YouTube Goes 4K — and VP9 — At CES

sfcrazy writes "YouTube will demonstrate 4K videos at the upcoming CES. That's not the best news, the best part of this story is that Google will do it using it's own open sourced VP9 technology. Google acquired the technology from O2 and open sourced it. Google started offering the codec on royalty free basis to vendors to boost adoption. Google has also learned the hardware partnership game and has already roped in hardware partners to use and showcase VP9 at CES. According to reports LG (the latest Nexus maker), Panasonic and Sony will be demonstrating 4K YouTube using VP9 at the event. Google today announced that all leading hardware vendors will start supporting the royalty-free VP9 codecs. These hardware vendors include major names like ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba."

Comments

Still 3K$ for a monitor

[ackthpt]

I don't quite have to have it, yet.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

4K for $3K, isn't that a great deal!? Less than a dollar per pixel!

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Try 4K for $1K.

http://reviews.cnet.com/flat-panel-tvs/polaroid-50gsr9000/4505-6482_7-35833805.html

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[symbolset]

Supposedly Polaroid is to offer a 4k display under $1000. Still rich for me but for some...

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The Seiki SE50UY04 shows up at less than a thousand pretty frequently.

The one major downside is that the cheapies almost certainly have neither Displayport nor HDMI 2.0 HDMI 1.4 will drive a 4k panel; but maxes out at something like 30Hz. Given that pre-canned 4k video is practically nonexistent (but would be the material that might have been shot at under 30FPS originally, and has plenty of detail in the original film if somebody feels like doing a good transfer), the only real use case is hooking it up to a computer, where the refresh rate will promptly unimpress you.

It won't flicker or anything, this isn't the CRT days; but 30FPS is Not Good.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[ArtForz]

Dell UP2414Q. $1299 for a 24" 3840x2160 60Hz IPS (also 10bpp and wide gamut, but... meh.).
Finally a monitor for us high-DPI weirdos clinging to their preciousss IBM T221.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Areyoukiddingme]

Try $500 plus shipping for a 39". Of course it's only capable of 30 Hz at UltraHD resolution because it only has HDMI, but it's available. I can't imagine why they didn't include a DisplayPort connector, since DisplayPort is royalty-free, but they didn't. I'm hoping they'll release another model this year that includes DisplayPort.

Reviews say Seiki customer service is nothing great, and there are more than their fair share of DOA units, but it's a start.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought my 37 inch 720p TV for $5k when it came out in 2005.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[should_be_linear]

There is SEIKI and other chinese manufacturers with 4K TVs for $500-$1000. Not sure if difference is big to these $3K monitors for programming work, which is what I care.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Bro, you got ripped off! 4K has been around since the early 2000's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[ShanghaiBill]

4K for $3K, isn't that a great deal!? Less than a dollar per pixel!

4K is the horizontal resolution, not the number of pixels. Actually, it is 3840 pixels × 2160 for most "4K" TVs, or about 8.3 MegaPixels. Some models are much less than $3K. Here is one for $500.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Kjella]

Unfortunately the current crop of monitors is aimed mainly at the photography professional, since being able to see 8MP of a still instead of 2MP is immediately useful to anyone with a modern camera. The downside - for us that want affordable monitors at least - is that they then also put great emphasis on color accuracy and coverage, that $3k buys you a Dell UltraSharp 32 with 99% AdobeRGB coverage and factory calibration to a delta-e 2. In short, they promise you plug it in and the colors are pretty much perfect. Early this year should see the first consumerish monitors, Dell has promised a 28" inch 4K monitor for under $1000 early this year.

I expect the same will happen with 4K cameras soon, currently the state of the art is $4-5k professional/hyperentusiast cameras but a $1500-2000 high end consumer camera can't be that far off. If you can get amateur content from YouTube and professional content from Netflix in 4K, the snowball might really start rolling. It of course also wouldn't hurt if Apple offered a Retina iMac, they seem to do a better job with high DPI displays than Windows. In any case, there's really no "anti-4K" resistance like there was against 3D, it's only a matter of being worth the price. And I don't think anyone can dispute that it went way down in 2013 and the trend for 2014 looks to be the same.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Salgat]

That's not a monitor and doesn't even support 60fps at 4K resolutions. Try again.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[aliquis]

Also it's 4K UHD.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[aliquis]

If the film is filmed in 4K film wouldn't one really want to have that rather than 4K UHD?

Seem a little weird to shrink the pictures just a little bit.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[aliquis]

Dell is supposed to release a 34" 21:9 3440 x 1440 screen which of course is lower resolution but possibly a more suitable format for movies (then again UHD is likely to be the standard so maybe not) and very nice for say FPS shooters as long as the aspect ratio is supported.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[ahabswhale]

Probably because DisplayPort isn't suitable for televisions. What it really needs is HDMI 2.0, which can support rates much higher than 30 Hz at 4k.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... "nice". You still need a rather budget-unfriendly GPU to run with decent graphics settings at those resolutions.
http://hardocp.com/article/2013/11/11/geforce_gtx_780_ti_vs_radeon_r9_290x_4k_gaming/

TLDR version: a single 780Ti or 290X *can* produce playable framerates, but in recent games you will have to turn AA and quality settings down quite a few notches to get there.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[iluvcapra]

but would be the material that might have been shot at under 30FPS originally

Recent Peter Jackson films excepted.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[tlhIngan]

4K is the horizontal resolution, not the number of pixels. Actually, it is 3840 pixels Ã-- 2160 for most "4K" TVs, or about 8.3 MegaPixels. Some models are much less than $3K. Here is one for $500.

4K Ultra HD is quad-1080P, i.e., 3840x2160.
"4K" can also refer ot 4K Cinema, which is 4096x2160, where the 4K literally means 4Ki.

Though, sometimes it's also confused with the plain old 4000x2160 format, or 4K.

Of course, home electronics use 3840x2160 because it's just doubling 1080p in each dimension, making it easy to scale.

And until you have HDMI2.0, it's really 3840x2160 @ 30fps (same bandwidth as 1080p 3D @ 60fps) using HDMI 1.4 which doubles bandwidth of HDMI 1.3 which supports 1080p @ 60.

HDMI 2.0 is to support full 4K (Cinema) @ 60fps.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Twit. He said "TV", not "monitor". Sheesh.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

One would, but then the industry would have to switch to slightly wider TV (and computer & laptop) screens--4K digital cinema (4096 x 2160) requires a 1.85:1 aspect ratio panel, not the 1.77:1 ratio of HDTVs (or, 37:20 vs. 16:9 if you want integer ratios).

It's only a 256 pixel difference, out of 4,000-ish; the minute amount of down-scaling and letter boxing needed to find a 1.85:1 D-Cinema image onto an HDTV is easy enough to ignore (and I say that as a film geek who is very obsessive about correct aspect ratios; people with their TVs set wrong (e.g. the common practice of stretching SD images to fill an HD screen) drive me absolutely bananas).

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unless the DCI changes course, fast, the point will be largely moot. DCI 4K is higher resolution than 4k UHD; but 4k UHD hardware is available right now (with the cheap seats down to under $1000, and the 'walk into a Sony store and look rich and clueless' option still likely to set you back only ~$5k). DCI 4K gear is... niche. Not only is it almost entirely high end projectors designed for commercial movie theaters (and priced accordingly), the DCI writes their specs with all the paranoia, loathing, and pathological aversion to user friendliness that you'd expect from an organization composed of the big seven film studios writing a standard to 'protect' their precious content from being obtained in very, very, high quality digitized form once distributed to theaters. (If you thought that HDCP was a nuisance, check out Section 9. Who wouldn't want a projector where support for FIPS 140-2 level 3 is mandatory, and you can blank the embedded keys just by opening the case incorrectly? The spec also covers actual video-related stuff; but the section on DRM, logging, phoning home, and per-showing authorization was not written with customers in mind.)

It's a pity, because I'd like to see the format with more pixels win; but it would be quite a shock if DCI remains anything other than a morass of acronyms designed to keep movie theaters on a very, very, tight lease until their eventual bankruptcy. "This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen." will live on for another generation...

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

A tv is a monitor with a tuner. It may be terrible, but it displays 4k. You didn't ask for a good one.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[dbraden]

It appears that DisplayPort 1.2 supports 4K at 60Hz, the new Mac Pro supports it (source).

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[DarwinSurvivor]

Too bad the monitor doesn't use DisplayPort, then it could be running at 4K with 60Hz with no problem for over half a decade.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[DarwinSurvivor]

I'm actually genuinely curious what type of card you need to run non-gaming (maybe some blender) at 4K. I don't have much interest in high-quality gaming, but would LOVE to put websites, code, monitoring software, feeds, etc on a single display. I haven't bought a video card in years and really don't know what it would take.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[evilviper]

4K for $3K, isn't that a great deal!? Less than a dollar per pixel!

I suppose you think an HDTV has just 1080 pixels as well?

3840x2160 = 8294400 pixels

8294400 / 3000 = 2,764.8 pixels per dollar

I just wonder if they have the same dead-pixels policy as my first 800x600 LCD monitor way back when. Three out of 8 million isn't a bad ratio.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[aliquis]

Wider is ok for me. I've thought a little about a 21:9 monitor. Among other things simply because movies are often very wide.

Doesn't have to match or care about old HDTV because .. why would it? :), for old content? Now when I mention it I will follow up on that point real soon now.

I wasn't thinking about either of the aspect ratios or letter boxing, I was thinking about the actual down-scaling.

4K ultra wide television: 5136 x 2160 (2.37:1)
DCI 4K: 4096 x 2160 (1.9:1)
4K UHD: 3840 x 2160 (1.78:1)

(DCI 4K also had cinemascope and flat cropped at 2.39:1 and 1.85:1, just because? =P)

So I guess one is just fine if one cut off the extra width from the 1.9 content for the 1.78 screen, but if one is really shrinking the picture to keep the aspect ratio and introduce black borders top and bottom then you'll cut of some resolution along each edge.

I don't know how much it matters that one go away from the native resolution with this kind of encoded data though, maybe someone can tell? Do it decode to pixel perfect or to any resolution?

Obvious reason I saw was that with a little rescaling stuff will be wrong (at least if you have a perfect image at first), then again one reason to stick with UHD after HD would of course be that you can easily put a HD image on a UHD-screen since the aspect ratio is the same and it's 4 times as many pixels. That is one thing I didn't thought about before. I think it make more sense to adjust to the content you will be viewing rather than something old though, then again I suppose content will be made in and for UHD too and not necessarily DCI and then UHD is just fine too.

So maybe UHD is the best after all :).

As for the number of pixels I don't care much since they are so close anyway. I wouldn't mind a wider aspect format though since so much movie content is wider than 16:9.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Kjella]

The DCI spec won't change because it's a cinema standard to protect cinema content, but there's no reason for consumer level gear to follow it. Whether you have a 16:9 (HDTV), 17:9 (DCI) or 21:9 (ultra wide) ratio screen it should play consumer movies just fine. The only question is if the delivery system will have a 17:9 version of the movie, it depends on how they've reframed the movie. If you could take the 3840x2160 stream and add a 256x2160 slice left/right you could have "dual format" discs that'd give you the full 4K DCI picture, assuming you have a 17:9 screen. That would be rather neat.

