Not so pointless. Yes, you do need a large TV for 4K to be worthwhile. My current HDTV is 70", I'd benefit from an 85" 4K television in the same media room. But most people by 32-40" televisions... the format could certainly suffer the way high definition audio did, just not enough people interested to hit consumer saturation.
Steaming, or at least net-based downloading is certainly possible today. Red's Red-ray player is using some new CODEC (possibly eyeIOs or something home grown) at only 20 Mb/s. Sony's doing something similar with their HDD-based player. Netflix (certainly not a leader on picture quality) claims they're good with 4K at 15Mb/s. ISPs may render these problematic with monthly download caps, but the technology is certainly there. Yes, it'll look even better on disc. Disc looks better for HD than streaming, broadcast, or cable/satellite. That didn't make non-disc formats pointless.
It's not a replacement, it's augmenting it. The ATSC 3.0 committee is discussing 4K. I wouldn't hold my breath; it took six years just to decide analog vs. digital for ATSC 1.0:-)
The first HDTVs were ATSC compatible, but not ATSC compliant -- no ATSC tuners. Full 1080i60/720p60 compliant, but no tuner built-in. And it's not just one thing... this was the greater HD industry dealing with things like analog YPrPb vs, digital HDMI or whatever.
As for that... very few modern Blu-ray players have YPrPb outputs. Usually just HDMI. They can be had, for a price... I found one on Amazon from Toshiba, $125. Probably some more there, but they're fading. Or you get a digital to analog converter from Monoprice (which may downrez, depending on what HDCP tells it to do). Not a highly compatible situation.
I'm on my third large HDTV (65" analog, 71" DLP, 70" LCD-LED) since they were first available. If you bought before digital, you were an early enough adopter to get hosed on that. There is future proofing of a kind... the Sony PS3 was a future-proof Blu-ray player. But very rarely, and even more rarely when a technology is new. It was a foregone conclusion that HDTV was getting digital inputs, they just hadn't been invented yet when the first TVs materialized. And we were going though a huge shakeup in display technology, also moving analog to digital.
Some of that, certainly... Beta was a Sony-only thing, due to their not licensing it. Much as HD-DVD was a Toshiba-only thing, due to their selling it below cost (because Toshiba got money per disc, like a gaming console), making it impossible for other companies to even want to make an HD-DVD player (other than Samsung's brief experimentation with Blu-ray players that could also read HD-DVD).
VHS had a head up on rentals, too... the first VHS players ran 2 hour tapes, Beta only one hour. So rentals didn't make much sense until the second generation Beta, and at that point, running the tape slower, Beta wasn't as good as VHS. And a business like a video rental store really wants to pick just one winner.. they'd rather diversify their shelf-space than have to support multiple formats carrying the same thing.
And the claim is made that the Pornography Industry also helped VHS win. They put porn out on VHS, due to the cheaper licensing deals... porn studios, at least in those days, were all very small. And for the first time, folks could discretely get their freak on, on demand and at home. This was a factor for sure, not certain just how significant.
Actually, both were pretty much established by the content providers. HD-DVD was set up to fail, launched more like a video game console than a disc format, a virtually proprietary Toshiba/Microsoft venture, sold below cost. That actually did resonate with buyers, even the bleeding edge folks. What really decided it was the content people. In January 2008, Warner Bros. announced they were dropping HD-DVD, followed in February by Paramount announcing they were going Blu-ray. Toshiba officially threw in the towel a few weeks later.. Universal announced they were going Blu-ray only the same day. Of course, it wasn't just that. Even though Sony didn't have stand-alone Blu-ray players out in any volume, they had sold 10 million PS3s before the first million HD-DVD players had been sold. Blockbuster (remember when they mattered?) went Blu-ray only summer of 2007, and Wal-Mart and Netflix both went Blu-ray only in February 2008, while Best Buy was only recommending Blu-ray starting then. Lots of dominoes, all falling the same way.
