YouTube Adds 'Leanback,' Support For 4K Video

teh31337one writes with news that YouTube has announced support for 4K video, which runs at a resolution of 4096 x 3072. From their blog: "To give some perspective on the size of 4K, the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet; IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors. ... Because 4K represents the highest quality of video available, there are a few limitations that you should be aware of. First off, video cameras that shoot in 4K aren't cheap, and projectors that show videos in 4K are typically the size of a small refrigerator. And, as we mentioned, watching these videos on YouTube will require super-fast broadband." They provided a small playlist of videos shot in 4K. This announcement comes a few days after YouTube debuted "Leanback," a service that attempts to find and serve videos you'll like based on past viewing habits, as well as offering a simplified method of browsing.

Comments

not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Surt]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hi-Vision

4k video is so legacy.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Particularly given the existence of films that are never actually filmed(ie. virtually anything Pixar has done, etc.) which make the existence of a camera that can actually handle a given resolution irrelevant to that resolution's "existence", the notion of a "highest resolution" seems rather meaningless.

This goes double for any format with lossy compression(ie. pretty much all of them in any sort of practical use), where you could declare that your format is 16,000,000x9,000,000 pixels, and thus the awesomest available, and then compress it down to 1Mb/S. The result would look roughly like the original Wolfenstein; but it would be the highest resolution out there.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, how low-tech. I'm waiting for Ultra Mega Hyper-Definition 3000(TM).

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Surt]

Who in the heck moderated this off-topic? How could this possibly be any more on-topic? It directly refutes a claim made in the summary!

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[sznupi]

Also - tons of people actually have cameras perfectly capable of making videos in this resolution, assuming they are of quite specific kind - stop motion animation.

But yeah, I would prefer better bitrates (and/or encoding methods; H.264 won't be the last word) in more "standard" resolutions than such things basically just for show. Vimeo has "only" HD, with with their higher bitrates they look better (plus one can download the initial file)

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Anonymous Coward]

22.2 channel audio. Seriously, NHK.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[calmofthestorm]

Well if your generated graphics are vector based, then the resolution you rasterize to could have some effect on quality, but only if your screen is >= that resolution after all or it'll just be downscaled.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[yoyhed]

Man, this is getting ridiculous. As sweet as it sounds, do we really need more than 1920x1080? Granted, I don't have a 4000-pixel-wide monitor, but on my 2048x1152, I can't tell a difference between this and 1080p at all.

Then again, this is on YouTube. I'm sure compression brought the quality below a 1080p Blu-Ray the instant it was uploaded.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My point with the generated graphics was just that, if you are talking about videos actually shot with a camera at some specified frame rate, there is, in fact, a meaningful "highest resolution". If no camera presently built can do more than YxZ pixels at 24 FPS, or 60 FPS, or whatever you prefer; then it is meaningful to say that YxZ pixels is the "highest resolution".

If you are talking about CGI, the output resolution is limited only by storage space and patience. In theory, there is still a "highest resolution" since there is a finite amount of digital storage currently available on earth(might be a cute problem to use as a test of somebody's ability to make sensible estimates; but otherwise of no real interest).

I have no reason to believe that, in practice, pure CGI outfits are rasterizing to resolutions any higher than their camera-using counterparts are shooting; but they could if they wanted to, while the camera crowd would need new hardware.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that this "Super Hi-Vision" did include a specially built camera capable of doing 60 FPS at that resolution, I give the engineers involved credit for that part of the system. There may also have been some interesting FPGA work done to compress the result in reasonable time. Aside from that, though, the whole thing seems like a stunt.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[buchner.johannes]

The eye has a resolution of about 400 dpi on one meter distance*.
So the resolvable angle is (1 inch / 400) / (1 m) = 6.35E-5 rad

4K on 25 feet screens is 1.9 mm per pixel, or 13 dpi.

Means you need to put that screen as far as 30m away, otherwise you could theoretically see pixels.

With 8K, 15m. With your laptop, about 3m.

*Hint: don't print in a finer resolution.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is all fine and dandy but not really that usefull at home. Visual quality probably doesn't improve at all after 4k (in said home setting). The average human can discern two points that are about 1 arcminute apart of each other. At 50cm distance this is about 290dpi. On a 22" monitor (with 16:9 aspect ratio) it'd require a resolution of ~3400x1900 pixel. The end is near! :) Still cool though of course.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[VinylPusher]

1920x1080 is not the absolute last word on things. 1920x1080 is *not* enough for everybody. More screen-space is always welcome.

My old phone had a 640x360 display. New phones are available with 800x480. The iPhone 4 has a 960x640 resolution screen and that's only a 3.5" display!

I would like to enjoy as many pixels per square centimeter on my TV and laptop as I do on my phone. Consider old laptops had 800x600 displays, then we had technological advances through 1024x768, 1280x1024... then widescreen from 1280x800 now up to a maximum of 1920x1200 for laptop displays, 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 for very expensive external monitors. Technological advances now seem to apply solely to mobile devices. In fact, we're going backwards ever so slightly because 2560x1600 was last year's top resolution. Same monitor family this year sports 2560x1440 at the top of the range. Pixels per square centimeter is still nto great, because to go more than 1920x1200 means a 27" screen, minimum.

Perhaps there is no market demand? 1920x1200 is a nice resolution on a laptop. Still considered luxury, for the most part. People even seem happy with 1024x600 on their netbooks.

1920x1080 seems to be the new 1920x1200 for laptop displays and external monitors from anywhere just short of 23" all the way up to 27". If we're going to stick with 16:9 as our ratio, I'd like to see us progress from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440, 3200x1800 and then 4000x2250.

Imagine that on your 17" laptop. Heck, why not go crazy and have 6000x3375? We could do away with horrible, blurry, anti-aliased text on our displays.

Sadly I think progress will come in the form of OLED (or a variant). That will at least get rid of refresh lag, which really sucks but everyone kinda just ignores it because those of us who remember (or still use) CRT's know that LCD's clarity outweighs CRT's short-persistence phosphory blur.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[AAWood]

Of course you can't tell the difference; your monitor resolution means that the video is being rendered down to only a few percent over 1080p anyway, and the same will be the case for almost everyone. Support for this will cater to a niche audience for the moment, whilst also allowing for wider adoption of higher-resolution cameras, monitors and graphics cards. This is how it always is in the world of tech; we settle into a certain pattern of what we can expect our hardware to achieve, and then someone releases software (or a service, or something) that requires hardware currently on the upper bounds, slowly encouraging people to purchase it, manufacturers to lower the costs, and R&D to start working on the next high-end until eventually the cutting-edge hardware it required is mainstream.

Remember that once upon a time, 640k of RAM *really was* enough for pretty much anyone.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[yoyhed]

Did you read the subject of TFA? I don't need a lecture on screen resolution, and of course I support more resolution if I've got a 2048x1152 monitor (and that's just one of two monitors on my desk).

My point is that as a video standard, 1080p is far from being widely adopted, yet YouTube is introducing streaming (and thus compressed) 4000-something pixel video. How many years will it be before anyone actually produces real content at these resolutions, and more importantly - before people can consume it on their screens?

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[yoyhed]

I knew someone would come back with the 640K thing. I'm not anti-progress, and of course technology advances at a breakneck pace. I just don't think it's a big deal that YouTube supports it right now, when 99% of people's biggest televisions and monitors don't even come close.

I also know why I can't tell the difference, my point there was supposed to be that I've got what's considered a pretty high-end monitor by today's standards, and this 4000px video standard gives me zero benefit. It is INCREDIBLY niche.

It will be sweet when it's the standard though :)

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Mikkeles]

Gee, that's almost the resolution needed to show a square inch of a Durer etching!

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[markov_chain]

Pure CGI is not completely resolution-independent; a lot of the quality depends on how detailed the textures are.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[migla]

You could also duct tape a few cameras together and use a computer to stich the different images together to get higher resolution...

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[adbge]

Granted, I don't have a 4000-pixel-wide monitor

Nobody does. Consumer monitors are not built that support a native resolution of 4096 x 3072. You would hard pressed to find even a 60" TV that supports this kind of resolution.

Hopefully, Google knows something we don't about the future of display resolutions and this is foreshadowing consumer grade monitors receiving a long needed bump in pixels per dollar. With Apple's "retina display", maybe higher resolutions will become trendy and spark a resolution war. I don't know much about the actual feasibility of this from a technological stand point, so maybe someone in the industry could give us a break down on just how reasonable this is with current technology. This is exciting for anyone who spends a significant amount of time with technology because the advent of screens with higher DPI would significantly improve readability and allow us to deprecate things like font hinting.

More realistically, Google is just trolling for some publicity. Unless YouTube relaxes their compression on 4K video, its current incarnation is useless and, even if Google was to offer high quality 4K video, the bandwidth is simply not available. ISPs would have to roll out infrastructure that allows for speeds of 100+ Mbit/s.

At this point in time, the only reasons for putting 4K video on YouTube are bragging rights and future-proofing.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Cyberax]

"Man, this is getting ridiculous. As sweet as it sounds, do we really need more than 1920x1080?"