However, most consumers will get 16:9 screens to avoid black bars/stretching on HDTV and BluRays, it'd just be for niche movie buffs who really want those last pixels and will buy a 17:9 screen to get it. It's not ever going to become a mainstream resolution when 16:9 is so entrenched as it is now.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[TheRaven64]

Yes, but the problem with DisplayPort is that it's a royalty-free standard, so to implement it the manufacturer has to pay royalties to no one, making it expensive. In contrast, HDMI requires implementers to pay $10,000 per year plus a royalty rate of $0.15 per unit, reduced to $0.05 if the HDMI logo is used, and further reduced to $0.04 if HDCP is also implemented, making it cheaper. Or something.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, i can imagine all that royalty money just sitting in a damp cellar being eaten away by mice and rats and mold. Not a pretty picture i tell you.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Jupix]

I've actually got a Sony X9005A as a desktop display for my PC and no, the 29Hz refresh rate does not make it "unimpressive". If you're looking for getting impressed then the resolution will vastly overpower the refresh rate. When you have a window-like view to your games, photos etc. you just instinctively ignore the slow refresh.

The worst thing is probably the input lag introduced by the low refresh rate. The thing has one of the lowest input lag scores on the market, but the slow refresh still makes cursor input really laggy. It's not the kind of lag you see but the kind you feel. It's gone if you switch to 1080p, but you won't if you have a 4K panel, will you.

FWIW the Sony supports hdmi 2.0 and thus 4k@60fps, but good luck finding a GPU that outputs it. I'm stuck waiting for the eventual NV GTX 800 series which probably will. NVIDIA haven't even confirmed it.

On the topic of Youtube, I thought they'd supported 4K since 2010. In fact 4K vids on Youtube were one of the first materials I tested my panel on. They stream fine over 24mbps ADSL2 but the bitrate is not great (the vids are noisy).

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[pspahn]

Someone please get this man laid.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Really not much, even a Haswell HD5000 is fast enough for basic desktop compositing and video scaling at 3840x2160, so is a $79 AMD or nvidia card.
The practical lower limit is more "supports 17.3Gb/s DP1.2 multi-stream transport" than actual graphics power.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[jon3k]

Wrong.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[jon3k]

Or a high quality IPS monitor for $1.3k.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[geoskd]

I run a GeForce GT 630. I paid about $120 for it, and it runs the Seiki just fine. I use it mostly for coding, and some light CAD work, and it works just fine. As you said, it is awesome being able to keep everything up in its own "little" space of screen, and not having to dig through stacks of open windows to find the one I want. The windows drivers worked (albeit grudgingly). The Ubuntu drivers required major hackery, and if I had known I might have gone with an AMD card, which I hear tell is a lot more linux friendly. I'm still not entirely certain which part of the stuff I did got the Linux boot working, and I am subsequently nervous about doing any OS updates for a while as a consequence...

The one thing to watch out for is power draw requirements. The GT 630 draws more power than the rest of the system combined, and according to the Nvidia tool, the card is throttling 3D performance because the power supply wont provide enough power, but I don't do much 3D CAD, so I don't really care if it is throttling 3D performance.

also of note is the frame rate. 30 FPS is fine for an LED/LCD display, because unlike CRTs, there is no flicker. The lack of flicker means that the low refresh rate wont give you a headache. I used to get wicked migraines from a CRT running anything less than 75Hz. I have been using the current setup at 30Hz for about 3 months, and have not had any problems. I am told that gamers need the faster refresh rate, but again, I don't use the machine for games, so I don't care.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[JoshRosenbaum]

Well if we're gonna get technical, you just calculated pixels per dollar whereas he was calculating dollars per pixel. Switch your numbers around:
3000 dollars / 8294400 pixels = 0.00036 dollars per pixel
So technically he is still right. It is less than a dollar per pixel.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[BluBrick]

He's never getting laid - look at his username! Hell, I'll probably never get laid, and I only recognized it.

Those of you getting laid will need to Google it.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[epSos-de]

You are late. 2014 will have a screen for 1k USD at 4k pxl resolution. Old prices are irrelevant now.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Shirley Marquez]

Most likely, downscaling won't even be done when 4K movies are done for 4K TV. They'll just chop off the sides of the image a bit. And when documentaries and the like go 4K they'll probably be made at the UHD resolution, because that's what inexpensive consumer/prosumer cameras will shoot and because video is their primary market.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[Areyoukiddingme]

Why is DisplayPort not suitable for television? It includes an audio channel, just like HDMI, that can handle 8 channels of 24 bit linear PCM at 192 KHz. It also includes bidirectional auxiliary data channels capable of transmitting USB. That's more than sufficient to transmit Consumer Electronics Control commands.

Re:Still 3K$ for a monitor

[ahabswhale]

There's nothing wrong with DisplayPort per se but the problem is that there are no receivers that support them. So if you want to hook your TV up to a sound system, you're fucked if it's DisplayPort. Which is why, nobody uses it in TVs with the sole exception being small TVs that are also marketed as monitors.

4K video

[BringsApples]

I had to look it up, so here ya go...

4K resolution is a generic term for display devices or content having horizontal resolution on the order of 4,000 pixels. Several 4K resolutions exist in the fields of digital television and digital cinematography

Re:4K video

[BringsApples]

Woops, forgot to provide the link to it on wikipedia.

Re:4K video

[ackthpt]

I had to look it up, so here ya go...

4K resolution is a generic term for display devices or content having horizontal resolution on the order of 4,000 pixels. Several 4K resolutions exist in the fields of digital television and digital cinematography

And with that resolution you can see the layers of pancake makeup on your favourite actors and actresses, plus all that spitting during sports events in astounding clarity.

Well, I'd like the vertical resolution just for photo editing, it would be nice to see the full resolution without affect from scaling algorithms.

Re:4K video

[mythosaz]

And with that resolution you can see the layers of pancake makeup on your favourite actors and actresses, plus all that spitting during sports events in astounding clarity

...in stills.

It's still going to come down to bandwidth. VP9 might be a revolution in codecs, but it won't deliver 4k to me except for very special events until we've all got FIOS.

Re:4K video

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of it this way, you can view 4, 1080p soccer matches simultaneously on the same screen (1 in each corner)

Re:4K video

[Mike Buddha]

Yeah, but it will deliver 1080p and 720p video to you with lower bandwidth requirements. Less buffering and fewer artifacts (because of lowered data requirements and a corresponding lower rate of dropped packets).

Re:4K video

[bob_super]

3840x2160 for "video" (four full-HD screens per display)
4096x2160 for "movies"

At $3K for a 4k screen, that's indeed cheap per pixel, but it's time for the chicken-and-egg of prices/adoption vs available content.

Re:4K video

[Em Adespoton]

Yeah, but it will deliver 1080p and 720p video to you with lower bandwidth requirements. Less buffering and fewer artifacts (because of lowered data requirements and a corresponding lower rate of dropped packets).

So do we call the new 4k video we show on these 4k screens 4096p? When do I get a smartphone that can record at this resolution direct to VP9? For that matter, I'd love to record to VP9 in 1080p -- that'd fit a lot of video on a 32GB SD card.

Re:4K video

[Anonymous Coward]

And fall asleep four times faster?

Re:4K video

[Anonymous Coward]

So do we call the new 4k video we show on these 4k screens 4096p?

No, 4K is about the horizontal resolution. 4K will be 3840 x 2160 for 16:9 screens, so 2160p.

8K will be 7680 × 4320 or 4320p

Re:4K video

[jedidiah]

>> And with that resolution you can see the layers of pancake makeup on your favourite actors and actresses, plus all that spitting during sports events in astounding clarity
>
> ...in stills.

Nope. Video shows you all of Hollywood's ugly skin conditions in all of their frightening glory. Although you don't even need 4K for that. Just regular 1080p will give you that effect.

Sometimes, you really don't want to see everything.

Re:4K video

[Anonymous Coward]

And with that resolution you can see the layers of pancake makeup on your favourite actors and actresses, plus all that spitting during sports events in astounding clarity.

Oh look, the same argument that was used against HD-porn.
I'm sure that the movie industry won't adapt their makeup process to deal with the higher resolution.

Re:4K video

[Kjella]

And with that resolution you can see the layers of pancake makeup on your favourite actors and actresses, plus all that spitting during sports events in astounding clarity.

You're like an echo from 15 years ago when 1920x1080 was to replace NTSC 640x480, both HD porn and HD sports looks great despite the naysaying. Movies and TV too, if the costumes, props, backdrops or special effects no longer looked real they simply had to improve until they did. Why should UHD be any different? It might be that many people meet it with a yawn like Super Audio CD vs CD, for the vast majority a regular CD was more than good enough already but the "too much detail" should be thoroughly debunked by now.

Re:4K video

[EdIII]

see the full resolution without affect from scaling algorithms

Laserdisc baby :)

I really hate that waterfall effect amongst all others. It's a almost a deal breaker to me.

That's why the top of the line Laserdisc player and some titles just look awesome, even by today's standards. At least, IMHO.

Re:4K video

[EdIII]

Sometimes, you really don't want to see everything.

And yet... sometimes, in those special moments, you really really do want to see everything :)

I'm right, right?

Re:4K video

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a complete waste of money. You'd need a gigantic screen and to be sitting so close that you can't see all of it in order to need 4k. 4k is for movie theaters.

I'm surprised that the idiots on slashdot aren't aware of the pixel density that the eye can perceive is the limiting factor here. Even with the current crop of HDTVs being 1920x1080, you need a rather massive TV and to be sitting quite close in order for the pixels to be a problem.

4K really only makes sense for monitors and large screens like at the theater or ball park.

Re:4K video

[bob_super]

I've spent the last 7 years with a 37" 1080p screen as a primary monitor. I sit about 4 feet from it, can't see pixels, but almost (I see them at 3').
Games looks absolutely awesome.
Since it's showing signs of aging, if I can get a cheap 60" 4k screen in 2-3 years, I'll sit 5-6 feet from it, except when I have to display three datasheets side-by-side.
Games will look awesome.

Re:4K video

[AmiMoJo]

That is a really positive thing. On 4k models look more normal, like real people. The fact that you can see tiny flaws stops them looking airbrushed.

Re:4K video

[drinkypoo]

My Laserdisc players keep dying. The only ones I find at flea markets any more have karaoke and the sellers want too much money to take a chance on them. Anyone want to buy the han shot first boxed set?

Re:4K video

[Anonymous Coward]

You're like an echo from 15 years ago when 1920x1080 was to replace NTSC 640x480, both HD porn and HD sports looks great despite the naysaying. Movies and TV too, if the costumes, props, backdrops or special effects no longer looked real they simply had to improve until they did.

