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The Trouble With 4K TV
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an article about the difficulties in bringing so-called '4K resolution' video — 3840x2160 — to consumers.
"Though 4K resolutions represent the next step in high-definition video, standards for the format have yet to emerge and no one’s really figured out how to distribute video, with its massive file footprint, efficiently and cost effectively. How exactly does one distribute files that can run to hundreds of gigabytes? ... Given that uncompressed 4K footage has a bit-rate of about 600MB/s, and even the fastest solid-state drives operate at only about 500MB/s, compression isn’t merely likely, it’s necessary. ... Kotsaftis says manufacturers will probably begin shipping and promoting larger TVs. 'In coming years, 50-inch or 55-inch screens will have become the sort of standard that 40-inch TVs are now. To exploit 4K, you need a larger form factor. You’re just not going to notice enough of a difference on smaller screens.' The same quality/convenience argument leads him to believe that physical media for 4K content will struggle to gain traction among consumers. '4K implies going back to physical media. Even over the Internet, it’s going to require massive files and, given the choice, most people would happily settle for a 720p or 1080p file anyway.'"
cable and sat don't have the bandwidth for it and that's on the broadcast side.
Maybe 1-2 channels but most cable systems are loaded with sd channels and old mpeg2 HD boxes.
Sat has moved to all mepg 4 HD but stills has lots of SD boxes out there as well.
.. the cable companies would compress the signal as they presently do with "HDTV" to the point that it looks like crap. They have ruined the HDTV quality with this compression and I can only imagine how much they would ruin 4k TV content. The best HDTV experience I have ever had was pulling HDTV signals from the Over The Air broadcasts. The first time I saw this (after spending so much time watching compressed HDTV on Comcast) I couldn't believe how great it looked. If you don't believe me, give it a try. The OTA HDTV signals blow Comcast's HDTV signals out of the water with crispness and detail.
Hopefully the means of getting this type of signal dramatically improves so that compression is not needed and we can watch 4k the way it was meant to be..
The CD is over 30 years old, you can still buy CD players.
We've still got 636k to go then!
Much of the bandwidth/media etc claims are rubbish. 4k has (approximately) 4 time the pixels of standard full HD, so at most a given
format will increase by 4 times, HOWEVER, most lossy compression methods (for example AVC/MPEG4) on real footage scale better
than linear with pixel count, as detail becomes more repeated at higher resolutions, so a more likely estimate for such formats is
2 times, which is not crazy (blueray for example can already delivery that for many movies if needed). newer compression methods are
coming on line that can deliver close to double the compression for equivalent quality, meaning we end up back to normal HD data sizes.
Is it needed? thats a whole different story, with the size of living rooms/available and comfortable wall space for screen, etc it is pretty
marginal, but trying to use raw uncompressed bitrates as a scare tactic is rubbish.
Their raw figures are of course not even right as they seem to be assuming 444/12bit storage, which would be rather rare in real life, 422 10 bit
would be MUCH more common, and most workflows would actually use comrpessed storage (as they do now for HD.).
“Even over the Internet, it’s going to require massive files” While this is true, the speed of the Internet connection makes a huge difference. Unfortunately for the US population, the market is divided among a couple of companies and the slow speeds are offered at bank-robbery prices (e.g. 25/3Mbps for $50). Many countries in Europe get a faster and cheaper connection (e.g. 75/50Mbps for $10) and that changes how people watch TV. With TVs that can play MPEGs directly off some network connected HDD and a laptop that can download any torrents to that HDD, the experience of watching a show is often:
1. Find a torrent on a laptop and click on it to start downloading.
2. Wait a couple of minutes.
3. Navigate TV to the specific file on HDD and start watching.
It is amazing how much the experience changes for the better with faster connection speeds and more reasonable laws on downloading/uploading the content.
There's no such thing as "illegal download"
the problem is that HD is still more than is needed, and a fair amount of programming is still made for SD (and most still broadcast in SD).
broadcast facilities dragged their feet with HD adoption - the single factor that made all facilities HD capable was the move away from hardware to software and masters-on-HDD.
so no... the market didn't adapt in 2005, it didn't adapt in 2010, it hasn't adapted now and it will be a long time before anything other than big budget movies or events like the olympics will get the 4k treatment.
also consider the optimum viewing distance of 2.5 screen heights. if Jobs were still here, he'd stop at 2k and call it "retina television". unless you're doing it well wrong, you're not going to get much benefit. even the jump from SD to HD was marginal - most of the gains were in compression quality (a macroblock is harder to see when it's 1/4 the size, and in h.264 it's impossible to see as it's filtered out by design).
but i suppose 4k will be interesting for perving on individual audience members at sporting events...