Yes, we do. High-DPI text would look great if our displays support more than 1920x1080 with small enough size.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[yoyhed]

Again, way to take my comment out of context. I was talking about 1080p as a video standard - considering it's barely even seeing adoption now in 2010. Obviously screen resolution and real estate are nice, but this isn't about monitor resolution, it's about the 4K standard.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[omnichad]

In response to your second point - movie trailers can certainly be output in 2K and 4K, and probably will be by the time they hear the news and have time to upload. Films are edited at a higher resolution than 1080p.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[yeshuawatso]

You can always tell where hack-a-day and /. readers are one and the same.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[yeshuawatso]

Speaking of new hardware, why don't we have a camera that can take reflected light and convert it into vector pixels?

Legitimate question as google didn't produce any usable results.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Macrat]

Then again, this is on YouTube. I'm sure compression brought the quality below a 1080p Blu-Ray the instant it was uploaded.

Not to mention that may bluray discs contain nothing more than a copy of the standard def mpeg2 data from the same DVD release.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Hurricane78]

Well, I love the effect that when I hold my phone’s super-high-DPI screen at just the right distance and angle, it looks like I’m looking trough a window when watching a good quality video on it.
From what I heard, this is also the case for UHDV. If it feels *that* real, then it will be worth it for me. But please fill out my whole viewing angle. Those few degrees are really crappy. I want 180x180 degrees! In (visual) stereo! Or even better: all depths at the same time, so your eyes can do the refocusing.
Now the only thing to solve, is, how to make binaural recordings work for everyone... ;)

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[zim2411]

Here's my comment from the discussion on Engadget. I grabbed the video file and opened it in Media Info. 4K Video for "Life in the Garden": Bit rate : 6 445 Kbps Maximum bit rate : 19.4 Mbps Width : 4 096 pixels Height : 2 304 pixels 1080p Version Bit rate : 3 350 Kbps Maximum bit rate : 5 728 Kbps Width : 1 920 pixels Height : 1 080 pixels Probably the most important thing thing, and the number that corresponds most to subjective image quality, is the Bits per pixel/frame. The 1080p manages 0.067, while the 4K halves that to just 0.028. The 720p is higher actually, with 0.085. (The 480p manages even higher with 0.157) A 1080p Blu-ray can hit 0.567, if not higher. What I mean by that number corresponding to subjective image quality, is that the higher that number, the closer the it should look to the source video the encoder is taking in. In short, this "4K" mode is a complete and utter joke. 4K is the holy grail of HD, many films are shot, edited, restored, etc all in 4K, and the day that true 4K comes to consumers will be glorious. YouTube has essentially taken a giant dump on 4K, and presented to the world as their pride and joy. Good game YouTube, next map please.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[jackbird]

It's not the camera so much as the playback medium. There's little point in mastering to some ridiculous large-format print resolution when hardware that can play it back at speed doesn't exist. That having been said, most effects work these days is done at 4k and downscaled to 2k on release, with really complex/detailed work mastered at 6k or 8k to give the artists extra resolution to nail the smallest details.

When you watch films in true IMAX, you can often tell which shots/films were mastered at higher and lower resolutions, especially for the compositing, as little problems that weren't noticeable on someone's monitor or in a small screening room can be glaringly obvious at huge size. One of the most impressive things about Avatar was near-totally consistent and super-clean CG and compositing throughout the entire film - hardly any shots had anything dodgy about them even in IMAX, except for some surprisingly off-the-shelf smoke.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[digitalunity]

My biggest concern with 4k video is simply that they will be compressing the video to a bitrate that is reasonably cheap for them to serve up. So if that's 5Mb or 10Mb, fine, whatever, but it still won't have the quality of a bluray DVD.

When Americans are all rolling 100Mbit fiber, I think 4k video will be a lot more practical.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[zippthorne]

**double-hint: Nyquist had some things to say about your "hint."

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[WeblionX]

"Vector pixels" are squares of color, so you might as well just use a regular camera for that case. What you want is something that can detect shapes and textures separately. You can try to vectorize the textures, too, but once you start scaling you're still going to be lacking in anything of decent quality as it can only see the color and gradients. It'd have to know the physical makeup of the material to keep getting more detailed. At which point you might as well just do it CG.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Kaz Kylheku]

The question is not how many feet of screen you need, but what kind of after-market retina do you need to implant to take advantage of this. (And does your current optic nerve have the bandwidth, not to mention the back end behind it?) :)

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Ken_g6]

Based on this discussion of the iPhone "retina display", a wraparound 180-degree screen of 9,000 pixels in hemi-circumference would match the resolution of the human retina. So you don't need another retina - but you might need LASIK.

Oh, and neural bandwidth isn't a problem. Maximum resolution is only achieved in a small area of the retina; if a computer could track your eye and move a small display with it, this kind of resolution wouldn't be necessary.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[aquila.solo]

Mod Parent Up.

For the non-EEs out there, the Nyquist frequency is the highest frequency that can be resolved at a given sampling rate. It's just less than half the sampling frequency. Any frequencies higher than that will be aliased to a lower frequency, with signals equal to the sampling frequency appearing at DC.

So given the GP's ocular resolution of 400 dpi, we'd need something over 800 dpi printed in order for the print to appear non-pixellated (ignoring any ink/toner blending). Add to that the fact that most people don't hold a printed document at 1m from their eyes for reading, (if they even have arms that long) and I can see a market for the 1200 dpi printers.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[tru3ntropy]

Super Hi-Vision is so legacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Digital_Cinema_Camera_Company http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/28k_RED_CAMERA.png 28000x9334

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Anonymous Coward]

Missing the point.

If I upscale a pure vector image, there are no "textures" You're thinking 3D Games garbage quality, not Pixar and Blender HDR radiosity ray tracing.

If you upscale say... flash (which has a hard limit of 2880x2880, go ahead try and create something with a larger size) to something higher resolution like RED 4k (4096x2304), you're simply blowing up all the vector coordinates in 2D space. So if you have details that has sub-pixel (flash works on 1/20th pixel space), more detail is pulled out of the original source material.

The same goes for 3D. Ever notice how a crappy game still looks crappy at HD resolution, hence everyone still runs their games at low resolution? Because the frame rate is faster. In the 3D rendering process for movies, all that math is done (and can take hours per frame of video.) If you have the Shrek DVD, go look at the outtake with the poofy-donkey.

We need the higher frame rates first. The flash player just doesn't cut it.

And this is what Youtube really needs to address first. Get 120fps (to allow for 3D video at 60fps per eye) support in there at all resolutions.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[V!NCENT]

As sweet as it sounds, do we really need more than 1920x1080?

Do we realy need 24bit colors? Do we realy need one gigabyte harddrives?! Do we...

So let me ask you a question: Why do you think anti-aliasing exists? Why do you think most people still print out their emails/letters/rapports before sending them?

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[yoyhed]

Of course we need more than that for screen resolution. I'm talking about as a video standard. 1080p is barely being adopted right now and YouTube is giving a shit about 4K video? It just doesn't matter.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you daft? Or are you simply unable to comprehend video with high-resolution text of the kind your parent poster mentioned? Before complaining about being out of your context, perhaps you should consider expanding it somewhat as the discussion moves forward? You could learn something from it, unless you actively refuse to, of course. Your call.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[VinylPusher]

Having looked at some of the YouTube sample clips, 4k video presented me with a few issues: -

1. My CPU, GPU and drivers combination were not capable of sustaining full rate playback.*
2. One clip suffered corruption every few seconds.
3. Whilst I have plenty of constant, uncontended bandwidth, YouTube does not.**
4. I don't have a 4k display.

OK, the last one is pretty obvious. Mind you, you need HDMI1.4 to transport 4k video from your computer to your 4k screen. Even then, HDMI1.4 supports that resolution at a maximum 24fps (i.e., not really suitable for your Windows desktop).

I don't think 100Mbps is needed for 4k video at the consumer level. Current encoders can squeeze 1080p24Hz into, e.g. 5.1Mbps average over the length of a movie with very good quality. 4k video contains 4.2667 times as many pixels as 1080p. Very unscientifically, this means less than 22Mbps to transport a high quality 4k video stream.

Of course, consumers are happy with shitty quality digital video, as witnessed by the many cable-TV channels using low bitrate encoding which nobody seems to complain about (at least, not enough for cable companies to worry).

YouTube is not exactly cable-TV quality, so I'm sure they would get away with 5Mbps for 4k video.

*2.2GHz Core2Duo, Nvidia 8700M GT, latest drivers.

**I have 20Mbps internet, one of the 4k test videos constantly paused during playback due to buffer underruns.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[V!NCENT]

Well it's true that we don't need it now. But we need to have these crazy "Why the hell is this useful?"-stuff so eventually people start adopting and companies will eventually support this when their older products run dry so to speak.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[inefab]

From what I remember, eye can distinguish two objects separated by about 1 arc minute. That is around 3E-4 rad.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Jedi Alec]

With a Core i7, GTX260 and 50/5Mb I could watch with no issues. 1 of the cores clocked in at about 60% use, didn't check use on the videocard.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Surt]

Yikes, that's almost twice as wide-favoring as 16:9 (which I think is already too wide favoring). Who on earth wants their format so asymmetric? Pretty cool, though.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[omnichad]

Not zero benefit. Given the higher bandwidth allocated, and assuming it's scaled down to 1080p on a smaller monitor it approaches lossless HD quality.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for that explanation, Sherlock.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[djdanlib]

* except when DPI is actually used correctly, and the printer prints an individual pixel using multiple dots. Many printers use 8+ dots per pixel.

