cheaper and cheaper. The price of content is quite stable. Add 2+2 and see where it is going. More, faster and more "profitable". I know several people that are probably "millionaires" by now.
At the estimates for piracy, using the full penalty of the law, the total piracy is more than the GNP of the world - not just this year - but (estimating like a geometric sequence) for all eternity since the dawn of time.
How's that possible? Simple. We make "money" out of thin air. You give me a million, I give you a million, and we both keep it as well. At $0/content, we could all have all the content in the world. So the loss = 7 billion people * millions of CDs/DVDs/Apps/Games/whatever * full retail price. Yeah. Right.
Copyright will have to change because pretty soon everyone will have millions in liability - it will simply be common. I've seen it in every age group from 8 to 80, both sexes, all sorts of people. It's bigger than prohibition in the sense that "everybody" is doing it. There's simply no stopping that.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
NHK of Japan invented an analogue high definition television system called Muse in the 1970s and 1980s, which looked wonderful compared with standard definition at the time, but its bandwidth requirements were much too high, sets were too expensive, and by the time it got into production it was becoming clear that digital technologies using data compression and consequently that would work using much lower bandwidth and would provide much more in the way of interactive services were viable. So Muse was abandoned and digital services were rolled out.
For this new system to work, we need much larger bandwidth and/or much better compression than we have now, which in practice means more powerful CPUs than we have now. This will come, but I think this will be a decade or more off. (At that point, any system invented by the Japanese right now will be superceded by something newer invented in the mean time).
Personally, I like the idea of this new system in principle. It is the first television system I have seen that generates pictures as good or better as conventional film. It will look fabulous if used in a digital cinema. (Current digital cinema technology only uses 1000 lines or so, and this is seriously lacking compared to film)
As for viewing this in your living room, it is probably overkill, unless we have screens covering entire walls of rooms (which of course we may). The 1080 lines max of conventional HDTV probably is good enough for 40 inch screens and the like. Current generation screens do show various digital artifacts, but these are more to do with the inadequacies of the display technologies than the number of pixels on the screen. (Things like LCD and plasma displays are simply not is good as conventional CRTs in terms of picture quality). Increasing the number of lines in such circumstances will certainly improve the picture further and it will probably happen some day, but larger gains in picture quality can probably be more easily gained in other ways for the moment.
If my math is right, to download this 18 minute clip over my 256 m/bit/sec cablemodem is around 40 hours.
So, start download when leaving the house for work on Monday...
Chip H.
I can understand the incredibly high resolution, but why so many audio channels?
Two channels does quite a good job of reproducing all the sounds of an environment, assuming the stereo speakers are appropriately far apart.
5.1 channel sound added a sub-woofer, which is a positive development, and then 3 more speakers. Okay, the two rear channels I can understand, because most people don't have their speakers located well, and there's a certain gee-wiz factor in hearing something that is distinctly behind you. However, the center channel still makes little sense to me, since the stereo speakers can handle that area just as well (center channel is usually a crappy little set of treble-only speakers anyhow).
Now, I am really at a loss to understand why you need even more, especially 20+... Put on a pair of stereo headphones and pick any location, 360 degrees, and I'll make it sound like a noise is comming from that exact spot. So what can 20+ channels do for you?
Even if we start getting holograms comming out of the screen, I could still make a sound seem like it's comming from whatever position that object is located with just 4 speakers, and I could do a pretty good job with just 2 if needed.
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