4K is so 2007, I have seen 8K broadcast streets (all equipment needed to acquire, store, transmit, compress, scale, playback and display) for years as shown at the international broadcasting conference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hi-Vision_television
Before anyone comes up with, "but the eyes cannot resolve that kind of details", YOU ARE WRONG!
8K is not even a little comparable to HDTV.
I have also seen 4K being displayed, often scanned from 35mm prints, I doesn't have much impact beyond 2K. But this may be due that this is not captured on a digital camera and the grain (effective resolution) of 35 mm is worse than pixels at 4K. The 8K footage I've seen was captured on a 8K digital camera.
Also 300 fps video is freaking amazing, this was a demo from the BBC, your eyes can track fast moving objects and therefor focus on it razer sharp like when you track a moving object in the real-world. Finally we can actually watch Hollywood action sequences which as 24 fps is just a blurry mess of motion blur, or a vomit inducing slideshow.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of Betamax tapes. Analog of course.
If they do crank these out, 4K computer monitors should come down in price. I don't care what happens to the TV market as long as that happens.
The important point is that at last, there'll be computer screens with non-stupid resolutions again! They took my 1920x1200 away, and though I would prefer 3840x2400, I can live with 3840x2160.
At least resolutions are going up again.
Remember when Blu Ray came out and a number of people were claiming they couldn't see much difference.
Well this time it will actually be true for almost everyone.
Most people don't even have their TV's close enough to visually discern 1080p.
This kind of TV resolution is irrelevant in a normal home setup.
I'm calling bullshit. The summary talks about uncompressed video, glancing over the fact that even 1080p uncompressed requires a bitrate of 190 MBytes/s (at 24FPS) - faster than most HDD's can handle. Storage space required? 667Gb per HOUR, or a solid TB for a 90min film. Do you need a massive SSD to play 1080p files? Do you even need an SSD to edit and encode them? No, you don't.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncompressed_video#1080i_and_1080p_HDTV_RGB_.284:4:4.29_uncompressed
Compression has always been essential, even for DVD. Uncompressed SD videos would still fill a dual-layer blu-ray (50GB) after about 30mins. Yes, we'll need better CODECS to handle 4k and yes a lot of work needs to be done, but the size of uncompressed video isn't and never has been the issue. At worst, it'll take a slightly newer disk format (I don't see why a 4-layer Blu-ray disk - which exists today, couldn't do the job) and better internet connections to stream.
Devices will be released THIS YEAR capable of outputting 4k - just look at Tegra 4, or nVidia's SHIELD, which has been demonstrated live supplying a 4K TV (Admittedly, probably up-scaled content, but obviously the technology is there today).
The real issue is content, in that nothing is really in 4K right now. The transportation and storage method is not.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I'm working the Samsung booth at CES this year and I worked it last year. When I saw the engineers (last year) assembling the 4k demo sets, I asked where the content was coming from. The answer was a half-rack of servers behind the wall filled with powerful machines and lots of disks. Clearly not practical for consumers.
This year, the 4k sets are being driven by slightly smaller computers, presumably with compression. Samsung is demoing their compression technology (HEVC) VS h.264. I'm sure the manufacturers know that with the sorry state of networks, 4K video is not possible without more advanced compression algorithms to reduce data rates.
Exactly, it's just early days and all this doom and gloom about the format is ridiculous. I remember when 1080p video started appearing and I tried playing a sample on my AMD 3400+ processor - of course, it skipped and jumped all over the place. The file was also huge, my paltry 2Mbit internet connection took ages downloading it and my monitor was too small to display it properly. It was excessive, took up a lot of space and required fast, new hardware. How could such a thing ever catch on?!