I'd agree with this rephrased version: "Print no higher than 400 PPI for prints intended to be viewed at 1m"

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[GigsVT]

4 cameras stuck together don't (easily) give you higher resolution.

Think about it. If they all had the same lens and pointed in the same direction, all the pixels would be the same so you'd have no additional information.

If you could narrow the fields of view so that they didn't overlap so much, you could get higher resolution at a certain distance. But then you are stuck at a certain distance... if the subject moves closer you start to lose pieces and if they move farther you lose resolution.

What you might be able to do though is operate 4 cameras at say 7fps at super high resolution and then interleave the results to get smooth video. To do it right you'd need to hack some kind of time sync signal to keep them interleaved though.

(If anyone does this at least give me a shout out for the idea hehe)

cool but...

[Anonymous Coward]

how many people out there actually have the hardware to enjoy these videos?

Re:cool but...

[korean.ian]

how many people out there actually have the hardware to enjoy these videos?

Well, I can think of at least two - Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Re:cool but...

[should_be_linear]

I watched it and now am impressed! 1080p suddenly looks like RCA Studio 2 console, with giant pixels.

Re:cool but...

[Yvan256]

There's also Frank, with his 2000 inches TV.

Yay HD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can enjoy horse porn in glorious 4096 x 3072!

4096 x 3072

[Pentium100]

Not much use to me, my 21" CRT monitor only supports up to 2048x1536 and that at only 75Hz.

So, the ideal screen for 4K is 25 feet (google says it's 300 inches) or 240 x 180 inch. So that makes it ~17 dpi (4096px/240in). Too low. With good, ~300dpi screen you would only need 20.48 x 15.36 inch screen, or 25.6 inch diagonal, doable, but probably nobody makes monitors with that high resolution. CRT is probably more doable than LCD though and nobody likes CRTs because you can't place several monitors one behind the other without taking a huge amount of space..

Re:4096 x 3072

[Pentium100]

With good, ~300dpi screen

make that 200dpi...

Re:4096 x 3072

[beelsebob]

So, the ideal screen for 4K is 25 feet (google says it's 300 inches) or 240 x 180 inch. So that makes it ~17 dpi (4096px/240in). Too low. With good, ~300dpi screen you would only need 20.48 x 15.36 inch screen

And it would be entirely wasted, because you don't sit 12 inches from your screen to watch a movie, so you wouldn't be able to see a resolution that high anyway.

Re:4096 x 3072

[Pentium100]

And a huge screen (for example, in a cinema) is more wasted to me - either I sit far enough to see the whole screen without needing to turn my head and see crap resolution or I sit near enough to see every detail, but on only a part of the screen. That's why, to me, dpi is more important than just size.

Re:4096 x 3072

[BasilBrush]

Try IMAX.The huge screen, larger than you can take in at one look, makes for a very different experience than a normal cinema screen. Especially for 3D.

Though it's not suited for most films. It's best suited for natural history and space documentaries and the like.

Re:4096 x 3072

[Pentium100]

No IMAX theater in my country, but Wikipedia says there are some in Poland, maybe someday I'll visit it.

Re:4096 x 3072

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you live? I almost live a in a third world mud hut and there's an IMAX cinema nearby.

Re:4096 x 3072

[Anonymous Coward]

Which will come first, the ultra-high resolution screen that can play this video, or the video that needs an ultra-high resolution screen to be appreciated?

Someone has to push the envelope.

Re:4096 x 3072

[moderatorrater]

nobody likes CRTs because you can't place several monitors one behind the other without taking a huge amount of space

The rise of LCD monitors in a nutshell right there.

Re:4096 x 3072

[Anonymous Coward]

They have iMax in Alabama?!

Re:4096 x 3072

[bradgoodman]

If history has taught me anything - the answer is neither. It will be 10 years of wars involving patents and competing standards before either really emerges!

Re:4096 x 3072

[bhtooefr]

The screen.

(Not quite 4096x2304 (the actual resolution), but it gets close.)

Re:4096 x 3072

[toddestan]

Probably the high resolution screen, as there are other uses for high resolution screens right now if they only existed.

Mess

[Wowsers]

Youtube makes a horrible mess of 1080p Hi-Def video and uses far too much CPU to display, on my system much more than the original HD video does, what would it do to video with more detail than Hi-Def?

Re:Mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that the bitrate is so low that the higher resolutions are no more than marketing bullet points.

Re:Mess

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what you are talking about.

I just loaded up one of these videos from the playlist @ their original resolution

It was a compelling film about the life of a spinning series of circles.

You should really check it out.

Re:Mess

[DurendalMac]

And it's compressed to everloving hell, so you can't even tell that it's 4k. It's almost bad enough to just look like poorly upscaled 480p.

Re:Mess

[cgenman]

Youtube might be making a play for something. Maybe they want to be the video source for Anime conventions. Maybe they hope to get projected before movies at low-end theaters who don't have advertising contracts but who do have digital projectors. Maybe they want better-than-1080p resolution for those pesky high resolution PC monitors. Maybe they're just trying to counter the image that Youtube is still all about postage-stamp sized videos of squirrels getting drunk.

Either way, 4K is pretty future proof. If source video started getting uploaded in 4k, they could display across Imax theaters, regular theaters, 1080p HDTV's, CRT's, and cellphones... Sort of the way that sound gets recorded in 24bits or higher, despite being generally played back in 16 bits.

Re:Mess

[cgenman]

Now that I say all of that, YouTube might be making a play for Videos-On-Demand for theaters. Have an independent movie theater and want to show Casablanca on Valentine's Day? Why go to a distributor when you could go through YouTube's new Media On Demand service, pay a flat theater rate, and be ready to go in minutes?

4k is a good way of hedging bets against future functionality.

Re:Mess

[Trufagus]

That doesn't make sense to me.

Google streams the video to you as H264. How much CPU is consumed when you play it doesn't depend on how Google formulates it - it depends on your hardware and software.

It ain't 1080p, but I've tried hi-def movies and hi-def Youtube videos on one of the early models of the Acer Revo's (these are very small and cheap atom CPU + ION computers) with Win7 and Flash 10.1 and the CPU was barely working.

Re:Mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, lots of blocking. I was pretty excited until I actually saw it. Perhaps P2P has an offering with the necessary minimum video bandwidth.

Re:Mess

[bhtooefr]

Nvidia GPU, Flash 10.1. That's why it didn't suck.

ATI GPUs are unsupported right now, Intel GPUs never will be, for Flash 10.1 acceleration.

Re:Mess

[MojoStan]

Nvidia GPU, Flash 10.1. That's why it didn't suck.

ATI GPUs are unsupported right now, Intel GPUs never will be, for Flash 10.1 acceleration.

I think your info might be outdated. In early betas, recent NVIDIA GPUs had the best support, but support for ATI and Intel GPUs were added and improved with every beta and release candidate.

The final version of Flash 10.1 (for Windows) supports hardware acceleration for ATI Radeon HD 3000, 4000, and 5000 series.. It also supports Intel GMA 4000 series (e.g. G45 chipset), HD Graphics, and GMA 500.

Source: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/#video

Re:Mess

[TheRaven64]

More likely, they're demoing this to the content producers, rather than the cinema owners. They already do DRM'd video for consumers in the US, now they want to get into the pro market. Upload your 4K source, and cinemas can pay to show it, and Google will automatically downscale it for streaming to consumers in 1080p, SD, or mobile formats a bit later. No distribution cost for producers, just upload then sit back and collect the money.

More interestingly, this lets independent film producers distribute to cinemas using exactly the same infrastructure, which would make this an interesting disruptive technology. It's now much cheaper to produce a film than it ever was in the past, but it's still expensive to distribute the final result.

What is this for again?

[zogger]

OK, I am downloading one just to try it out, there's no way in heck I can stream it, I can't even stream "normal" you tube vids yet, just can't get a good enough internet connection around here for that. So..what is this ultra high resolution for again? Who has a 25 foot screen at home? Why the bandwith wasteage? Really, just an honest question, if the bulk of humanity can't watch this in the manner it was designed for..why bother? Isn't this like driving around a 3 ton SUV to get to work in? Aren't we supposed to be all doing our part to just stop wasting resources for the hell of it? Just "because you can" is somehow bad when it comes to some forms of energy use, but other forms get a pass because it's connected to a computer? Google is supposedly "green", I am not seeing pushing this as being all that "green". How about "good enough" video quality with less megs being needed to be transferred instead, as a focus?

Re:What is this for again?

[jvillain]

I would take flashless WebM support over 4K all day long. I can only view less than 0.01% of the youtube content currently because of flash so I am not really that excited about 4K just yet.

Re:What is this for again?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Simple marketing stunt, I expect. For the cost of hosting a couple of stupidly large videos, and the bandwidth of a lot of people downloading the first 10 seconds and then giving up, and a couple of fiber-to-home users downloading the whole thing and then realizing that no x86 ever made can allow flash to decode video at that resolution in real time, Google gets a little more buzz about youtube.

Re:What is this for again?

[Anonymous Coward]

The examples on youtube downloaded and decoded at full frame rate for me. I'm using 3mhz AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 940 Processor black, 8 gigs ram at 800mhz and an HD4870 radeon card using the mesa drivers.

Re:What is this for again?