The thing is that they don't even need to improve anything. Live theater works just fine without artificial resolution limiting. Thinking that low resolution somehow is improving anything is just stupid.
If I go to a strip club I don't need my vision reduced to 1920x1080, why would I need it to enjoy porn?
Clearly the argument comes from some technophobia or whatever and that is what has to be addressed because the arguments by themselves are just ridiculous.

Re:4K video

[fafalone]

On a cursory search, the first charts seem to suggest that at a viewing distance of 10' (hardly super close), that 4k becomes visible with a display as small as 25-35". At 20', between 50-60", which due to falling prices is quite a common screen size for new tvs. Some other charts vary a bit, but you're definitely exaggerating.

Personally I think we all ought to skip 4k and go straight to 8k, because 4k isn't enough of an improvement.

ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to upgrade your ffmpeg app for ultra high resolution.

So how's it look?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is there any word on how this '4K' actually looks at bitrates Youtube can push enough ads to pay for, and your ISP will permit?

I have the greatest respect for people who actually handle the challenges of paying the computational costs of video compression and decompression (and scaling if necessary) as efficiently as possible; but once their work is done, a nominal resolution (even an actual X pixels by Y pixels value, not some marketing bullshit) is nearly meaningless unless you are in the (rare for video, probably less rare for audio) situation of having such a high bitrate that the quality of your reproduction is being constrained by your resolution.

Barring an increase in bitrate, will it even be possible to distinguish between Xmb/s nominally 1080 video scaled up to 4k and Xmb/s nominally 4k video?

Re:So how's it look?

[alen]

you can see the individual brain cells of the russian drivers splatter on the camera as they get hit by trucks on the highway

Re:So how's it look?

[ackthpt]

I have a feeling AT&T, Comcast, et al, are working feverishly to figure if they can make money with existing bandwith caps on this.

Re:So how's it look?

[bob_super]

That's what killing network neutrality is about.
"The only way to get these 4k images are if you download from my pay-per-view"

Re:So how's it look?

[AmiMoJo]

4k on BluRay looks good, despite the bit-rate being the same as for 1080p. It looks like the new codecs really work. I'd assume YouTube 4k will be similar to what 1080p on YouTube is now. Not as good as BluRay but on a par with broadcast TV, or better.

Re:So how's it look?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I have no problem with AT&T or Comcast charging Netflix and YouTube for higher bandwidth, as long as when you sign up with them, they clearly, in blinking lights on the top of their contract, state:

"We deliberately throttle Netflix and YouTube so they look shitty to you, unless they pay us money."

Better to light a lamp than curse the darkness.

THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[QA]

That’s not the best news, the best part of this story is that Google will do it using it’s own open sourced VP9 technology. Google acquired the technology from O2 and open sourced it. Google started offering the codec on royalty free basis to vendors to boost adoption.

Google has also learned the hardware partnership game and has already roped in hardware partners to use and showcase VP9 at CES. According to reports LG (the latest Nexus maker), Panasonic and Sony will be demonstrating 4K YouTube using VP9 at the event.

VP9 keeps FSF happy, users happy, content providers happy, carriers/ISPs happy and hardware vendors happy.

Google today announced that most leading hardware vendors will start supporting the royalty-free VP9 codecs. These hardware vendors include major names like ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba.

VP9 is beneficial for everyone as it makes the codec available to vendors for free of cost – thus boosting its adoption compared to the non-free H.264/265. At the same time being Open Standard and Open Source it also ensures that users won’t require proprietary (and insecure) technologies like Flash to view content. The third benefit of VP9 is that it can deliver high-resolutions at low bit-rates thus using less bandwidth to watch content. It means that those on slower connections will not have to wait for buffering and be satisfied with low-resolution videos. It will benefit those on faster connections as they won’t have to waste their expensive bandwidth on videos.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

the best part of this story is that Google will do it using itâ(TM)s own open sourced VP9 technology

Yup. How often have we heard on Slashdot and elsewhere "There's no hardware support! H.264 is the standard! H.265 is the future! Just give up, everyone else already has!". Then Google go and sign up all the major players to VP9 support.

I'll just wait for the usual bullshit and FUD about patents and how VP9 can't possibly not invalidate all these mystery MPEG-LA patents (while at the same time ignoring all the patents On2 & Google have filed over VP8 & VP9, naturally).

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

H.265 is the future. Every piece of hardware that supports V9 will support the superior H.265 as we'll.

Plus everyone that implements V9 will get sued out of existence.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not fantastic at all. Almost nobody will use 4K on Youtube, not for a long time anyway. At best this is a ploy to pretend they're taking VP9 seriously, when in reality they renegged on their position to drop h264 support from Chrome.

Instead they've been using their browser dominance and Youtube to make everyone else exhaust their resources: first to support VP8, then to support H264, then to support Pepper (since Adobe is so in love with it), and now recently they've pushed their DASH streaming for certain high-res videos on YouTube, including DRM extensions, and finally they're making sure people are too busy to even do that by forcing them to adopt VP9 as well.

In short, this is only fantastic if you're a fan of a fragmented codec ecosystem that benefits the person who got there first the most, and just makes everyone else fall behind. Google just does what they want, calls it a standard, and then everyone else has to dance to their tune. And people fall for it, hook line and sinker, because hey... it's an open standard, right? Who cares if Google didn't spend any time evangelizing it first with other browser vendors, when they can dictate the direction of 4K streaming as they see fit?

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[SerpentMage]

And this is a problem how? It is called competition you know, a free market you know. And guess what I am mucho happier that Google is competing without clubbing everybody over the head using patents. You know like that Fruit company?

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's amusing, the sad reality is that people actually do think that way. You know, that just as long as Google's not directly clubbing them, it's fine for them to indirectly do so. Just who can compete with Google, and who is doing so?

When it was just with regards to one product, their search engine, it felt quaint to argue about them having a monopoly or some-such, since they weren't really able to block anyone from entering that market, they just did a better job and put everyone else to shame. But what about now? Especially now that they have their hands in everything from the most-used cell phone OS on the planet to the largest video site on the Internet? Suddenly it's not quite so quaint.

Free market capitalism only works on scales. When everyone is the same size, it's fine to bring up it up in a hand-wavey way. And yet, there's hardly a lot of healthy competition out there at Google's scale, for search engines or video codecs. I hardly think that mom and pop can compete with Google if even Microsoft and Apple can't.

It's no longer a simple laughing matter.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Kjella]

Don't get your hopes up too high because I've heard the same all the way back to the VP3-based Theora and every version since. It's the escape hatch/emergency break to keep H.264/HEVC from abusing their near monopoly but in reality nobody seems to want to abandon them, not even Google. Kind of like how VC-1 is in the BluRay standard and in every player but 99% of recent discs use H.264. Even Firefox finally bit the bullet in October this year and said they'd use Cisco's H.264 blob on platforms that don't have native support rather than try fighting the windmills any longer, effectively waving the white flag.

Of course you could claim it'll be different next generation, that VP9 will be the new H.264 and HEVC the sideshow but I'd call you delusional. Despite the long list of VP9 supporters they're all HEVC backers too and that list is even longer, quite soon I expect native HEVC cameras to appear (there are already a few security cameras, but no "normal" ones) and while Google might have some clout on the Internet and mobile devices it's Sony, Canon, Panasonic, JVC and so on who still set the trends in video capture. Show me Google pushing hard for a VP9-reconding Android phone and I might change my mind, but I think it's just blustering like how they were supposed to remove native H.264 support from Chrome but quietly backed away.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[iluvcapra]

Google has also learned the hardware partnership game and has already roped in hardware partners to use and showcase VP9 at CES. According to reports LG (the latest Nexus maker), Panasonic and Sony will be demonstrating 4K YouTube using VP9 at the event.

I work in film post-production in Hollywood and I'm not sure we've had any consultations on VP9, MPEG always gets SMPTE and the ASC involved in screenings and quality shootouts. Of course Google might just be trying to buffalo filmmakers, which would be nothing new, I suppose. "Content providers," as a term, rarely describes the people working the camera or doing the color (let alone syncing the sound). If you're a professional the licensing of the codec is completely irrelevant, it's a poor economy if the quality is even remotely compromised.

Panasonic and Sony were demonstrating Google TV STBs a few years ago and I we all know how that turned out. It's basically no-cost for these shops to turn out this gear for whatever marketing event Google cares to throw. What you want to hear is Sony Consumer Electronics saying they wouldn't support the next MPEG standard, or Sony Pictures Entertainment announcing they'd standardize their delivery format on VP9. SPE is one of my employers and the codecs that, say, Crackle.com uses is decided by a group of people completely independent from the consumer electronics folks, and Crackle will support whatever codec is optimal on the target STB/mobile/desktop platform.

Why would a provider want to go single-track with a codec which is "Open" in the way Android is, which is to say, you can download the source code, but the reference implementation that's distributed to millions of clients is controlled by a single vendor?

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

dont forget google recently breaking 1080p (and other resolutions) direct downloads for offline viewing and archival... opting to complicate matters by obfuscating the video, splitting video and audio of that resolution into two streams (which must now be separately downloaded and then remuxed), which broke just about every 'youtube downloader' on the planet... and some still aren't patched yet with even a manual-remux-later option.

think big business... they claim openness now.. but you know damn well they're doing it now and first to see what kind of patents they can come up with for 4k video delivery over the interwebs.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[symbolset]

AC was just sarcastically providing the mandatory minimum snark. Florian Mueller is on holiday today and can't fulfill his Google bashing duties today so volunteers are filling in.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[symbolset]

You people are sick. Google spends hundreds of millions of dollars to give us a free and open universal video codec, to crush the MPEG-LA monopoly that actually sued ordinary people for posting their own cat videos over patent licensing, and improves it enough that it can do 4k video even over LTE, and actually gathers enough industry support to ensure universal hardware adoption. And you have to bitch about it like you have ever in your life achieved something so globally useful and helpful and difficult. So you don't like it. Here's my gift to you: you don't have to use it. There. Now we can both be happy.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[DarwinSurvivor]

Which part of free licensing didn't you get? Vimeo, College Humour, ustream, etc are all free to implement it whenever they want. About the only thing stopping them at this point is bandwidth and its about fucking time something came out that would put pressure on the ISP's to build proper pipes.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[AmiMoJo]

Don't expect the use of VP9 to mean you are rid of proprietary, closed source technologies. It will come wrapped in DRM pretty quickly, to prevent ripping.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[TheRaven64]

The difference with VP9 is that there isn't already an entrenched standard that's better. When work on Theora started, MPEG-1 was still pretty common for web video, but by the time it was released everyone had moved to MPEG-4. Theora was definitely a big step up from MPEG-1 (and MPEG-2), but not as good as MPEG-4. When VP8 was open sourced, it was better than MPEG-4 (ASP), but most of the rest of the world had moved on to H.264. Now VP9 and H.265 are appearing at the same time. No one is considering switching from H.265 to VP9, they're considering switching from H.264 to either VP9 or H.265. If VP9 is royalty free and comparable quality, then that's a big incentive to move in that direction, particularly as they already have the H.264 infrastructure set up to support the devices that can't do VP9.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[fatphil]

Frauhoffer say that VP9 has 8.4% worse bitrate (at same PSNR) than H.264/MPEG-AVC, and has encoding rates that are 100x slower. See page 3 here:
http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf

I see no incentive to move in the direction of VP9. It's google very persuasively shoving their proprietory format on everyone, that's all. We criticised MicroSoft for doing that in the past, we shouldn't pretend that google is anything apart from an enormous multinational that wants to control a monoculture.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're so wrong on so many things I don't even know where to start. It's exhausting just thinking about how much you need to be taught.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[fatphil]

Help out someone whose only native language is English:

buffalo (v.)
        "alarm, overawe," 1900, from buffalo (n.). Probably from the animals' tendency to mass panic. Related: Buffaloed; buffaloing.
-- http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=buffalo

2 buffalo
transitive verb
buffaloed buffalo·ing
Definition of BUFFALO
: bewilder, baffle; also : bamboozle
First Known Use of BUFFALO
1891
-- http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buffalo

Those two are quite different methods of persuasion. Which did you mean?