VHS grabbed an early dominance due to a lower price and a two-hour recording time... users could time shift a whole film, not just a prime time TV show. Beta soon offered a 2-hour format, but they had to drop to below VHS quality (slowing the tape speed from 1.5ips to 0.75ips, versus VHS's 1.3ips), particularly after VHS-HQ debuted, which pretty much put VHS on par or better than Beta. And once video rentals drove VCR sales, VHS had an easy win. Yeah, it was horrible quality, but so was broadcast in those days.
And the brain adjusts pretty quickly, learning to ignore the bad stuff unless specifically looking for it. That's also why people accepted the early TiVo, which had terribly artifacty recording, and DVD, despite its faults, and cable/satellite/broadcast digital TV, all of which is overcompressed.
Supposedly the Blu-ray folks have a committee going on 4K discs. And actually, if they rolled this out like 3D, that's not a bad thing. 3D Blu-ray (Profile 5) was actually kind of a substantial change... a 3D player needs a 2x BD drive, versus the 1x drive for all previous profiles. But that's entirely hidden from the customer, and pretty much any 3D disc package also has a standard 2D disc, and probably a DVD and/or digital download, also included. So marketing it that way, as something in the Blu-ray family, has a much better chance of success, IMHO, than launching this whole new disc format.
And storage-wise, it's kind of a no-brainer. Either sticking with 50GB discs and using HEVC (or something better) for 4K compression, or going to the already exising BD-XL standard (up to 100GB on three layers or 128GB on four layers) and sticking with AVC, delivers enough storage for 4K use. I particularly expect this approach because Sony has already announced that the upcoming PS4 can do 4K video. Keep in mind that the PS3 supported every new profile so far announced for Blu-ray... Sony found it pretty handy to have that software-driven BD platform available for their development purposes, and to drive adoption of Blu-ray (when I bought mine, it was one of the cheaper BD players, and in retrospect, the only future-proof model).
Sony's FMP-X1 4K media player is apparently using eyeIO's video CODEC, claimed to have a higher compression efficiency than HEVC, on this player... at comfortable-for-today's-Blu-ray encoding rates. Given the need for new players, that's maybe the most interesting aspect of this. If they're getting quality 4K at the same bitrates as today's AVC-encoded Blu-rays, that suggests the 4K format is exactly just another kind of Blu-ray, in both normal and 3D models, just as we have today. Same disc hardware, same disc manufacturing, etc... just different code and/or electronics. That would really help establish this. Given the rise of streaming media, it's unlikely a stand-alone 4K format could launch today.
Passive LCD uses a different film, but it's not a significant extra expense. LCD panels have a polarizer on them, all of them. If you doubt it, wear a pair of polarized shades or, for that matter, RealD glasses around and tilt your head around those many displays in your life. The passive displays require an alternating circular pixel aligned polarizer, so yeah, it's a more complex version of an existing step in the process.
My new-last-spring Sony has passive 3D. I find it far superior to active... no significant dimming of the screen is a big one.
3D is like Blu-ray these days... if you buy any old video player over about $50, it does Blu-ray. It's a feature, even if some won't use it. 3D is the same thing.. it was cheap to implement (which is why the television makers jumped to that as their Next Big Thing) and now it's just going to be there in any television above a certain threshold.
It's possible 4K goes the same way. Given that LCD panel makers are pushing 2.5K displays onto 8" tablet panels, it's pretty likely that the pixel resolution over time is scaling faster than price. So maybe. If video DSPs are fast enough, they might sell a few on the promise of HD upscaling, much as quite a few folks seem satisfied with DVD upscaling on HD screens. But I don't see it really taking off unless media (whether streaming or disc-based) and television embrace it. And even then, many aren't going to see any difference... and some will still have that one yellow RCA-ended CVBS connector driving their 4K display:-)
The TV makers are the guys pushing 4K... not the TV networks. Just as in the case with 3D TV.
See, they got spoiled on TV upgrades. As you say, NTSC ran for over 40 years... ok, sure, that whole nasty color switcheroo in the early 60s, and the vast might of the world's brain power spent on adaptive comb filters and other things in a hopeless attempt to turn the pig's ear of analog TV into some kind of silk purse. So TV evolved, but slowly. And you probably kept that old TV for 10 or 20 year at least... TVs actually wore out!