[afidel]

You do know that you can view ~80% of youtube content in H.264 without flash by using a different URL, right?

Re:What is this for again?

[afidel]

Flash 10.1 with GPU offload can probably decode 4k video just fine on any modern gaming card.

Re:What is this for again?

[ChienAndalu]

Got a 30mbit line here (south germany) and it streamed just fine - even buffered 30% faster than playback

Re:What is this for again?

[kramulous]

Not sure about about homes, but there are starting to be plenty of these.

Will have a crack at streaming the 4K vids tomorrow morning.

Re:What is this for again?

[TheRaven64]

Really? I use ClickToFlash on Safari, which fetches the H.264 version if it's available. I don't think I've encountered a video that didn't work without Flash since I started using it.

Re:What is this for again?

[Jedi Alec]

Ehmm, I get 50/5 over cable(soon to be upgraded to the point where I need a new router if i want to actually use it all), and I'm getting less than 20% cpu usage on those video's...

Re:What is this for again?

[MonChrMe]

Here's an interesting idea : Maybe they're bothering *because* you can't stream it yet? It's a neat way of showing that broadband in the US (and here in the UK too, for that matter) simply isn't fast enough for developing new services - in most areas it can barely handle the existing ones. The public reacts badly when they realise that their connections aren't fast enough, but the connections people abroad are using *are* - and we all know how much Joe Public loves to complain.

If the telecoms companies are fast enough, they might be able to spin this to make it look like it's youtube that's broken - most people don't know enough to question that. But, if it makes the media - or enough people who *do* know - complain about it loudly enough, then it puts some real pressure on the ISPs, and if were lucky we might see some real investment in the infrastructure.

It's easier to show it this way than to try and push the bitrate up on the videos - if they try to jump the rates, people will assume Youtube's broken and use competitors that are running lower rates. Not because they're any better mind, but because they don't stutter every ten seconds.

How about less compression?

[Beardydog]

I just tried a couple seconds at 1080p, and a couple of seconds at 4k on a 1080p screen, and found the difference to be quite noticeable in the details. The downside was that my 8800GT can't actually play 4k video faster than 4fps. How about instead of a 4k option almost no one will use, we try a 1080p option that doesn't have massive blocks, fringes, and blurring.

Re:How about less compression?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's rather irksome how effectively marketers have pushed "resolution" rather than bitrate as a metric of video quality, despite the fact that, with digital video, the latter is generally far more important than the former(except, of course, for output devices like monitors and projectors, where the number of physical pixels really does matter, and input devices like cameras, where the number of pixels matters, along with the quality of the glass, degree of compression, and a bunch of other fiddly stuff).

As 20 seconds in the image manipulation program of your choice will easily demonstrate, you can resize an image(and, by extension, a series of images) from any resolution you have to any resolution you want, subject only to the limits of your RAM and your patience.

If all video were lossless, or there were some iron law stating "though shalt allocate no less than X bits per Y pixels", comparing videos by resolution might actually matter. As it is, though, in most real world situations, the limitation is in the bitrate(unless you have a really crap monitor), and, while you can smear your too-few-Mb/s mpeg4 over as "high resolution" an output as you like, it isn't going to look any better.

Re:How about less compression?

[Jerf]

What that basically means is that your 1080P video was overcompressed and did not actually contain "1080P"-worth of information. The 4K video is probably overcompressed and doesn't contain "4K" worth of information either, but it had more than the 1080P video. (In fact there's a decent chance the 4K video is simply about 1080P's worth done right.) You shouldn't be able to tell.

Variable bit rate encodings means that resolution is pretty much a fiction, as others have pointed out in this discussion.

This is one of the reasons that BluRay won't quite die as fast as some people say. While it is technically possible to stream a BluRay-quality video, we're a ways away from it being practical on the large scale yet, and we're even further away from it being so dirt cheap that big corporations finally decide that they might as well not compress the video to death. (I've certainly streamed some video from Netflix I'd call "better than SD", but definitely not "BluRay quality".) Until then, streams can label themselves as "1080P" all they like, but without the bits it's just equivalent to a lower resolution video upsampled. There's different levels of "pixel quality".

In other news, a DVD can have a better quality than a streamed putatively-HD video, because the DVD may have less resoultion, but (like BluRay) it's full of high-quality pixels where the HD-stream may just consist of impressionistic blobs when you really look at it. Bits matter.

Re:How about less compression?

[cgenman]

The Xbox 360 used to be a perfect example of this.

Buy a video of something in SD. Then buy it again in HD. Watch them both on an SD screen. Theoretically, they should be basically exactly the same. But as it stood, the HD version displayed on an SD screen had far less artifacting, smoother black gradients, and a more solid apparent framerate. Therefore, the "HD" rate was actually about adequate for SD video. Sadly, at least at first it wasn't up to the task of HD video.

The same can be said of cameras. You can have a 15 Megapixel CCD that has poor light absorption and comes up with terrible images. Some of the best images have come from 1 MP cameras with giant CCD's and huge lenses (like the ones NASA uses).

Re:How about less compression?

[pushing-robot]

except, of course, for output devices like monitors and projectors, where the number of physical pixels really does matter.

Your monitor isn't an exception, it just has sufficient bandwidth to display uncompressed video. It other words, "perfect" bit rate.

And bit rate isn't the whole story; the method of compression has a tremendous effect on video quality. 1920x1080 30p ATSC takes the same amount of bandwidth as 480i NTSC. 320x240 24p uncompressed RGB video is about the same bit rate as Blu-Ray. If marketers pushed bit rate instead of resolution, we'd just have huge files with lousy compression.

There are just too many variables to say that video quality comes down to one specific dimension. Resolution, bit rate, and compression algorithm are all important, and picking the right combination for your specific content is even more so.

Re:How about less compression?

[Deorus]

Was coming to report the same. How sad... My 100mbps Internet connection streams the whole thing just fine, but my 8800GTS grinds to a halt attempting to play it... Never thought I'd see the day when the bottleneck would be on my computer rather than on my Internet connection...

Re:How about less compression?

[Kohlrabi82]

If you compare the actual frames, you'd see that the 4k variant has insane blocking, which destroys all the information. 1080p just blurs these sections, but still looks way better because it doesn't create 8x8 blocks. Youtube can only encode to 4k because they use an inferior entropy coding and no proper deblocking. Otherwise 4k wouldn't run on any but the fastest CPUs, even without the flash overhead. As it is, the 4k variant is inferior to 1080p and 720p because of the massive blocking, I don't see why Youtube wastes space and bandwidth on this unless they are just experimenting.

Re:How about less compression?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your video card has almost absolutely nothing to do with playing video, unless you're using Splash Media Player or the brand new VLC with GPU hardware acceleration (which you're not, since it's YouTube).

Otherwise, it is practically solely decoded by your CPU.

Re:How about less compression?

[djdanlib]

It was only a matter of time before the problem plaguing digital photography marketing came to digital videography.

Spatial resolution only matters so much, especially when overcompression starts to destroy it, and the glass and sensors aren't very good. Color resolution is the real loser when compression kicks in - it's quite enlightening to see what happens to the UV in YUV when the typical compression algorithms are employed.

I'd like to see some better color reproduction - how about xv.Color or Deep Color or the same product by any other name, that all these systems claim to support... What's the point if nothing produces that material?

4K?? They can't even do 1080p yet

[JavaBear]

I'd be far more impressed by this news, had it not been for YouTube's dismal implementation of 1080p, which in reality is only 1920x540. Yes, they effectively do 1080i, but remove one of the frames entirely.

This should prove the point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyFGDHPm-tc

Re:4K?? They can't even do 1080p yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be far more impressed by this news, had it not been for YouTube's dismal implementation of 1080p, which in reality is only 1920x540. Yes, they effectively do 1080i, but remove one of the frames entirely.

This should prove the point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyFGDHPm-tc

It's called Blu-Ray. Expecting to see true 2K on a free streaming site is asking a lot. I just watched a 1080 video on Youtube that looked nice for streaming. Was it true 1080P, no, deal with it. It wasn't that long ago that live streaming video was a frame every 5 minutes. It was a big deal when people started streaming multiple frames a second at extreme low res. The rate of advancement is breathtaking.

Re:4K?? They can't even do 1080p yet

[Anonymous Coward]

They should call it 1920Hp. It sounds bigger, and doesn't explicitly present the user with the one aspect of the video it's failing to live up to.

Re:4K?? They can't even do 1080p yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I really dont understand what everyone complains about. I watch 1080p youtube on my tv all the time (through a htpc running XBMC). It might not be blurray, but its crisp and clear. Heres a good example of a 1080p starcraft2 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvDBBXqthrY

All the text looks just as clear as it does when playing the game.

Re:4K?? They can't even do 1080p yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the streaming quality on YouTube is fine, but you may be missing this AC's point... If YouTube isn't delivering 1080p (as the AC claims) then they shouldn't label the stream 1080p. YouTube could easily use their own made-up names for their video standards to avoid this issue.

Re:4K?? They can't even do 1080p yet

[JavaBear]

Vimeo does true 1080p

Re:4K?? They can't even do 1080p yet

[Anonymous Coward]

The rate of advancement is abysmal. We could have had all this 5 years ago if broadband roll out in the US was sucktastic.