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[fatphil]

Oh, I forgot to say:

> If you're a professional the licensing of the codec is completely irrelevant, it's a poor economy if the quality is even remotely compromised.

This!!!

I have worked with both stills, and with audio, and the shortest version of our mantra was "the signal is god", and your statement fits in with that mantra very well. However as you hint, the people who work in that realm are effectively a minority, alas a minority almost hidden in an almost invisible black box. The consumers are fed by the distribution network, and that's pretty much the only interface that's relevant when it comes to how money gets in to lubricate the cogs of the business. The bulk of consumers pretty much don't care what you're doing. I have noticed that the distributors are now actually distributing shit quality a lot of the time (visible blocking artefacts on TV, even to me who's got pretty poor eyesight), which an insult to the content creators' work. The view from the ivory tower may alas be irrelevant in the long run.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[fatphil]

They are not giving us a free and open universal video codec.

They are letting us currently have free use of a proprietory video codec.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/webm/libvpx/+/2344e3a2e1600a2a31e63d2a82a9bbd0b91912b0/LICENSE
"""
Copyright (c) 2010, The WebM Project authors. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:

    * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
        notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

    * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
        notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
        the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
        distribution.

    * Neither the name of Google, nor the WebM Project, nor the names
        of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
        derived from this software without specific prior written
        permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT
HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE
OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
"""

This is not a "Free" licence (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html), nor is it an "Open" license (http://opensource.org/osd).

Re: THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[AvitarX]

I thought Google cut a patent deal for their codec.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Maury Markowitz]

> The difference with VP9 is that there isn't already an entrenched standard that's better

HVEC *is* entrenched. It is accurate to say it is not entrenched in the delivery channels, so far, but don't think for a second it isn't utterly dominant everywhere else in the delivery stack, even if it's not even being used yet. Consider the state of LTE three years ago, and compare it to the Qualcomm efforts.

> Now VP9 and H.265 are appearing at the same time

And in testing to date, VP9 loses, HARD. Now I don't know how much I trust these tests given that they were based on older reference releases, but the numbers I've seen show that VP9 is worse than AVC, let alone HVEC. I wait for newer tests, but I honestly don't think anything is going to change *that* much.

I think there's far too much weight being given to the royalty free issue. No one that matters cares. Every piece of consumer electronics includes dozens upon dozens of licensing deals in it - for instance, even if a TV were to support VP9, they'd still be paying for AVC, and even for HDMI for that matter. It's the way business is done. No one gives a crap unless you're talking about something like $1 or more *per device*. HVEC certainly isn't going to be that, and I can't imagine any scenario where anyone chooses one over the other due to fees.

Every indication is that this is a hail mary on Google's part, or even less, just press fluff. Like the solar panels on that Ford car.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter if it is 8% worse, the fact of the matter is that we need something that's free of patents. It doesn't matter if it's double the size of the competition, if the competition isn't available on your platform it doesn't matter, you've got no choice.

The point here is that those assholes at MPEG-LA have effectively forced this on us, the absurd royalties for encoding, royalties for decoding, royalties for transmission was ridiculous. They did eventually suspend the royalties for transmission, but there's no guarantee that that's going away.

The internet has been fucked up enough by the likes of MS with their Silverlight. Not to mention the Adobe's Flash, which thankfully is mostly available everywhere now.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's google very persuasively shoving their proprietory format on everyone

It's not a proprietary format, and also it's not very persuasive. A persuasive shove would involve Google's programmers releasing a Free very fast encoder, Gallium decoders, etc.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but how fucking greedy can you be? They're giving the source away for free and you're bitching that they're infringing upon people's right to make incompatible versions of the software.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes, because the only issues you can conceive of are licensing and bandwidth, yes? It doesn't matter if Google dictates how those problems are solved, as long as they're solved as quickly and hastily as possible and in Google's favor.

Do you seriously think that licensing was EVER a real concern? The fact that YouTube exists shows it wasn't. Nobody was sued for serving their own videos in a patent-encumbered codec, and the cost of licensing is so tiny compared to the other problems that it's entirely negligible. Licensing is a hypothetical issue, one that never really materialized.

As for bandwidth, Google can't force the companies to do anything. If anything, 4K video just won't take off. Unless of course Google manages to get in bed with the ISPs like NetFlix et al, who've become one of the largest bandwidth sinks on the web and yet things haven't improved much. ISPs are less likely to care about 4K video until there's a market demand, and Google isn't going to spark that with the low-grade content they serve on YouTube.

The real problem is everyone in the web video world will have to follow Google's lead; no one will be able to compete against one of the largest companies in the world when it comes to "free" video. Whatever Youtube does, the others will have to do. Flash is dying. Silverlight barely has a presence anymore, and won't once Google takes over hi-def and DRMed content. Whatever Google does, goes. They're one step ahead, and everyone's busy thanking them for rushing this tech out the door so they can have it a year or two sooner than it otherwise would have come, regardless of how unstable and unimportant it is.

Now that's not the worst thing in the world, I'll grant you that, but I'd rather not sit back and let Google gain control of everything online just because YOU'RE happy they're not as evil as they could possibly be.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference with VP9 is that there isn't already an entrenched standard that's better.

Yes, keep your eyes shut and swallow all the propaganda and lies fed to you by the FSF.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

VP9 keeps FSF happy

The FSF is happy with anything that's free, regardless of quality, availability, time consumed, or any other factors.

users happy

Users will not be happy with VP9 because it delivers lower quality and demands higher bitrates and encoding/decoding time.

content providers happy

Content providers consider licensing costs to be an almost insignificant factor when all other issues are considered.

carriers/ISPs happy

Again, VP9 will require more bandwidth to provide the same level of quality as current standards. Not at all good for them.

hardware vendors happy.

No.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, you're here to defend Google, actively promoting an inferior encoding standard. Hmm... shilling for Google or the FSF perhaps?

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[ArtForz]

3-clause BSD is a proprietary license? Since when?

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

You just don't get it. Freetards never do. VP9 isn't worth two cups of liquid brown shit, because it's still inferior technology. PERIOD! It delivers less quality than H.265 and requires a hell of a lot more encoding time. Only freetards would really get excited about VP9. They've consistently proven that they are happy to accept something that's not as good simply because it's "free". You are a Linux zealot and troll. Naturally you're going to bow down and worship Google for their offering. The rest of us, however, are excited about H.265.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[symbolset]

Let's review that partial list of freetard losers from the fine summary, shall we? "ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba". Hmph. Quite a bunch of freetard hobbyist idiots there. Probably not a solid engineer in the lot. The lot of them probably lack the resources to make it work. Gee, AC, clearly your vision and wisdom is superior to that pack of fools. If only we knew who you were, o genius of mystery, so we could give you the accolades you so richly deserve for helping us dodge this fool's errand!

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

You think the FSF has shills? Is it wrong to believe in software that is Free, open and unencumbered by IP issues?

Who are you shilling for, Microsoft? Apple?

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

*Formats* aren't about license to the code. Formats are about the way they are designed and maintained.

VP9/VP8 = result of proprietary closed development by one party, nobody else had any say in the design. There does happen to be an open-source encoder and decoder.

H.264/H.265 = result of open and public development jointly done by many subjects. And you know what, open source encoders and decoders exist for it (and the same goes for other MPEG/ITU stuff).

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh BTW, VP9 still has no specification (like AVC/HEVC do...), so how is it an open format? If you want to implement it, you need to read the code to google's encoder and decoder and replicate their behaviour. GTFO with that, On2/Google.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that when VP8 launched years ago, there was also much fanfare about how many semiconductor vendors will support it. Let me remind you that the list (without looking back) contained for example AMD and Adobe. The reality is naturally that nothing happened from those two.

In other words, take care. These announcements are not always what they seem to be.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[ADRA]

Yes, in Canada at least, many cable networks have extremely high compression rates in order to squeeze in all those channels into so much spectrum, alas. That said, I think any director expecting objectively identical movie watching experiences have never been to two theatres in their life (though certification would at least puts it into the ballpark).

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

FSF has thousands shills for free, who do the propaganda for free and even believe it. Young men in search forf meaning of life. It's called secular religion in sociology or anthropology IIRC :)
Demonstration is currently going on in this thread and elsewhere on slashdot/the internet.

Re:THIS is fantastic news! From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

On2, not O2. Or The Duck Corporation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On2_Technologies

Yeah...

[rsilvergun]

but the cat videos look _amazing_ in 4k.

Re:Yeah...

[AmiMoJo]

Personally, I'm not looking forward to 4k porn.

They've had 4K videos

[Anonymous Coward]

I've watched them before and they brought a Sony GoogleTV device to its knees lol.

Even on a regular machine it seems to take a bit of power to play them

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx6eaVeYXOs

4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[alen]

well worth the $3000 TV and the $100 a month internet bill to go with it

Re:4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[rudy_wayne]

the $100 a month internet bill to go with it

You obviously don't live in the U.S. where decent speed costs a lot more than that.

Re:4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[SpaceManFlip]

Yeah I hear a lot of 4K hype but it's all just noise to me because NOBODDY GON' BUY DAT SHIT when it costs $1000+

Plus the TV industry is far away from upgrading their equipment to produce the content.

Also, Internet pricing and availability sucks in America, yes.

