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NASA Launching 4K TV Channel
An anonymous reader writes: NASA has announced that it's partnering with Harmonic to launch a new TV channel that delivers video at 4k resolution (4096x2160). The channel is called NASA TV UHD, and it'll go live on November 1. Content will be generated by cameras at the International Space Station and on other NASA missions, as well as any 4K content they can remaster from old footage.
People that have enough bandwidth to watch it, I'm sure it's great.
No, I'm not bitter about paying $3k per month for rent in downtown Seattle and stuck with dialup.
That sounds great, but DirecTV still doesn't even carry NASA TV in HD.
You are as well!
Pan&scan back with a vengeance?
4k and UltraHD are not the same format!
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
(Digital Cinema Initiative) 4k resolution means 4*1024=4096 columns, and generally 2*1080=2160 lines (with a resulting aspect ratio of ~17:9). It has been used for several years in movie projectors.
UHD-1 means 3840x2160 (16:9), which is 4 times the "Full HD" of 1920x1080 (or, as it's often abbreviated, 1080p, with 1080 for the number of lines, and p for progressive, 16:9 ratio implied)
(While there's also UHD-2, which is 4 times UHD-1 at the gigantic 7680x4320.)
Most screens sold as "4k" are in fact only "UHD-1", except some specific ones, generally used for very high-end video editing, now usually advertised as "True 4k" (which includes a larger color gamut, among other things).
There's also an issue that if you run at 4096x2160, 60Hz, 12-bit JPEG2000 colors, the overwhelming majority of HDMI and DisplayPort cables won't be able to carry the signal due to insufficient bandwidth (it would seem that some monitors can use two cables as a workaround).
Will it be streaming UHD video in VP9, HEVC or what?
Surely tens of millions of people would pay a few dollars a month to be able to watch 4K video from the moon, sent back by a handful of rovers? Surely if Russia could put Lunokhod on the moon over fifty years ago (please correct me if I'm out by a few years), with ancient technology, it should be child's play to send up a handful of rovers with ten 4K cameras in each one (for multiple views, and in case any of the cameras failed for any reason). They are dirt cheap, (the cameras), compared to what existed fifty years ago. Imagine the incredible views that would be seen, every single day of the mission.
I hope they also get some good microphones, and allocate decent audio bandwidth, so space feels less like the technological frontier it was 50 years ago, and so you don't need an interpreter to work out what they're saying.
Harmonic claims to be the first UHD consumer channel in North America.
But Amazon Instant Video has offered some UHD content for a while and UltraFlix, a dedicated 4K UHD strteaming service has been around for awhile and keeps getting better.
I sometimes check out to ISS-HD feed of the earth below here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload
But ll too often there is nothing to watch because the earth below is dark or there's no space to ground link. It'd be great if NASA filled in that dark time with other videos.
Coming up on Africa right now.
I know I would. But why stop there? Put some 4K video cameras on other space objects too.
I would rather see this money go towards extending the New Horizon mission.
NASA knows there is a boundary; we can't get into space. Everything NASA produces is "generated", it's virtual reality, nothing is real.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Yeah, for a month. Or two, for everyone who forgets to cancel.
The moon is a big, dusty, gray rock. As cool as it would be to me to go there, my interest in high-res video of dusty rocks is measured in minutes.
Now I can watch "VIDEO FILE" and "EDUCATION FILE" in 4K!
I fear that the power requirements to broadcast a 8Mpx/s signal from Mars towards Earth might be a bit steep?