Pathetic bitrate

[McTickles]

Seriously at the resolution if you want to take advantage of it you have to use a higher bitrate... In the state it is in currently, all this gets you is more macroblocks and a boiling CPU. I'll pass thank you...

Re:Pathetic bitrate

[JavaBear]

That is what I observed as well. Though the 4k recordings looks pretty good in "YT1080" mode (I refuse to call it 1080p as it is not)

Stop the hatin'

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I see it already, the army of Slashdotters saying "no one has the bandwidth for this" and "no one has the video hardware for this" and "YouTube's implementation of this sucks." Well, that's ok. The point is that they're pushing the limits. Remember the first time you saw any video at all on a computer? Chunky, blocky, slow, tiny video coming off a CD-ROM in the early 1990's, perhaps? Yeah, it sucked, but the point was that they were showing something that would, eventually, evolve into something useful. Without the crappy CD-ROM graphics of the early 1990's, there would be no YouTube today. Someone's got to be the first to try it, someone's got to get the technology out there so it can be improved. Wouldn't you like to eventually watch YouTube in HD directly on your television? Today you've got to jump through hoops to do that. Tomorrow it might be as effortless as watching YouTube on your desktop computer.

Re:Stop the hatin'

[Entropius]

And in a sense we're already there on the capture end -- you can plunk down $300-$400 and get a digital SLR (or Micro Four Thirds "thing that is like a SLR but with no reflex mirror") that shoots at precisely this resolution. The only thing stopping them from storing video at these framerates is the ability to get all the data off of the CMOS sensor and onto the memory card fast enough. 4000 x 3000 x 30 fps x 12 bits per pixel is 4.3Gbps, which is hard. But Olympus already makes a cheap digital SLR that will do this resolution at 5fps, and that limit is caused by the mechanical motion of the shutter and mirror. Nikon will give it to you at 12fps or something if you're willing to plunk down the $$$, and again -- that limit is for the mechanical elements.

Re:Stop the hatin'

[Kev Vance]

Thank you! Reading page after page of complaints about this was disheartening. Not everyone has lost their sense of imagination.

Re:Stop the hatin'

[supertrinko]

It seems to have become common practise to suggest that the quality of music or movies are low, many simply say this to show people that they are capable of telling the difference. Almost a rite of passage into 1337hood.

Re:Stop the hatin'

[Fumus]

Thank you! Reading page after page of complaints about this was disheartening. Not everyone has lost their sense of imagination.

There is one person roughly half-way though that seemed to be quite excited about the prospect of more detailed animal por^H^H^Hvideos.

Re:Stop the hatin'

[thegarbz]

When colour television came out is was revolutionary.
When VCRs allowed you to record your show it was revolutionary.
When DVD came out and allowed you perfect images, additional content, and a quality increase everyone could see even with an old CRT it was revolutionary.

Now Blu-ray is out and has a slightly higher resolution and the headscratching idea that a TV must be connected to the internet. Many people don't have a TV with which they can tell the difference in quality. This is evolutionary.
With Blu-ray not even firmly entrenched in people's homes, people's living rooms simply not setup for ultra high resolutions (distance from screen too great to notice, or size of screen doesn't fit), the next step up in resolution is already being discussed. This isn't evolutionary anymore this is stupid.
I'm all for watching youtube in HD on my TV, however we have yet to get the tech companies together to sort out their crap, we have ISPs imposing stupid download limits with an ever increasing bandwidth requirement on content, and here we have an application that will again require more bandwidth.

This isn't a case of "No one has the [important requirement for technology] for this". It's a case of "No one will be arsed investing in the [important requirement for technology] for this."

screen and c/gpu

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't have a big screen and even if I did, my computer can't cope with the 4K...

I think this may kill the horse porn industry

[Anonymous Coward]

At those resolutions the horses can never shave close enough.

Re:I think this may kill the horse porn industry

[Anonymous Coward]

At those resolutions the horses can never shave close enough.

It makes no difference for sick bastards like the OP, who are clearly into ponies.

Re:I think this may kill the horse porn industry

[FlyMysticalDJ]

At those resolutions the horses can never shave close enough.

It makes no difference for sick bastards like the OP, who are clearly into ponies.

This sounds like a matter of projection to me...

Re:I think this may kill the horse porn industry

[Anonymous Coward]

At those resolutions the horses can never shave close enough.

It makes no difference for sick bastards like the OP, who are clearly into ponies.

I prefer my horses in all their furry glory, thank you very much.

Re:I think this may kill the horse porn industry

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a matter of projection to me...

So? When watching horse porn with a group of friends, a projector lets them all see the screen more clearly.

Er, framerate, or video length anyone?

[Twinbee]

A hundred times more useful than a 4k resolution would be to allow videos more than 10 minutes long. Or better quality for 1080p. Or, my pet favourite, frame rates at around 60fps (and yes, obviously 60fps apx video does appear much smoother than half that frame rate as has been discussed countless times on /. ).

Re:Er, framerate, or video length anyone?

[sznupi]

They would have to pay MPEG-LA for each streaming of H.264 if the video is more than 12 minutes in length.

Re:Er, framerate, or video length anyone?

[Entropius]

This could enable longer videos, sure.

Make a 4000x3000 video where each frame consists of a mosaic of 16 successive frames of a 1000x750 video, and then release a third-party plugin that will pull out the frames and play the original video.

Re:Er, framerate, or video length anyone?

[tao]

Encoding the video in WebM would neatly sidestep this issue though.

Re:Er, framerate, or video length anyone?

[sznupi]

Don't count on it too much. Don't be surprised if WebM will be, in some time, where VC-1 is - forced into submission.

Framerate, not resolution

[Animats]

James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) says that higher frame rates are more valuable than higher resolution. He wanted to do Avatar at 48FPS, but the technology wasn't there yet. The sequel probably will be at a higher frame rate. Cameron points out that 4K resolution is worthless beyond the first few rows of the theater, but frame rate benefits all viewers.

It's a real issue for Cameron, who, as a director, likes sweeping panoramas with high detail. If you pan slowly over a high-resolution scene at 24FPS, there are visible artifacts. This precludes certain shots which look great and ought to be in the movie. It's necessary to defocus slightly or add motion blur for certain shots.

So YouTube should work on getting their frame rates up, not their resolutions. Let's see some IMAX movies at 48FPS on YouTube.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[the eric conspiracy]

Yes, and after frame rate higher dynamic range. Screen resolution is a distant third.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[karnal]

So, once James Cameron does this, he can release a press statement:

"I've upped my frame rates. Up yours!"

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Mystiq]

It seems like the biggest problem for the 4k videos is not the frame rate but the bit rate. There's a ton of compression artifacts in all those 4k videos that I'm not convinced are going to look any better on a 4k-capable monitor.

Also, I thought he wanted to shoot it at a higher frame rate because it would make the 3D less eye-straining?

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Entropius]

Yes, essentially, because of the way the 3D works -- you're using alternating frames for left, right, left, etc. This means that stuff close to the "viewpoint", where there's a significant difference between the left and right images, winds up only at 12fps.

I know a few people who got severe headaches from watching Avatar because of the 3d; I imagine that improving the framerate will go a long way toward fixing this.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, essentially, because of the way the 3D works -- you're using alternating frames for left, right, left, etc. This means that stuff close to the "viewpoint", where there's a significant difference between the left and right images, winds up only at 12fps.

I know a few people who got severe headaches from watching Avatar because of the 3d; I imagine that improving the framerate will go a long way toward fixing this.

RealD, the leading 3D projection system, projects alternating views at 144 fps, not 24 fps. Each eye's view of each frame is projected 3 times.

Most film projectors have 3-bladed shutters, so running at 24 fps, they will also display each frame 3 times.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[mrpiddly]

Sadly all the technology in the world did not stop James from making one of the worst movies ever. Film is not about the medium. Upload 99.99% of youtube videos in 4k, and you still have crap.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Sadly all the technology in the world did not stop James from making one of the worst movies ever.

Yeah, yeah, sanctimonious hyperbole. If you think Avatar is literally one of the worst movies ever you've never seen an Uwe Bolle film - he's got a couple of dozen big-budget crapfests. Then there are all the evangelical-produced end-days/rapture movies which as a genre are uniformly terrible. After those easy categories there are still thousands of really poor films out there in all genres. Avatar may have had pedestrian story-telling but only a reverse-fan-boi is going to claim that it is close to the bottom of the barrel.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it was better then Twilight.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

The Epic camera, http://epic.red.com/, shoot at 5k at over 100 fps, at 2k it shoots at 225fps; I think there are plans on upping the resolution to 15 or 20k -- I can't find the details anymore, but i remember seeing them on that site.

They also have another camera, called "the red" that shoots 4K at 30fps (higher frame rates for lower resolution), and the body only runs around $25k, which is insanely cheap -- for that quality of camera.

Also the Scarlet, is there consumer line of cameras; I think it is about 2-3k.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Paxinum]

Well, the plot is obvious: Neytiri will be visiting earth, and start dating a young diplomat instead, whom she falls in love with and takes back to pandora. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas_II:_Journey_to_a_New_World

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) says that higher frame rates are more valuable than higher resolution.