Re:4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[alen]

not really, most movies from the last few years were shot with 4K cameras. just like most movies starting in the late 90's were shot on HD cameras in anticipation of blu ray and HD adoption.

the studios need to get the 4K masters and put them on a new format for 4K

Re:4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[Anonymous Coward]

$3000 TV

$1000+

http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-Digital-SE50UY04-50-Inch-Ultra/dp/B00BXF7I9M

Re: 4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[Anonymous Coward]

no, nobody on the late nineties shot on hd cams, they all used film for cinema and SD for TV. A lot of TV-networks around the world have not even finished upgrading their production to HD yet, let alone broadcast in more than 720p. also, there's virtually no content available in 4K (except yet to be converted/transcoded movies), no medium or player to deliver the content physically (one blu-ray movie is about 20 gb, so one in 4k should be have at least triple the size and not enou bandwith for live streaming/ota - broadcast. shure, you can compress the hell out of a video, but even if vp9 is massively more efficent than h.264, there's only so much you can compress something before using a 4k resolution get's pointless. besides, you'd need a pretty huge TV to be able to spot the difference between a 4k and 1080p video. I'm not even sure if that's even possible at "normal" viewing distances.

so, 4k is a long way off - sure it's great for content production, but bet you anything that the majority of youtube users don't care or is even aware of the fact that they can set a lot of videos to higher than 360p resolution.

i'm pretty sure, that tv manufacturers will have to look for another gimmick than 4k to sell their new displays in the foreseeable future.

Re:4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[iluvcapra]

not really, most movies from the last few years were shot with 4K cameras.

But just about all television is shot 1080p, and the TV stuff is where the money is in terms of DVDs and streaming. That's yer Walking Dead, BSG, Mad Men, Orange is the New Black , all in straight HD.

the studios need to get the 4K masters and put them on a new format for 4K

Most films are shot in 4K now, which is to say their "originals" are in 4K, not their "masters." Many, many films have a 2K workflow and distribution pipeline, even if many of the original elements are 4K. Upconverting to 4K might require all-new color correction, opticals, onlining, and reauthored VFX.

Re: 4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[iluvcapra]

nobody on the late nineties shot on hd cams, they all used film for cinema and SD for TV.

Many TV shows also shot on film: Star Trek TNG and DS9 were shot on 16mm film (Super 16 aperture), and several prime time sitcoms and dramatic shows shot on 35 mm -- Frasier, Law and Order, and this had been a standard practice for high-quality pre-recorded content since the 70s.

Phantom Menace (1999) shot one scene on a high-def camera -- the midichlorians scene, God help us all. This was the first theatrically-distributed footage shot on an HD camera. Robert Rodriguez was aggressive and used a Sony/Panasonic F900 to shoot Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001), which was the first film originated completely on a digital camera to show in theaters (strictly speaking Russian Ark was shot first).

Digital HDTV production uses the same cameras that film does, REDs, Arris, Varicams, and these came online with TV as the price came down (it should be said that more than a little broadcast HD content, and some films, are originated on Canon 5D and 7Ds, Nikon Ds, and GoPros.)

Re:4K videos of russians crashing into each other

[TheRaven64]

It wasn't too many years ago people were saying the same about HD. Most of the video I watch is still DVDs on a projector that can only handle 1024x768, but when I replace the projector I don't imagine HD will be any more expensive. My mother now has an HD TV because there weren't any SD ones that were any cheaper. Once the economies of scale kick in, the prices will come down.

The most important question goes unanswered

[Anonymous Coward]

What will it mean for my porn?

Re: The most important question goes unanswered

[danomac]

When you see what they really look like you'll wish the resolution was 320x200.

Re:The most important question goes unanswered

[Anonymous Coward]

Ass pimples and ingrown pubic hairs where you can see the eye of puss through the cover up.

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[msobkow]

Oh, yes, of course, an open sourced codec is clearly the same problem as a platform-specific closed source product designed to lock the customer in to a particular vendor.

The only thing they have in common is that you hate them both.

More Google ADD

[rudy_wayne]

When Google bought Youtube they converted all the videos to h.264 and made that the standard. Now all of a sudden h.264 is evil.

Re:More Google ADD

[BenoitRen]

They didn't even need to buy On2 to get VP9. They could have used one of the open-source codecs that already exists. You know, like Vorbis, which is perfectly fine for most videos and not as resource-hungry.

Re:More Google ADD

[Trogre]

Do you mean Theora perhaps?

Re:More Google ADD

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should look at the development history of Theora (which I assume you were referring to, since Vorbis is audio only). Hint: It's completely derived from On2.

Re:More Google ADD

[symbolset]

When MPEG-LA (the patent group behind H.264) was trying to form a patent pool to make Google's VP8 non-free, Google had to send their lawyers down there to explain to them why that was going to not work. Turns out Google now owns a huge chunk of their patents, and enough other patents to shut down their game. Now they have given up that nonsense and we get to have high quality video devices that are compatible with each other, free editors and hosting, streaming and media center devices. As a technology H.264 is fine, but as a mechanism for "we get to say who can do video", well that day is done forever.

Re:More Google ADD

[Anonymous Coward]

When MPEG-LA (the patent group behind H.264) was trying to form a patent pool to make Google's VP8 non-free, Google had to send their lawyers down there to explain to them why that was going to not work. Turns out Google now owns a huge chunk of their patents, and enough other patents to shut down their game. Now they have given up that nonsense and we get to have high quality video devices that are compatible with each other, free editors and hosting, streaming and media center devices. As a technology H.264 is fine, but as a mechanism for "we get to say who can do video", well that day is done forever.

This is arrant nonsense. Google was forced to licence the H.264 patents from the pool due to their infringement with VP8. There are many links to this but here's one:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130307006192/en/Google-MPEG-LA-Announce-Agreement-Covering-VP8

Also, in anticipation of future Google fanboi's getting upset, here's a pre-print indicating VP9 is pretty bad compared to H.265:

http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf

Re:More Google ADD

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they didn't license anything, the actual contents of the agreement is secret. I heard that the MPEG-LA was forced to the agreement due to a nuclear situation, they where unable to form a pool for VP8 and their managed patents where of dubious application to VP8, and Google had inherited from On2 some patents that make a MPEG-LA attack on VP8 a dangerous situation as they predated some from the MPEG-LA pool of H264 for similar things.

The situation is like:
Company 1 has P covered by patent A, company 2 have patent B
Patent A and B are similar, being A older
If a judge rules that company 1 with P violates B, company 1 can argue:

  1.That patent B is invalid as any product uses patent A violates patent B, then patent B is the same as patent A with other description and the older is the only one valid.
  2.If both are considered valid then any product that implement patent B violates patent A and then it can sue.

Re:More Google ADD

[MildlyTangy]

"Now all of a sudden h.264 is evil."

hyperbole much?

H.264 cant do 4k like vp9 which is royalty free and open source, where H.264 is not. And it will be widely supported by all the manufacturers that matter.

I fail to see how this is a bad thing.

What exactly is the problem here?

Re:More Google ADD

[Anonymous Coward]

This is arrant nonsense. Google was forced to licence the H.264 patents from the pool due to their infringement with VP8. There are many links to this but here's one:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130307006192/en/Google-MPEG-LA-Announce-Agreement-Covering-VP8

Also, in anticipation of future Google fanboi's getting upset, here's a pre-print indicating VP9 is pretty bad compared to H.265:

Are you a Microshit in training? Or have you always been this stupid?

Re:More Google ADD

[Lennie]

Of course it was derived from On2, as On2 donated their VP3 codec to Xiph.

Re:More Google ADD

[BenoitRen]

Ah, yes, I meant Theora. Vorbis is the audio codec.

Re:More Google ADD

[Maury Markowitz]

> What exactly is the problem here?

Market fragmentation, obviously. And concerns about the quality.

Let's turn this question on it's head, what *exactly* is the problem if H.265 becomes the standard?

Everyone made all of these nebulous arguments over VP8/H.264. The claims at the time was that using 264 would cause all sorts of chaos in the future when we tried to read old archives, but I've failed to see a single example of this. Source code for extremely high quality 264 en/decoders can be easily found on the 'net, I've used it myself. Meanwhile the VP8 code is of moderate quality at best, and the quality of the product is lower. Is there any reason to suspect any major changes?

If not, which is my belief, then I am at a loss at so what advantages VP9 might offer, especially in light of early testing which demonstrates very low quality in comparison to HVEC.

Re:More Google ADD

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, he is quite right, while you are not capable of anything else than dumb and baseless slandering, calling people you wish weren't true trolls/shills/astroturfers or whatever. Thumbs up!

So what?

[bistromath007]

With ISPs throttling them, 4K videos will probably play about ten frames in between each thirty seconds of buffering.

Minor typo

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor typo: it wasn't O2 that owned VP9, it was On2.

In other news...

[westlake]

Related Posts

Is LG Ditching Google TV? Working On WebOS TV?
Goodbye Patent Evil H.264; YouTube Switches To WebM
Opera Welcomes Google's Move To Drop H.264 Support
Microsoft Backs H.264, I Back Betamax

YouTube goes 4K at CES, brings royalty free VP9 to fore front

There are some very big players moving in HEVC.

Netflix has tossed their hat in the 4K ring with the announcement of 4K streaming starting next month.

The jump from streaming 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 is not something that can be done by just flipping a switch. First of all, viewers need a 4K TV, which practically no one has yet. PCMag's Chloe Albanesius has informed us that Netflix's 4K content will require ''somewhere between 12 and 15 Mbps'' to stream properly. That;s a pretty serious connection which, again, not many .

By using H.265 HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) moving forward instead of the currently popular AVC H.264, Netflix thinks they will be able to stream the same quality they currently transmit at half the bitrate. Not only does this mean there's room for higher quality 4K streams, but the current HD content will be transmitted more efficiently.

It's unclear when we'll see 4K streaming available in standalone set-top boxes any time soon, or whether or not it will require new hardware in order to handle the increased resolution in the future, but for now it looks like the TV itself is the home for 4K streaming.

Netflix is bringing 4K streaming to TVs with H.265 and House of Cards [Dec 19]

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

There isn't an HEVC encoder available yet that can regularly create the same quality content at half the bitrate. With the high CPU requirements for encoding HEVC at the moment, I doubt that very little content will be created at the best settings either.

DASH still sucks

[TubeSteak]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_over_HTTP
Youtube has split up all video/audio over 720p into separate streams, which makes downloading much more difficult.
Some downloaders use ffmpeg to mux the streams together, but other than that, you're SOL for downloading anything better than 720p mp4.

Re:DASH still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

And since you're not 'supposed' to be downloading, only streaming, I really don't think Youtube gives a damn.

Re:DASH still sucks

[Malc]

YouTube isn't meant for downloading, so suck it up; you're in a very small minority. DASH is awesome because we finally have an industry standard way of delivering adaptive streams. Well, it has some complications in being a little bit too generic but but a lot of the industry is going the same way now.

HFR?

[Trogre]

Good to see further progress in YouTube video quality. Any word on when they're going to break the 30 frame per second limit and allow HFR content?

Re:HFR?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Google's already working on that behind closed doors right now with the HFR rights holders. Don't worry, in a few months we'll hear all about the "open standard" they've come up with all on their own, and it'll come with another shift in HTML5 formats already implemented by Youtube, so that other browser vendors will have to implement yet another of their technologies or not be able to show higher FPS Youtube content.