Oh easy, this is technology and technology constantly moves forward. If you're the kind of person that has ever complained about having a quad-core processor in your phone as "unnecessary", then please hand in your geek card and get off slashdot. Technology always moves forward, things always get better and nothing will stop that. There is never a "Good enough", things can always be done faster or with less power.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
In who's mind is 2K good enough for theatres? Speaking as a former motion picture projectionist who ran 35mm and 70mm film for almost 20 years, I can tell you the "quality" you get in a 2K auditorium is significantly inferior to what was delivered by a 35mm print, albeit with no jitter or weave. 4K cinematic presentations are actually quite good, even on a 40 or 50 foot screen but I steadfastly refuse to see anything in a theatre that's shown in the 2K format. What's worse, most exhibitors run their 2k machines with the 3D lenses in place when they're not showing 3D, cutting the available light in half. So what the vast majority of patrons experience in a movie theatre today is a dark, washed-out image with lower overall quality than they were seeing just 5 years ago. The only winners here are the companies who don't have to ship 12,000 feet of film (for a 2 hour movie), which weighs about 40-50 pounds per print, to 2000 screens -- and pay to ship it back again at the end of the run. The exhibitors also win because they got the 2k machines for free from the companies and they don't have to employ skilled projectionists to run them either.
So yeah, I'll take 4K home presentation once the price comes down to the level that mere mortals can afford. I have a 53" Aquos screen now that's OK at 9' viewing distance but a 65" class screen at 4K and using HFR would rock my world once content becomes available.
My bet is that flat panel manufacturers are quickly realizing that 3D in the home is a dud and they'll concentrate their efforts into amping up 4K in the coming years, even though content will be quite minimal for a very long time. Since you'll never see anything more than 1080i or 720p from OTA broadcast (6 MHz channel size ain't changing any time soon), it'll only be a selling point for movies or DVDs of TV series. I don't know about everyone else, but 95% of what I watch is broadcast TV dramas, comedies and sports. I don't see the studios converting to shoot and edit to 4k in the foreseeable future, either.
Cheers, Peter, W2IRT
also consider the optimum viewing distance of 2.5 screen heights. if Jobs were still here, he'd stop at 2k and call it "retina television". unless you're doing it well wrong, you're not going to get much benefit. even the jump from SD to HD was marginal - most of the gains were in compression quality (a macroblock is harder to see when it's 1/4 the size, and in h.264 it's impossible to see as it's filtered out by design).
I thought the jump from SD to HD was great....for a while. Lately most of the free to air TV channels in Australia have been going terribly downhill with overly compressed or badly up-scaled video sources. It's rare now to get HD content that looks like HD - the best thing I've watched lately was a 3 year old doco I had saved on hard drive.
Which then begs the question, why go to 4K when we cant even get 1080p right consistently?
The basic problem with Ultra-HD is that nobody can see it. You'd have to be sitting so close to the screen to appreciate the difference (from "normal" HD) that your eyes couldn't see the whole screen. Add on to that. that the data stream would be so highly compressed to fit into the available bandwidth that the only difference would be the resolution of the artifacts. What you have is the video equivalent of an audio bandwidth extending into the 100's of kHz. great for any dogs listening, or eagles watching your TV, but utterly pointless for humans, unless their motivation is so immature that they feel the need to have something impractically better than the guy next door's, no matter what the cost - or usefulness.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The more interesting step to me would be 1920x2160 panels for 1080P passive 3D. Right now passive 3D polarizes alternate lines so at 1080P it is more like 1920x540 per eye. Which probably is perceived by the brain like 1920x700 or something like that. If no one makes a 1920x2160 panel I presume it could be done with a 4K panel.
The article proclaims FUD. This is just silliness. The data requirements ARE NOT 600mbps just as 1080p's data requirements are not 150mbps.
Digital television is ALWAYS compressed.
It will require 4 times the data throughput as it is only 4 times as many pixels. Period. There isn't a downside. If it is only getting a 1080p signal then it will be at least that good and you know that they will have a lot of processing to anti alias the upscaled image. It will probably really help on 3D movies where they are cheesing out by cutting the vertical resolution in half.
The only issue will be getting the infrastructure caught up with it. The cable companies may have a problem but if they don't take care of it they will go the way of the buggy whip because the Internet and Netflix will scale to take care of it.
The only real issue that 4K may have is if it makes enough visual difference that anyone will care enough to pay the premium. I really think the only place it will really noticeably shine is 3D. We will just need to see how fast meaningful 3D content becomes available. And with the limitations on how much 3D content you should reasonably watch in a day that will slow the "need" for it.
I think I'd rather see a higher frame rate. When I was watching "The Hobbit" I really enjoyed the HFR but I was thinking to myself that the rate needs to be even higher still. No less than 60, I would say...
Well, I'll just wait for the 640K TV. That should be enough for anybody.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.