If I ever want to spend half a decade making an insanely expensive, painfully boring container for special effects and terrible dialogue with exactly two semi-original elements, I'll be sure to ask James Cameron what's important.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[gmueckl]

Score one for the marketing department ;-)

For moving images it doesn't matter how many times the same frame is projected onto the screen. What matters is the number of *different* frames per second per eye. If that gets to low, you get stuttering and have to compensate by artificially blurring the image. I am not sure how the 3D projection works on a frame-by-frame level, but I'd like to get some pointers to information on that.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes sense to me. Try watching a low frame rate animation on a 40+ inch screen with a 240 hz+ refresh rate and you can totally see the jitter between frames. I'm just your average Joe when it comes to TVs but it seems that as refresh rate goes up, frame rate would also have to increase to eliminate the jitter between frames.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[ChienAndalu]

I have read somewhere that people associate higher framerate with cheap home videos.

Reminds me of how some people like mp3 artifacts now...

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

If I ever want to spend half a decade making an insanely expensive, painfully boring container for special effects and terrible dialogue with exactly two semi-original elements, I'll be sure to ask James Cameron what's important.

Yah, you do that, and I'm sure your movie career will continue to be as successful as it is right now.

Others might recognize the technical prowess of Cameron's movies despite what they might think of the stories themselves and understand that this particular issue is about the technology.

You are obviously not capable of such recognition. Sucks to be you.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[TheRaven64]

I know a few people who got severe headaches from watching Avatar because of the 3d

I watched Avatar on DVD and in quite a few scenes it was obvious that the depth cueing was wrong in the CGI. Presumably they cut corners because they knew that the people doing the reviews would be watching in stereo, but in my experience with stereoscopic displays you are most likely to get a headache as a result of conflicting depth cues, and Avatar in 3D would have been full of these.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[TheRaven64]

Avatar, in spite of not being a great film, did have a message and made the point well:

Blue people make good soldiers... when led by white officers.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[kuzb]

It's too bad he isn't getting back to doing actual storytelling instead of letting visuals do all the work.

Re:Framerate, not resolution

[Archibald Buttle]

One of the great things about higher frame rates is that when compressed you don't actually need to use any more bandwidth than lower frame rate equivalents. As an added benefit you also get higher quality images with less compression artefacts.

Why's that?

Video compression is mostly all about finding differences between frames. The more frames you have per second, the less the differences between those frames will be. The higher the frame rate the better, since the faster you go the smaller and less complex the deltas become. You can compress those deltas more than you would for a lower frame rate too, since whatever artefacts may result will get smoothed out much faster with subsequent deltas.

(OK, it's not quite that simple - you need minor changes in codec specs to allow for less frequent keyframes in your bitstream to ensure their overhead doesn't become too onerous.)

The sweet spot turns out to be at 600fps. Why? Because at that frame rate you can trivially pull-down the standard frame rates of 24fps, 25fps, 50fps and 60fps by just taking every 25th, 24th, 12th and 10th frames. 300fps obviously also works fine if you're only worried about broadcast TV, and this tech exists now and is in use (although it is expensive and rare). Some TV cameras at the recent winter olympics were 300fps devices which they used for slow motion replays.

For similar reasons, 1080i tends to deliver worse results than 1080p at the same bitrate, since interlacing makes the frame deltas more complex. This is part of the reason why sports broadcasters tend to favour 720p over 1080i - the video compresses better, and looks much better as a result.

Oh dear

[Quiet_Desperation]

And a million internet tubes cried out in pain.

"Holy fuck! How many pixels by how many! What? HOW MANY? WTF? o_O We're gonna need a bigger pipe!"

Re:Oh dear

[Hurricane78]

They transport penis enlargement spam all day long. They should be able to do that by now. ;)

Re:Oh dear

[ModernGeek]

a bigger tube

"Leanback"...

[John Hasler]

...sounds a lot like this thing called "television" that we used to have back in the last century.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page could watch this

[ShooterNeo]

All it takes to view these videos in their native resolution is a $60,000 4k monitor like the one available here : http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/676516-REG/Astro_Design_Inc_DM_3410_4K_x_2K_10.html

For a billionaire, 60 grand is not even 1/100 of a percent of their total fortune. Not to mention that they could have google pay for the screen because technically messing around with 4k resolution is a business expense....(even if Larry or Sergey were using it to view equine pornography)

Re:Sergey Brin and Larry Page could watch this

[WillDraven]

Ok, this is like the third or fourth post I've seen in this discussion mentioning horse porn. Did I fucking miss something?

ugh. horrible compreseion...

[alexander m]

as one of the lucky ones with ultra-highspeed bandwidth (160Mbps -- thank you Tokyo) and a monster PC (and 2560x1600, so not quite there, but on the way), i was able to fire this up and stream it immediately with no frame loss -- and it STILL looks like complete and utter trash (except the violin one, which looked ok), since they compressed the sh*t out of it with a codec that was clearly not up to the job. looks like someone either upscaled a piss-poor original, or was trying to make a movie by stringing together low quality jpgs. not how i would have advertised this capability...

Re:ugh. horrible compreseion...

[_Shad0w_]

The codec will be H.264 using the HiP profile, the same as their normal content.

No way this should be called "4096P"

[George_Ou]

http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/07/youtube-adds-4k-video-capability-but-how-improving-1080p-first/
Google just announced that YouTube will now support “original” resolutions of up to “4096P”, but it’s actually a maximum of 3072P narrowscreen or 2304P widescreen. This announcement makes it sound as if our computers and broadband connection lags Google YouTube when YouTube is actually the weakest link. YouTube’s biggest problem is their over compressed “HD” video that looks nothing like HD video.

Re:No way this should be called "4096P"

[gmueckl]

The term "4096p" is a term that the journalist copying from the original blog post came up with. It's clearly wrong: the video does not have 4k rows of pixels. The the term "4k" for the resolution comes from the 4k pixels horizontally. The digital big screen film formats have been classified into "2k" and "4k" categories because of their horizontal numbers of pixels for some 10 years or so now. The 1080p HDTV format is slightly below the 2k big screen resolutions. But in television, the people are counting lines, not columns, probably because it was hard to get additional scanlines back when the analogue TV standards were developed. Thus the confusion.

Don't be alarmed if your computer whines

[hdon]

My computer's GPU fan just kicked on for the very first time since I bought this machine about 6 months ago.

At first I thought there was something wrong.

And then I realized that, for the first time... there was something right.

Re:Who cares.

[hdon]

Youtube is pretty much unwatchable now, between the annoying boxes people put on videos to the annoying ads. I may never find out about their new features, because I don't go there anymore.

When YouTube ditches Flash for Javascript and HTML5 video, we'll all be able to hack YouTube with browser add-ons like Greasemonkey to disable the annoying boxes people add to videos when/if we want, or move them so they don't obscure the video.

Ya 4k is stupid

[Sycraft-fu]

There are no consumer 4k monitors out there, none. You CAN find 4k large displays if you try. Barco makes some that are close (3840x2160) like their LC-5621 but that costs nearly $40,000. 4k is just not the sort of thing you find on a desktop PC or in a consumer's home.

As such doing video on a site like Youtube in it is worthless. Actually it is worse than worthless since, as you noted, it overloads the decoding ability of current hardware and causes slowdown. There is just no point, at all, on current desktop systems. Until they have displays that can handle the image and graphics hardware that can handle the decoding it doesn't do shit.

As you said, they need to improve their 1080p stuff. Reason is that their 1080 stuff... well... isn't. I mean yes, it is encoded at 1920x1080, but the compression is so heavy that you do not really get that level of detail. I mean consider that Blu-ray usually runs in the realm of 25mbps H.264 for 1080p. Youtube's problem with regards to visuals isn't resolution, they can already handle the resolution of all but the biggest computer displays (27" and 30" LCDs are slightly past 2k, but that's as high as it goes). Their problem is that they compress things to a very low bitrate to aid in streaming.

So fix that first. Don't add a 4k option, add a 1080p HBR (high bit rate) option. Until you are streaming high enough bitrate to make 1080p look real good, there's no point in going any higher. Once you've got that, then maybe add 2k for the really big monitors (not that a 2k source is easy to get). Don't add 4k until there is actual 4k hardware in homes. That day will come I'm sure, but probalby not for another 5-10 years.

Re:Ya 4k is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I think 7 mbps (what they're giving 4k) with really good encoding settings would be just fine for most 1080 content. Just bumping up the settings would probably help quite a bit.

Metricate your shit already, America!

[Stormwatch]

To give some perspective on the size of 4K, the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet

Feet? Come on, grandpa Simpson! Why the hell do you people insist in using that primitive measurement system?

Re:Metricate your shit already, America!

[John Hasler]

> Feet? Come on, grandpa Simpson! Why the hell do you people insist in using
> that primitive measurement system?

Ok, ok. 1.5 rods.

Re:Metricate your shit already, America!

[ThoughtMonster]

or approximately 1.524.000.000 beard seconds.

Re:Metricate your shit already, America!

[phantomfive]

It's really fun to watch people like you squirm. In fact we all use a perfectly proportioned system here in America, but we've made a pact that when we get on the internet we will use Standard just to mess with you guys. Then we talk about it at parties.

Re:Metricate your shit already, America!

[Anonymous Coward]

The same reason you primitive apes don't use metric time.

Re:Metricate your shit already, America!

[Artemis3]

I suppose they imagine 25 steps of someone's foot and get an instant idea. My only problem is when they mix it with other legacy measurement like they do with people's height, and come with weird stuff like 5 feet AND 10 inches; instead of saying something like 5.83 feet OR 70 inches, which btw in metric would be 1.77m.