4K YouTube? Great...

[wonkey_monkey]

So now we'll get idiots uploading cellphone footage of clips from Family Guy (dubbed into Spanish) scaled up to 4K instead of 1080p...

Re:4K YouTube? Great...

[jones_supa]

Also slap "3D audio" in the description as it was a mono recording duplicated to stereo (with heavily clipping audio).

Downgraded to Full HD after 8 years!

[Anonymous Coward]

My new laptop should have been 4k or even 8k. My 8 year old one had 1920x1200 (17") and my new one is less in "FULL HD" (whoop-dee-do!) 1920x1080. WTF?!? You can get 1920x1200 on a 7" tablet.

Re:Downgraded to Full HD after 8 years!

[Overzeetop]

Yes, but can you *see* 1920x1200 on a 7" tablet. I happen to (still) have 20/12 vision, and I can't. It's like hearing the difference between 320kbps mp3s and uncompressed rips. Or, more accurate 48kHz vs 96kHz music. Unless you are in the very tippy top of the population, you can't do it in the best conditions, and if you take your laptop anywhere but the perfect room with perfect lighting you can't tell even if you have the rare physical senses to do so. I have 2880 res on my 15" laptop; I run at 150% scaling for UI elements. It's unbelievably sharp, but I also use it as a tablet with my nose pressed against the screen for photos.

Re:MPEG/MPEG-LA is like the Nuclear Industry

[Anonymous Coward]

VP9 is like Solar, Google Won...

Too soon

[craigminah]

People still post 240p videos to YouTube so not sure I see a huge demand for anything at this time at 4K. I'd be happy if YouTube denied posting anything less than 720p.

Re:Too soon

[Anonymous Coward]

post typed with a potato

Re:Too soon

[epyT-R]

nah.. There's plenty of SD content out there that's relevant. Its lower bandwidth makes it more manageable on networks that aren't google fiber or top tier cable. This holds for both viewers and uploaders.

Re:Too soon

[LinuxIsGarbage]

nah.. There's plenty of SD content out there that's relevant. Its lower bandwidth makes it more manageable on networks that aren't google fiber or top tier cable. This holds for both viewers and uploaders.

How about nothing less than 480p? 240p 10fps videos should be illegal. 480p you can make out what the video is of. I tend to watch 480p due to bandwidth, and the inefficiencies of Flash. My older PC will struggle to play a full screen 720p Youtube video, yet I can download the raw MP4 file, and it runs smooth in VLC, MPC-HC, WMP, etc.

Re:Too soon

[craigminah]

Sure, but there's an awful lot of 240p stuff out there...almost unwatchable, and I'm not on Google/NSA fiber.

Re:Too soon

[tepples]

240p 10fps videos should be illegal

Then how did Nintendo get away with publishing the video game Star Fox for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System?

Always how it goes with new tech

[Sycraft-fu]

It is just entering the consumer arena. Hence it is expensive. However since it is entering the consumer arena, we see companies like Youtube starting to support it.

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[EdIII]

Doesn't matter about entering the consumer arena with display technology. I think this is very limited by bandwidth technology and realistic costs of deployment in the US. It's going to be amazeballs, but in South Korea, Japan, and several EU countries.

YouTube said it was demonstrating streaming of 4k. I would assume that to be true since YouTube is a website...

Doesn't that put the required bandwidth for streaming at 20-30Mpbs in ideal networking conditions with moderate compression? That's from a single source, not aggregate speed. It's less of a hassle with their CDN, but still is at the top end of what residential networks with consumer grade infrastructure does.

I know plenty of people now that don't have ethernet connections anymore, and have transferred to wireless. This may well be a non-free upgrade for consumers.

TL;DR -- I don't know how many people with meet the software requirements

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking about youtube here, well known for mutilating 1080p content with a H.264 encoder until it fits in 4Mb/s.
I'd be rather surprised if the 2160p stream is more than 10Mb/s average.

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[EdIII]

We're talking about youtube here, well known for mutilating 1080p content with a H.264 encoder until it fits in 4Mb/s.
I'd be rather surprised if the 2160p stream is more than 10Mb/s average.

So basically, look horrible, look like it was streamed.

Kind of defeats the point of the 4k investment though. Only local content is going to be played. On demand will need one hell of a buffer for full quality. Piracy is going to be difficult (a plus for them) since it can only be larger than BluRay, and that can be upwards of 35 gigs. Most people can't be patient enough to max their connection for several hours to get a movie.

Now we have a whole other format for 4k that we can pay extra for to Netflix or Best Buy.

It seems like that's what I get for laying down cash in this economy for a 4k display system.

- Limited expensive options for content
- Much lower quality if I do streaming. Not all that much better than 1080p with the compression.

Only way I see this working is if the cable companies get on board and start pushing out set top boxes that can process 4k content delivered across that bandwidth instead.

For somebody that cut the cord, 4k ain't good enough to make me plug back in :)

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[EdIII]

Sorry for the double post, but I reconsidered it.

If it was a 150 inch screen, with like 8k, and I could get streamed porn, then yes, I would consider getting a cable subscription again.

Industry. Take Note.

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[Charcharodon]

Speak for yourself. (100mbit down 65mbit up). I'll down load the video and stream it to you while I watch it.

Yay FIOS.

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[AmiMoJo]

It's already established in Japan. Half the large screen TVs on sale here are 4k and there are a couple of tv channels broadcasting it. 3d seems to be long dead.

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[gbjbaanb]

I think the point is so Google gets VP9 support out there, mainstream.

See, we all know it'll be so highly compressed it'll look crap. I'm sure that's intentional partly to save bandwidth, but also to encourage you to buy stuff instead of just youtube streaming it all the time.

But the 4k over VP9 only, that's a message to producers that they must start to make their stuff available in VP9 format if they don't want to be "left behind" in the future video technology, and they will. And once that's the only format natively supported on all 4k playback devices, and all content gets produced in it, they will start to make content available in VP9 for all formats, and we'll have royalty-free video everywhere. 4k has nothing to do with it except as a way to kick the industry in the right direction.

Oh and 4k porn... I wouldn't, slightly fuzzy images are better for your intended purpose in watching it, than the "full gynaecologist" video version.

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[Maury Markowitz]

"But the 4k over VP9 only, that's a message to producers that they must start to make their stuff available in VP9 format if they don't want to be "left behind"

The chance of that seems to be very close to zero, it is almost certain that HEVC will be "the" standard moving forward. The historical precedence here is pretty strong (VP8 v. AVC) and Google's own comments appear to be hedging their bets.

"And once that's the only format natively supported on all 4k playback devices"

Nothing is stopping any of these same playback devices supporting HEVC, and all evidence to date suggests they will, and that it's better than VP9. If YouTube were the only delivery platform you might have an argument, but to date YT is the home of low-res content.

"and we'll have royalty-free video everywhere"

Unicorns and rainnbows.

Re:Always how it goes with new tech

[garyebickford]

Oh and 4k porn... I wouldn't, slightly fuzzy images are better for your intended purpose in watching it, than the "full gynaecologist" video version.

So, it's tits not zits?

RedZone: a real-time highlight reel

[tepples]

Here in the States, we solve that a different way. The NFL (professional handegg league) runs a channel called RedZone that compiles a real-time highlight reel of all matches in progress on any Sunday afternoon. Whenever a team gets the ball within 20 yards of the goal, RedZone cuts to that match until the team scores or otherwise loses possession.

Re:RedZone: a real-time highlight reel

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Here in the States, we solve that a different way. The NFL (professional handegg league) runs a channel called RedZone that compiles a real-time highlight reel of all matches in progress on any Sunday afternoon. Whenever a team gets the ball within 20 yards of the goal, RedZone cuts to that match until the team scores or otherwise loses possession.

Good for the short attention span generation?

Re:RedZone: a real-time highlight reel

[tepples]

In fact, it's so good that DirecTV and NFL Network each have their own versions of RedZone.

Everybody except Apple

[Overzeetop]

And not a single Apple device will play VP9. Every Apple device will require transcoding, or using whatever format they find optimizes their [battery life|thermal envelope|PROFIT], which will nudge every well heeled, non-technical user to gravitate away from VP9.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

And not a single Apple device will play VP9. Every Apple device will require transcoding, or using whatever format they find optimizes their [battery life|thermal envelope|PROFIT], which will nudge every well heeled, non-technical user to gravitate away from VP9.

Jobs is gone. Android marketshare is up. Apple may not be as wedded to h265 as they were to h264. Things change.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[Overzeetop]

True. Jony has destroyed much of the UI Jobs toiled over; maybe he will sell out and join this open standard. My money is on the no side of this though. I see Apple devolving into all the bad things with none of the elegance now that Jobs is feeding the worms.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps their well heeled heads can gravitate away from apple.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[ne0n]

That's OK, Macs don't come in 4k anyway. When they do I suspect they'll be interested in supporting Youtube.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[dbraden]

The new Mac Pro supports 4K, it can drive three 4K displays simultaneously. They'll probably release their own 4K monitor(s) later this year.

Re: Everybody except Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Announced support is not the same as a real product. Nothing sold by apple has a 4k display and with their animosity toward Samsung nobody knows when that might happen.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[evilviper]

And not a single Apple device will play VP9.

That's utterly untrue. You might mean that Apple devices won't include VP9 support out-of-the-box (unlike Android), but that's quite different, and won't necessarily hamper adoption. You might as well say: "And not a single Apple device will have Google Maps."

All that's needed is for a popular iOS multimedia app to include VP9, or perhaps even for someone to simply implement a VP9 decoder in javascript:

http://libwebpjs.hohenlimburg.org/vp8/webm-javascript-decoder/

Besides, it's far more of an uphill battle for Apple these days than it was before. They're no longer seen as THE smart phone platform, nor do they have a monopoly on rich, young influential people. Plus Theora/VP3 was crap next to H.264 and VP8 didn't appear until the fight was long over. This time VP9 is around before H.265 has a foothold, and there isn't no gaping chasm of disparity as there was before. Not to mention the Opus audio codec is often considered better than anything else out there, including HE-AACv2 (or whatever the preferred branding).

Re: Everybody except Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the Mac Pro you can configure to come with a sharp 4k screen.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[TheRaven64]

The current generation of MacBook Pro has an internal resolution only 2880 pixels wide, but the HDMI port can drive a 4K display at either 30 or 24Hz, depending on your definition of 4K, and each of the two Thunderbolt 2 ports can function as DisplayPort 1.2 ports, each driving an external 4K display at 60Hz. So current generation Mac laptops support up to 3 4K displays (although I'd imagine the GPU might struggle a bit if you wanted to do 3D on all of them)...

Re:Everybody except Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

We have mavericks *now* and I can't play an AVI file with the OS provided software. Some things change, indeed, for the worse.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple market share is not that high. It can't nudge that many non technical users.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually tried that?
I did, didn't work with dual Sharp 32"s.
In 30Hz mode it worked, but switch one into 60Hz MST mode and the second one gets turned off.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[lordofthechia]

using whatever format they find optimizes their [battery life|thermal envelope

I think that's the point of getting hardware vendors on board. From TFS:

hardware vendors will start supporting the royalty-free VP9 codecs. These hardware vendors include major names like ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba."