Re:Metricate your shit already, America!

[Hurricane78]

Little known secret: All people who use “feet” as a measuring unit, are foot fetishists. ;)
Even less known secret: All people who don’t, quietly assume it anyway. ^^

Somebody cant count?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you need four 2k projectors to make a 4k image?

IMAX does not use 2 projectors

[vanyel]

Don't know where they get that from, the wikipedia article the article links to doesn't even back that up (with the exception of 3D, but there you have one projector for each eye, which does not increase resolution); all you have to do is look at the projection booth at an IMAX theater; at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (and, apparently, several other Omnimax/IMAX Dome theaters), the projection room is a big glassed in room where you watch the projector in action showing the movie before the one you're about to see while you're waiting.

Re:IMAX does not use 2 projectors

[Bo'Bob'O]

"IMAX Digital" uses two 2k Christie cinema projectors. Real IMAX would of course blow away 2k and frankly probably 4k as well.

Re:Who cares.

[SpeZek]

So disable annotations and blacklist the ad servers.

Youtube needs more bw

[the_one(2)]

Youtube can't even stream 720p in the evenings (at least here in Sweden)... Maybe they should solve that problem first...

It's the highest in actual use

[Sycraft-fu]

SHV is experimental tech. They are playing with it right now, but it isn't in use anywhere, even in the pro world. It is just proof of concept and early testing.

4k is the high end of cinema. 4k is normally what you scan in and process film at (it is considered to be about the same as good 35mm). You can also get monitors that are very nearly 4k, and the high end digital cinema projectors are 4k. It is a currently used and in production format. If you go to a new, spiffy, digital theater and watch a movie like Avatar, it is probably a 4k projector (though some places with smaller screens use 2k instead, which is just a bit higher than 1080p).

There's a difference between "Technology that is being developed," and "Technology that is being used."

Take Ethernet. 100gb is currently under development. There are test units that exist, and the standard was finalized last month. However it is not a deployed technology. Your network does not have 100gb Ethernet backbones. 10gb is currently the fastest Ethernet out there. It is the fastest deployed in actual networks right now (fastest Ethernet, I know there are faster POS lines and so on).

So it is accurate to say 4k video is the highest for now.

Re:It's the highest in actual use

[Surt]

Indeed, and TFS specifically says 'available'. Not 'commercialized' or anything more specific. 8K video is clearly 'available'.

Re:It's the highest in actual use

[jensen404]

If you go to a new, spiffy, digital theater and watch a movie like Avatar, it is probably a 4k projector (though some places with smaller screens use 2k instead, which is just a bit higher than 1080p).

I believe most digital theater screens use 2K projectors... more than 90%, based on how many 4k screens are listed on Sony's 4k page . Even IMAX digital just uses two 2k projectors, each projecting the whole image. I'm not sure why.

I just saw that Sony has a system to project two 2k images simultaneously from a 4k projector for 3D movies. I'd like to see a movie on that. I think non-synchronous frames for the left and right eye is what bothers me most about the 3D movies I've seen.

I'd like a 30 inch 4k monitor please

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean it's only 130 dpi or so, like a desktop version of my laptop screen. The 30 inch dual-DVI monitors from Apple etc. are 2560x1600 which is less dpi than I really like for having a lot of code windows on the screen.

Re:I'd like a 30 inch 4k monitor please

[TheRaven64]

IBM used to make a 225dpi 23" screen, which was really nice to use. Cost about $10K (so I only used it briefly and never owned one) and required two DVI inputs because it predated dual-link DVI (it appeared to your computer as two separate displays). Text looked crisp and readable on it with antialiasing disabled. They cited lack of demand as the reason for discontinuing it. The same panels are found in things like the Nokia 770 (the later ones have transflective versions), but these are much smaller, so get higher yields and can be made more cheaply per pixel.

Red

[Anonymous Coward]

"First off, video cameras that shoot in 4K aren't cheap"

www.red.com

Re:Red

[_Shad0w_]

Cheap here is, of course, relative :) The RED body on its own is $17.5k, iirc. Not cheap by most people's definition, but certainly cheap by industry standards.

I wish I had the skill - and money - to justify buying one.

bw

[scoopr]

Heh, my Macbook Pro couldn't handle the 4k, at least played by flash, 4k (or "original") didn't show up in html5 mode.

But what's more interesting for me is that, it's as if they (or someone else upstream from me, like my isp) upped the bandwidth cap from the painful 100-200KB/sec (which can't keep up with 720p videos) to a more pleasant 1.3MB/sec.

Feels stupid to have 200/10 cable and wait for videos to buffer on youtube (while other sites like vimeo are swift).

No imagination

[westlake]

Who has a 25 foot screen at home?

Well, someone must be buying them, when even Walmart has them for sale:

Draper Cineflex Cineperm Fixed Frame Screen - 25' diagonal NTSC Format

Really, just an honest question, if the bulk of humanity can't watch this in the manner it was designed for..why bother? Isn't this like driving around a 3 ton SUV to get to work in?

No.

It's more like the open air cinema projects that began in the silent era:

Open Air Cinema, Open Air Cinema & Film Aid in Tanzania
  FilmAid International

Aren't we supposed to be all doing our part to just stop wasting resources for the hell of it?

I am tempted to argue that the geek sees bandwidth as waste - any resource as a waste - only when someone else has it - uses it - and is willing to pay the price.

The argument is specious anyway.

The 4Kx2K movie can be stamped onto a cheap plastic disk. Delivered by mail or streamed off a satellite.

Bandwith is a problem only when you want instant gratification.

Does it really matter if the 4Kx2K Monsters vs Aliens takes two or three days to download in the background at very low priority?

Why Can't YouTube just fix Search?

[CohibaVancouver]

You'd figure with YT being owned by Google and all that their search would be great, but it's still largely rubbish. When're they going to fix that?

The flash player can't even handle this resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Started the first video in the playlist and the flash player in my browser crashed instantly.
Looks like this uncovers some more (probably exploitable) bugs.

Ah crap..

[matthiasvegh]

Now I have to render at even higher resolutions.. A 4K video frame won't even fit in VRAM at 2*2 oversampling....

Leanback, huh?

[Windwraith]

I hope that Leanback thing is better than the current suggestion system.
After seeing 300+ videogame videos, 200+ videos of avian life, and 100 cooking-related shows, all I get is suggestions about videos some random person linked me to via IM, that are extremely offtopic. So much "youtube poop" and crap like that. Also I once watched a SINGLE video about a game someone wanted me to see, I think it was supreme commander or something like that, and I still keep getting 5+ of those in my suggestions every update.

YES! We need 4k - just not predigested by YouTube

[sparkyradar]

Nearly a decade ago, I built a 100" fabric screen, and a home-theater. I've gone through projectors at 1024x768, 1366x768 (ie 720p), and now 1920x1080. I'm one of these guys who kinda likes the IMAX experience, so I sit 6' away from this 100" screen (and love the sense of immersion it brings!!!).

Let me be the first to say that the best BluRay discs (~33Mb/s) look really, really nice. But, they don't knock my socks off, and it's rare that I say "wow". When this is digested down to satellite / cable / over-the-air at the best ~17Mb/s, the image still can look good, but compression is a huge annoyance, and resolution has degraded enough that I cannot imagine "wow".

What does look *stunning* is some of my own content, run straight up the HDMI cable at 6Gb/s, for brief moments. So, I suppose that 1080 *can* look "wow", but it's a very, very uncommon experience.

So we may as well go to 4k, and once the compression/distribution has chewed on the content, it may finally look off-the-shelf "wow" to me :-)

But, I'm with everyone else, as far as YouTube is concerned - utter crap! It's gotta be big, it's gotta be clear, and I'm also on-side with Cameron, when he calls for higher frame-rates. And, the IntarWeb pipes of today certainly won't be a viable delivery-medium for this :-)

25 feet?

[barberousse]

My laptop's resolution is 1280 x 800 on a 13" screen. To have 4K resolution, I would need (roughly) 4 screens wide and 4 screens high. This means a 52" screen with the same DPI as my laptop would do the trick. This is far from the 25' (300") they quote.

Would be great

[Anonymous Coward]

Some 2k (or scaled-down 4k here) video would be great to show off my 2560x1600 display. Unfortunately, YouTube has a habit of 100% pegging one of my four cores, while the rest (and my $300 graphics card) presumably crack a few beers to watch the slideshow.

Re:Would be great

[VinylPusher]

This comes down to your graphics drivers. Modern cards, together with a modern version of Adobe Flash, provide GPU hardware acceleration. Your graphics drivers split video decoding between the GPU and CPU.

If one CPU core is pegged, your graphics driver is not doing a good job.

As long as it's not Bendover

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry just had to say it

UI and delivery mechanism do not scale

[mattr]

It would be more useful if a link is simply provided to download the original resolution file without having to mess around with Javascript. In Safari, when you try to download by opening the Activity window and doubleclicking the streaming file, instead of it showing up in the Downloads window as normally a browser window is opened and the movie plays in a Quicktime movie player embedded in the browser.

As others note, longer submissions and frame rates, and no compression would be more useful than 4K. And if it really is 4K then there is no point streaming it since the file will be so huge, just download it as a file instead and play later.

Perhaps if I had a large display it would be more useful for me. I have a MacBook Pro (1920x1200) I got to show video and film, so I am interested in the higher resolutions, but it really is silly to be stuck in the old browser interface. Even if you have a giant screen the main video frame is tiny.

Meanwhile, if resolutions above 1080p become popular (as could be possible for people who have a large iMac (2560 x 1440) for example could use, YouTube's network will fall over. It only really makes sense to distribute high bitrate film over a torrent style delivery network. As for DRM and charging for it that is a different story but since YouTube is free already it would make sense for them to add a bittorrent tracker and allow people to upload via a free program like Miro (the old democracy player), etc. It would be really great for people to be able to distribute video but my impression is that YouTube cannot afford to allow the really high bitrate, high quality files that would make these displays shine, due to their old-fashioned delivery mechanism. We won't really know until it gets more popular though..

Re:UI and delivery mechanism do not scale

[Thundersnatch]

Meanwhile, if resolutions above 1080p become popular (as could be possible for people who have a large iMac (2560 x 1440) for example could use, YouTube's network will fall over.

No, it won't. Google has kilometers of 10 Gb/s fiber spanning the globe, and far better connectivity inside each of their datacenters. It's your ISP's network (via private peering), or that of any public peering points that will "fall over".

Cameron was probably in high school

[toby]

When Doug Trumbull invented Showscan.

Special Effects == Everything

[TangoMargarine]

This whole HD thing, and how high-res video games are being made these days...uggh. If the thing isn't actually interesting/fun, I don't care *how* much detail and resolution you throw at it.

I don't feel the need to experience an eyegasm every time I look at a monitor. Honestly, we're pampered.

Re:Special Effects == Everything

[_Shad0w_]

Baraka - the BluRay release mastered from the 8K scan of the original Todd-AO film is the most stunning thing I've ever seen.

Exactly

[fyngyrz]

I've got a big screen - 204" diagonal - and watch 1080p on it. 1080p Blueray outperforms anything I can pull through my 10 mb/s pipe in the visual sense, and I'm not talking about anything subtle, either. Crisp edges, snappy transitions even when the whole frame changes at once, and when there is such a transition, the very first frame is fully resolved.

I've often wondered about the apparent difference in the ability of people to perceive the quality of what they're watching; I constantly hear people talking about streaming video as "the future" or "all I ever need", but... it's really pretty bad as compared to a Bluray, and frankly, I'd rather not spend my time watching it if I have a choice. It's like listening to music through a tiny, tinny little speaker. You can, but... if you have a good audio system, why would you?

I am very familiar with the differences between satellite, HD-DVD and Blurray, and Internet streaming (Netflix to youtube) against Bluray (and the obsolete HD-DVD)... there's no contest at all.

There are particular content types that really make this evident. For instance, high density CGI as in Avatar, the more recent Star Trek, and Starship Troopers all look not just a little bit better on Bluray, but oodles and oodles better (highly technical term, you may not be familiar with oodles.) Whereas your average shot-as-usual film uses wide open f-stops, most everything in the frame is blurry anyway, and who could tell if one pixel resolves from another, when they're pretty much the same anyway. Me, I like my films sharp, and maybe that's why I so strongly prefer Bluray. If you *have* sharp content, Bluray can get it to the screen for you. Streaming video... not unless the frame is still and has time to accumulate all its detail over multiple incoming corrections.

Now, with a screen the size of mine, I'd be tempted by 4k x 4k video, however, I surely wouldn't expect to see anything worthwhile from... youtube. Not talking content, just quality. The actual bit rate of [30 fps x 4k x 4k x 24 bit] RGB or YCC is horrific (about 12 gb/s). Never mind that we're already well past 24 bits, and that we like 60 fps. That takes us past 24 gb/s. And compression in this domain is lossy as heck; you do not get back out of the decompression the same content that went into the compressor.

You're not going to get 12 gb/s, or even 6 gb/s, through any pipe I'm likely to have in the next few years. So what happens is it is compressed to a fraction of what it originally was. And you know what? If what I end up with is a chunky, inaccurate mess, then WTF is the point of a 4k projector?

Now, if you're next door to the youtube servers and have a reliable 10- or 20-gb/s connection... well, your mileage will (hopefully) differ. And I envy you. But for me... Internet video is to be avoided if at all possible. 4k Internet video... not even going to try. Maybe if 1080p looks good, someday, 4k might become worth looking into. But as of right now, 1080p over the net looks like pixelated, frame-lagging dog doo... so 4096... no thanks.

Cheapness of 4K Cameras

[mjwalshe]

lol the RED body is under 20k and compared to the cost of other High Def cameras. This is very cheap if your doing pro quality video ie major TV series or films - quite often you cant even buy (at any price) the high def competitors to the Red you rent them at thousands of dollars per day. Also doing real High Def video you have to add the cost of the high end lenses to get the effects you (our your DP) want and dollies and stedicam rigs. You not exactly going to be doing pictures of your cat doing something cute at 4K.

motion blur

[kipsate]

Damn right.

Consider that at 24 fps, the shutter remains open for 1/24 sec. Try taking sharp pictures with a camera having a 1/24 sec shutter time - anything that moves will not be sharp. Now, you might think that decreasing the shutter time to say 1/100 sec or 1/250 sec, and play back at 24 fps solves the issue. It doesn't. Especially in sports, for instance a tennis match, you would see this: o o o o o o. The tennis ball will be sharp, but seems to appear multiple times when moving at high speed. Not acceptable.

Cameron is damn right - only higher frame rates allow for faster shutter speeds and sharper images.

And damn those tv manufacturers with their snake-oil "interpolation frames" that do not help at all to get a sharper picture.

Re:The flash player can't even handle this resolut

[_Shad0w_]

Mine didn't, played several of them fine.

Content delivery?

[the-bobcat]

If Youtube has trouble delivering something so small as 240p when I look up an old movie, how can they roll out 3072p ? I'd like for them to fix their content delivery system first...

no4k with 2x 2k

[Anonymous Coward]

you cannot obtain 4K with 2x 2K projector. the reason IMAX uses two 2K projector is because there is one for each eye, polarized accordingly. The ratio of your 2k projector is 16:9, if you stitch (place side by side) the image you end up with 4k pixel but with a 32:9 or 4:9 ratio, you would need 4x 2K projector to keep the same ratio, and that is if you stitch. If you blend, which is highly probable considering stitch are extremely hard to place and then minor vibrations can move one of the projector enough to make the stitch big enough to see, then you must consider the blend area, which should be at a bare minimum 120pixels, at which point the blend becomes very hard to feather, so you will need to project an image containing fewer pixels than the combined native of your projectors. That is if you don't need to warp (which you should never have to use in a permanent installation but we never know) in which case you will lose even more pixels.

So basically, 4k content if few and far between, 4k projection is almost non-existent and you need some godlike compression to show over 25 feet with no artifact showing, oh yeah and you can't project 4k with 2x 2k.

IMAX is NOT 2K

[hamiltondaniel]

Whoever wrote this does not know anything about IMAX. IMAX is not projected digitally, let alone with a 2K digital projector.

35mm film is about equal, or a little better than, 4K digital in terms of resolution. Most all of the time when you go see a movie these days, it is still being projected on 35mm film. It's cheaper than a digital projector and looks better. When you went and saw Avatar in 3D it was being projected in 2K (for almost everyone) digital and that's why you could see the pixels on the screen. 2K is NOT good enough for anything but very small movie screens. Anyone who says it is is not a cinematographer (I am) and has never used both a 35mm film camera and the best digital cinema cameras (I have), and probably doesn't know what a cinematographer even really is. 99% of all big-budget films are still shot on 35mm film because it is simply the third-best image-capturing method out there, better than ANY digital camera in existence today. It is also much more expensive, but on large films the price of film is a drop in the bucket compared to everything else.

The second best cinema image-capturing method out there is 65/70mm film.

The best is IMAX.

IMAX is 65/70mm film travelling through the camera horizontally; each frame is about 2.75 by 2 inches. That is enormous. It's like a medium-format still camera...except 24 times a second. Here's a comparison of IMAX to regular 35mm film (most digital cinema cameras have sensors, by the way, about exactly the same size as a 35mm film camera): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Imaxcomparison.png

IMAX is NOT projected on 2K. "Digital IMAX" is. Digital IMAX is pretty much useless and is not even as good as standard 35mm film projection; it uses two 2K projectors overlapping each other to give a slightly higher than 2K theoretical resolution to the image; for those of you with still cameras, 2K is about equal in resolution to a 6- or 7-megapixel camera. Congratulations. Your $1000 SLR has way more resolution than a digital cinema projector that costs a half million dollars.

Real IMAX, i.e. horizontal 65/70mm film, has an estimated resolution of about 104 million pixels; you would need a 12K x 9K digital sensor to even come close to the resolution of IMAX. No one makes those and no one will for a long time, if ever. The highest-resolution digital photographic sensors outside of the military are probably Hasselblad digital medium format backs; they are about 60 megapixels, or half the resolution of IMAX film, and they are still cameras capable of only about one frame a second.

IMAX is not 2K. Digital IMAX is not IMAX.

IMAX is film. Film is incredible.

Who is their market with 4k video?

[kuzb]

Who actually needs this? Certainly not the home user who doesn't have hardware even capable of displaying it at full detail. So what is it good for?