Previous open standards didn't include hardware vendor support, so decoding was not done optimally and fully in hardware.

Re: Everybody except Apple

[dbraden]

The 4K support is shipping now. If you're referring to the monitor, they haven't officially announced anything, but they already have support for a couple of other brands, and they'll even sell you a Sharp 4K right from the Apple Store as an add-on item.

Re:Everybody except Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is joining an open standard "selling out"? Are you implying that Google will be paying him to do that?

Re:Everybody except Apple

[ne0n]

I looked for 4k displays at the Apple Store and they don't stock any, nor will they provide a date for when stock might appear. Nice to know they're on board with HDMI 1.4 though. A bit surprising it's not some crippled proprietary connector with special Apple-designed cables with a fragile chip inside to provide plenty of early failure opportunities.. They do listen to user opinion sometimes but only when the world is inexorably moving ahead regardless. maybe there's hope for Mac users getting full 4k youtube after all.

H.263, H.264, H.265

[tepples]

I've read that Theora, based on On2's VP3, is roughly equivalent in rate/distortion to MPEG-4 ASP video (DivX, Xvid), which itself is primarily tweaks to H.263 (Sorenson video, used by early FLV). When Google added a free format to YouTube, it skipped Theora because Theora wasn't competitive in rate/distortion terms to what was already in use. H.264 and VP8 are a generation past that.

Re:MPEG/MPEG-LA is like the Nuclear Industry

[game kid]

Not so sure about "Won" given the earlier settlement with MPEG-LA over VP8. "Made a deal with the devil to validate math patents and keep themselves out of hell a bit longer", maybe.

Consoles prior to the Dreamcast output 240p

[tepples]

I'd be happy if YouTube denied posting anything less than 720p.

Consoles prior to the Dreamcast output 240p, except for a few PS1 and Nintendo 64 games that output 480i. The Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, original Xbox, and original Wii output 480i (or 480p if you were lucky). How would requiring 720p improve reviews of games for those platforms?

Re:Consoles prior to the Dreamcast output 240p

[epyT-R]

Because, when the source is pointsample scaled (say from 320x240 to 1280x960) before lossy encode, the edge destroying quantization noise floor is pushed lower. Each pixel ending up as noise is 4x smaller than the original, while the apparent quality stays reasonable as each original pixel is now taking 4x the pixels in each macroblock. This results in the original pixels of the unscaled image being rendered more accurately. The cool part, at least with h264, is that large point resizes don't use up that much more bandwidth than a very high quality encode at the original resolution. Again, the trick of it is to do a point resize scale of the original, preferably using integer values.

Another piece of this is that youtube uses more bandwidth for 720p+ encodes which helps, but it also transcodes again after upload, adding even more noise.

60fps

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet they still don't support anything over 30fps.
If they'd allow 60fps; that would be far, far better news.
Anyone who has seen 60fps footage will agree.

Re:60fps

[jones_supa]

Completely agree. I'm not terribly interested in the jump from 1080p to 4K, but very interested in seeing 60fps content.

Re:60fps

[Malc]

4K only becomes interesting if you want to have a bigger screen. I think sitting close to an enormous screen is more immersive than other fads like 3D and more interesting from that perspective than higher frame rates. Then again, I don't want an enormous TV in my living room that ends up being the first thing people use.

4K

[coop247]

I cant watch a 480p video on YouTube without shuttering, jerking, load screens and a generally crappy experience. But I'm sure 4K will work great. Bonus points for something like the 5th different encoding scheme used by Google.

Re:4K

[Virtucon]

Well I have to agree with that but if you look at the presentation from Google I/O from last May and you'll see that VP9 uses less bandwidth for a given quality based on the demonstrations. That's the main reason for switching to it, plus it does deliver some great video. So if VP9 does play out that means less bandwidth than competitive codecs. Unfortunately VP9 to me at least is half baked because I've been watching the project since first seeing the I/O presentation and I have to say that it encodes very slowly, from full raw sources only using their app and the code is still buggy as hell. The FFMPEG integration isn't much better but hopefully Google will throw some more support around it and we'll see better speed and reliability. I also wonder what's going to happen with VP8?

is Youtube going to give me a 4K video camera?

[Anonymous Coward]

I need a Sony F65

Re:is Youtube going to give me a 4K video camera?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Take a loan from a bank
2) Buy the 4K cam
3) Make a YouTube channel with valuable content
4) Become an YouTube partner and start receiving advertisement money
5) Pay back the loan
6) ???
7) Drink champagne and celebrate

Kinda dicey plan tho.

Would Dell be ok?

[AHuxley]

http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/02/dell-ultrasharp-4k-monitors/
3,840 x 2,160 resolution, HDMI, DisplayPort, USB 3.0, US$1,399 for the UltraSharp 24?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7563/dell-24-uhd-up2414q-gets-a-price-28-uhd-4k-3840x2160-announced

why bother?

[epyT-R]

They can't even deliver sufficient bandwidth to make 1080p look significantly better than 720. Adding 40% more pixels without sufficient bandwidth just drives up the noise floor.

Re:why bother?

[Lennie]

Because VP9 also uses less bandwidth than VP8 or H.264 for the same resolution (HVEC/H.265 also uses less bandwidth of course).

Obviously at the cost of more processing (like CPU cycles) for the encoder and decoder.

royalty free != open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's PR department mangles the language once again

Re:royalty free != open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source is the new word pair which is used in all sorts of situations to create a fuzzy warm feeling, even if the situation had nothing to do with needing the actual source code. Just slap it in there somewhere and all nerds will be happy. That's how it seems to work.

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great seeing all these worried and panicking Microshits scrambling for cover.

High hopes.

[westlake]

While YouTube's preference is VP9, [YouTube's Francisco ] Varela left open the possibility that the site might use HEVC in the future. ''We are not announcing that we will not support HEVC,'' said Varela, adding that YouTube supports 17 different codecs currently.

According to YouTube, the first partner TVs and other devices that incorporate VP9 will start hitting the market in 2015. In 2014, YouTube will start transcoding HD video into VP9.

YouTube's Ultra HD Strategy Could Spark Battle Over 4K Video-Delivery Tech

I am not convinced that the transcode to YouTube will be enough to derail HEVC.

On May 9, 2013, NHK and Mitsubishi Electric announced that they had jointly developed the first HEVC encoder for 8K Ultra HD TV, which is also called Super Hi-Vision (SHV). The HEVC encoder supports the Main 10 profile at Level 6.1 allowing it to encode 10-bit video with a resolution of 7680x4320 at 60 fps.

On October 16, 2013, the OpenHEVC decoder was added to FFmpeg.

On October 29, 2013, Elemental Technologies announced support for real-time 4K HEVC video processing. Elemental provided live video streaming of the 2013 Osaka Marathon on October 27, 2013, in a workflow designed by K-Opticom, a telecommunications operator in Japan. Live coverage of the race in 4K HEVC was available to viewers at the International Exhibition Center in Osaka. This transmission of 4K HEVC video in real-time was an industry-first.

On November 14, 2013, DivX developers released information on HEVC decoding performance using an Intel i7 CPU at 3.5 GHz which had 4 cores and 8 threads. The DivX 10.1 Beta decoder was capable of 210.9 fps at 720p, 101.5 fps at 1080p, and 29.6 fps at 4K.

High Efficiency Video Coding

An inbuilt HEVC decoder is not entirely new of course, as LG's LA970 series of UHDTVs released last year also offered the same feature. However, the company's latest 4K Ultra HD TVs due to be unveiled at CES 2014 will use a ViXS XCode 6400 SoC (system on chip) that can decode HEVC-based content at 3840x2160 resolution with support for 60p frame rate and 10-bit colour depth, a world's first.

LG's 2014 4K TV Models Gets HDMI 2.0 & 10-Bit HEVC/H.265 Decoder [Jan 3]

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

Brainwashed much? Open Source isn't magic pixie dust that makes things right. Google controlling this kind of stuff by dominating web services is every bit as controlling as MS.

Snowball's chance in hell to get adopted

[melted]

Google can't even serve Youtube using codecs currently supported by its own browser. There is a mode to switch to HTML5 video, but some of the videos require Flash anyway. Besides Google does not indemnify the potential users of VP9 against potential patent infringement, so it's only slightly better than just grabbing an h265 codec and linking against it without first obtaining a license. It's a patent mine field of epic proportions, and if you're going to pay for patents, you might as well get the real deal supported by Microsoft and Apple out of the box, including low-power silicon and GPU support. For Google VP9 makes sense, since they already license MPEG LA IP, so they can both encode and decode with VP9 without attracting legal attention.

Aside from search and ads, Google is all about basically building the fist 80% (sometimes less) of something and then throwing it over the wall to the unwashed masses, or, alternatively, milking the PR in perpetuity. Glass, self-driving car, robots - all PR projects that will not yield a successful product in the foreseeable future. Android and Chrome are basically means of protecting the ad revenue. Youtube's sole purpose is to show you those stupid pre-roll ads. Flash shows them just fine, which is why HTML5 video has been in beta for quite a while now.

Re:Snowball's chance in hell to get adopted

[Lennie]

Yes, when you enable the HTML5-player some videos are still using Flash.

If you look closely, you might have noticed that videos with 'annotations' all load in Flash, those without annotations load in HTML5.

While I have seen videos on YouTube that had annotations in the HTML5-player (they clearly do some A/B testing at times), I would call that: not yet for general consumption.

So it is work in progress, but they aren't moving fast.

Re:Snowball's chance in hell to get adopted

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you know there have been too many articles on one subject when I saw the Slashdot green and read that as "Snowden's chance in hell..."

Compatibility for existing devices

[Anonymous Coward]

Here I was opening the discussions hoping to see an opinion on what would happen to the "smart" devices such as TVs and Rokus that are already out there without the VP9 codecs.

This is why "smart" shouldn't exist in devices where an upgrade path is not clearly defined

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[msobkow]

Can you point to any vendors being locked out by the use of VP9, other than through their own volition?

The sky is not falling, Chicken Little.

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, they may not be the same but they're not vastly different just because the spec is open. All that does is cover Google's ass, because hey, it doesn't matter if they didn't consult anybody and just went ahead and made their own spec behind closed doors, it's OPEN. Not that anyone would want to implement it, but they'll have to, and they'll have as much input as they would otherwise.

Now it's nice to have alternative implementations and all that, but in the end that doesn't solve any problem beyond MAYBE being able to play the videos on alternative OSes; and I sincerely doubt many people will be generating 4K video worth watching that isn't also under the "open" DRM spec, which won't run outside of sanctioned OSes.

In short, just saying "it's an open spec" doesn't solve all the problems. It's still ultimately designed to do the same things in the same ways, and other related tech picks up the "evil quota". But hey, it's not a problem as long as you love both Google and the word "open", right?

Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[Opportunist]

When will I actually be able to watch a movie without stutter every 20 seconds because their buffering is shot to hell and back? And don't think that you can simply pause and let it load, because it simply friggin' doesn't! Instead, if you dare to pause the movie for more than a few minutes it will most likely not play at all anymore.

Quite frankly, the recent year has seen the worst development in quality for Youtube since. Now, I don't care too much about their "tie YouTube to your G+ account" spiel. I never commented and I don't plan to release any videos myself, so ... well, if I did either I would be pissed, but that way I can stomach that. But given that they are already unable to play 720p videos sensibly because they can neither provide the stream nor allow me to buffer it sensibly, I can do without 4k, 8k or whatever-k. All it would do for me is stutter every 3 instead of 10 seconds.

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[jones_supa]

Make sure that you are using the latest Adobe Flash Player (version 11.9).

Also make sure that you have enough bandwidth available (YouTube uses 2Mb/s for 720p).

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out google support forums. It's not a cutomer issue. I can easily get 40Mb/s down off usenet, yet for about 16 hours of the day, 720p video on youtube can not stream to me. I'm a comcast customer in Oregon. They have some kind of major issue with bandwidth on the west coast of the US for the last 6 months.

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[dbraden]

I, too, have been having a terrible experience with YouTube, with it often times just freezing at the half or 2/3rd mark. It also seems that when you select a specific resolution, they take it as merely a suggestion. As you noticed, you can no longer let it buffer, they try to do some type of adaptive resolution switching which more often than not results in the stream dropping down to 240 just because I chose to skip ahead. Very annoying.

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Are you using your ISP's usenet mirror? If so, those are often not subject to the same throttling as the upstream stuff.

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[DarwinSurvivor]

2 ways I've found to force it to a higher resolution are to "pause, adjust, unpause" or "adjust, rewind 3 seconds". Both seem to work for me, though it is VERY annoying when the resolution "resets" when clicking a link :(

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[deragon]

Unfortunatly, us Linux users are stuck with flash 11.2.202.332 as Adobe has abandonned the plateform, unless you use Chrome. We are not moving fast enough away from flash...

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[Lennie]

The reason you can't download from YouTube is probably because your ISP throttles the bandwidth from YouTube. Or because they don't have enough bandwidth however they peer with YouTube.

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[recharged95]

Same here, some of my linux boxes easily crash around the 2/3rd mark, especially when running fullscreen mode.

H.264 and H.265 are codecs licensed by the content creators. Not the consumer products folks. Only consumer product folks that would be interested are the personal video camera makers (e.g. GoPro), but then again, everyone wants to take consumer captured video into the pro-sumer/professional level. And that means fitting the proper workflow. Workflow is about efficiency in transfer, not the 'best codec'. You pay for the H.264 license cause everyone has an agreement to follow the spec--everything 'works'. You think Google's going to enforce anything? It's open source, so "the community" takes care of the fringe issues.... hence perpetual beta is the result.

If Google wanted to push VP9, they should be doing this at NAB, not CES. Doing it at CES just shows how much they don't know about video production, codec usage and it's just another "ad to the consumer" of the brilliant braintrust that got VP9 to stream 4K @ 1/2 the raw bitrate... considering H.265 already does that.

Re:Oh great. And when will they fix their crap?

[dbraden]

The pause-adjust-unpause sort-of works for me, but it doesn't change right away. It'll run for several seconds at the lower res, presumably while it buffers the chosen res. But if I'm watching something like a conference video I need the higher res to read text on the projection screen and by the time it "sharpens up" the presenter is has already switched slides so I have to seek back again. Ugh.

No they don't,...

[mha]

...because most of them are filmed freehand using totally unsuitable optics of a smartphone. So even when they get that resolution it will just be shaky fuzzy images.

Re:No they don't,...

[fatphil]

And the sound quality is awful - all you get is this constant "wooshing" noise.

Re:No they don't,...

[Anonymous Coward]

it will just be shaky fuzzy images.

As opposed to the real shaky fuzzy cats?

Re:No they don't,...

[rts008]

That just makes yer cat look more fuzzy and fluffy, FTW!
It's not a bug, it's an 'added value feature'!

I choose VP9

[FithisUX]

I am on a national project requiring to stream opengl framebuffers. I had to replace the old slow system with a new one that does not need a special decoder. Guess what I used. VP9 through gstreamer and it plays nicely with FF/Chrome. However if I have time i will convert it to the SDK provided by Google mainly as a personal project.

Sounds like a Hateboi Tautology

[Uberbah]

And not a single Apple device will play VP9.

And your evidence to support this assertion? So what if Apple is not among the chipmakers supporting VP9 before the gate, since Apple isn't in the business of making chips, but buying them and putting them in consumer electronics.

Re:Sounds like a Hateboi Tautology

[Anonymous Coward]

While Apple may not have their own fabs, they have designed their own SoC for their mobile products for several years now, they don't just buy chips off the shelf.

Re:MPEG/MPEG-LA is like the Nuclear Industry

[symbolset]

That deal is not what you think it is. You have been reading too much Florian Mueller.

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

But is the source really open? The article seems to conflate 'open source' with 'royalty free'. Where is the code? Is it all open?

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[TheRaven64]

It's not just an open spec, it's a BSD-licensed implementation with a royalty-free patent grant. You can take Google's implementation, adapt it for your product (if you want software decoding, that just means recompile it), and use it without having to ask permission from Google or pay Google any money. Hardware and video library developers are free to implement it without paying Google anything.

Re:THIS is fantastic news, For ISP's yes

[hebertrich]

bandwidth , imho , is less of an issue than download caps from internet providers. if we are to get video content delivery that is affordable , we have first to turn to our local service providers for necessary bandwidth and way higher transfer caps ( if any ) than what we have presently. whatever the way we look at a codec , take it's transfer rate / bandwidth and make a calculation for it's cost ( to we the consumers ) in terms of how much data it will " consume " for a month . That is the one obstacle that i believe is overlooked by a lot of analysts . What is the cost of getting all our media from the internet vs a cable subscription or even over the air hd ( which works well ) ? . Time to make calculations

ARM != hardware vendor

[Anonymous Coward]

TIA

Now 1K$ for a monitor

[gbjbaanb]

Dell is releasing a set of 4k monitors - 32 and 24" are already with us, a cheaper 28" version coming soon.

So you get 3,840 x 2,160 res on all of them, 99% AdobeRGB colour space, and 60Hz over Displayport 1.2.

'course I'll need a new graphics card :(

Non-square PAR; live action; capped uploads

[tepples]

At 240p NTSC, a dot clock rate of 135/22 = 6.14 MHz produces square pixels. But actual consoles that ran at 240p tended to have non-square pixel aspect ratios, such as 12:7 (Atari 2600), 6:7 (Apple II, Atari 7800, IBM CGA), 3:4 (Commodore 64), 8:7 (ColecoVision, NES, SMS, most TG16 games, Super NES, and some Genesis games), 32:35 (other Genesis games, PlayStation), etc. See articles about NES overscan and PAR and other classic consoles' PAR. If I record one of these consoles with a DVD recorder or a capture card and then point-resize the recording, it won't look very good because each point-resize cell won't correspond to one pixel output by the console. Nor will conversions of live-action home movies taped with an SD camcorder look very good point-resized.

Besides, if the higher bitrate and point resize really help, YouTube should be doing them automatically. Or must people on an Internet plan whose uploads are capped per month rent a VPS, upload the video to the VPS, resize the video on the VPS, and then upload from the VPS to YouTube?

Firefox support

[RebelWebmaster]

In case anybody's wondering, Firefox 28 will be shipping with VP9 support.

Here's who will decide if VP9 is next

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the "Theora or H..264?" days there was a big question: which would be next. Guess who decided which codec I had to make sure I had hardware decoder(s!) for.

The Scene. I play what the release groups use. All the rips are transcoded anyway (I don't want a 50 Gigabyte straight Bluray rip) so they'll use what they use. If hobbit2.mkv uses VP9 codec, then all my hardware will play VP9. If it uses X.265, then all my hardware will play H.265.

It's that simple. They are the ones who decide these things. And they'll decide based on encode time and quality-per-bitrate.

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you obsessing over companies being "locked out" instead of the fact that nobody can keep pace with Google, and thus they just do whatever they want and gain goodwill because they "opened" something nobody really had a say in to begin with?

I know that open standards are better than closed ones, but when one company basically dictates the direction of the web, it's not quite the glorious open source future that a lot of Slashdotters seem to be hailing. Google is not your friend. They are one of the largest companies on earth. Giving them a pass for their behavior just because they seem a bit less evil than the last guy isn't a sign of wisdom.

Why VP9?

[billcarson]

First google result gave me this comparison: http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf Seems like VP9 is even doing worse than the current-generation h.264 encoders. So we're using worser codecs for the benefit of not having to deal with patent issues?

Re:Why VP9?

[Malc]

Wow, and it has a much worse encoding speed. x264 is a slow AVC encoder, and the reference HEVC HM10 encoder is horrendous and probably an order or two magnitude slower than third party implementations. Hard to justify VP9 for commercial content producers (it will cost more to deliver lower quality content).

lol....Seriously...

[Psycho_Bunny]

From the article: "Google continues to innovate in fields it has almost 90% of the market and despite that it doesn’t show any sign of abuse." Oh, please. Google is the single most abusive company it's ever been my misfortune to encounter. I honestly believe that - internally - they have a corporate culture of open disdain for "customers" - a word that's probable seldom used at G-HQ, or when used, it's sort of annoyingly spat out - like a small hairball at the back of the throat. Ask anyone who said "No" to Google's question about whether or not you want to change your YouTube ID to your real name. Google literally harassed, lied to, manipulated and stalked those people. These scummy, hypocritical jerks actually when into my email account, disconnected my "Switch to" account, replacing it with a "Suggested" YouTube Channel account. They're operating way beyond the boundaries of the social contract.

Re:lol....Seriously...

[garyebickford]

Rule of thumb for consumers: If you're not paying for something, that's not the product. You are the product.

Re:lol....Seriously...

[wonkey_monkey]

If you're not paying for something, that's not the product. You are the product.

I feel dirty and cheap. And insufficiently remunerated.

awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now my 720p game will look even shittier!

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[msobkow]

So Google, IBM, Apple, and everyone else who contributes time and money to open source projects should stop doing so because you want to write something in your basement and take 20 years to do so?

But when are we going to get 60fps?

[wonkey_monkey]

Hey YouTube, how about letting us have 50/60fps first?

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[ADRA]

Google much?
http://www.webmproject.org/code/

Re:Microsoft and 90s all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

Google much?

Exactly the issue. ba-da bump
I'll be here all week.

This will be guaranteed shit

[PJ6]

when temporal resolution is constantly ignored either outright or effectively from compression. I'm tired of streaming "full HD" and being able to see each frame like slideshow.