But then HDTV came along. And a bunch of use early adopters went out and bought the first generation analog HDTVs... really just SDTVs with CRT-driven HD displays, no digital tuner, no digital inputs (well, sometimes Firewire, but that only worked with MPEG-2 input). Even though this was a fairly small group... many decided to pass on a 600lbs., $4000 TV with no content (sadly, not I), it was a huge boon to the TV industry.
And followed up in 5 years or so by the first generation digital HDTVs, the move to digital displays (plasma, LCoS, DLP... even LCD, but back then, on the low end)... so for me it was another $4000 for a digital TV, this time a 71" DLP (died last spring). And because of Blu-ray, and ATSC/cable/satellite had gone HD by then, and football looks so good in HD you never want to see it in SD again, they sold crazy numbers of new televisions. They were now hooked to this 5-7 year upgrade cycle... doesn't take long to love success.
And it kind of looped again; the vast might of the world's brain power this time set to make LCDs not look terrible, since plasma screens had high cost, crazy power requirements, and burn-in, but pretty much everyone was now demanding a TV that hung on the wall like a gigantic picture frame. But there wasn't a Big New Thing to sell you on, other than that hanging on the wall and not sucking thing. Some of it was just price... making LCD panels the size of double-garage doors in one shot, they could make big screen much cheaper... my DLP replacement, a 70" Sony, was just over $2,000 this time. But they figured on 3D as a big hook, since Avatar did so well, and... ok, since Avatar did so well. And, sure, because folks were dumping cash at the movies on 3D films.
Only problem... 3D at home kind of sucked. Particularly the LCD shutter glasses -- they dim the display with low duty cycle, even with that, crosstalk, etc. My latest TV had 3D -- you basically can't get a premium model without it, but it's passive 3D (they rig the LCD polarizer to alternate lines, then use RealD style circular polarizers... sounds like it might be bad, but it's actually an improvement). About as useful as 3D film -- occasionally good, but usually just a distraction. The nice thing about passive, too, is that you can get 2D glasses, which let you view the "3D" video without the 3D effect. But I digress.
4K doesn't have any of the problems of 3D... no need for glasses, primarily. The problem is more along the lines of the problem we've had establishing a followup higher-end digital music format. Ok, today that's Blu-ray, but mostly because Blu-ray just exceeded the other attempts as part of the main stream spec. And the format wars between DVD-Audio and SACD -- both of which required a new player -- were not pretty. But the main problem there was just that most people buying CDs didn't have home stereo systems that did justice to CDs... much less something with twice the resolution. And also, these entered the market just as the digital download revolution was kicking into high gear. The average listener was more concerned with getting all their music in a pocket sized player, even if that meant high compression and relatively lousy sound (but still historically great, compared to AM radio and the typical turntable owned by most folks in decades past).
I have worked in digital video since the early 90s, and HD about as long as one could have. I know "better" when I see it. The 4K Sonys on display at many big box stores, playing 50Mb/s AVC 4K v
HD broadcasts in the UK use the DVB T2 system, which has a raw bitrate of up to 35.4Mb/s per channel. That's the effect of using 256-QAM and 8MHz analog slots, rather than the 8VSB used for ATSC... and pretty much only ATSC. US cable and satellite systems also use QAM modulation. DVB T2 also allows AVC encoding, not just MPEG-2.
So the BBC may suck, but it's not for lack of bandwidth, it's something else. Even the old 64-QAM DVB-T system delivered 24.13Mb/s per 8MHz slot, and that was just for SD broadcast.
First of all, all broadcast video is 4:2:0 decimated. That's an ATSC and DVB requirement. So you immediately have to cut your bitrates in half; that averages out to 12 bits per pixel.
And of course, ATSC transmissions are only 1920x1080 (technically 1088, but the bottom eight lines are blanked) or 1280x720. Most broadcasts are either 1080i60 or 720p60, though technically, 30p and 23.976 "NTSC Film" are also supported. Most broadcast stations transmit at least 13Mb/s on their primary channel, leaving the rest for a low quality SD channel or two. Yeah, there are some that claim to transmit three HD channels, but that's pretty rare.
Older Blu-ray discs use MPEG-2 compression on a single layer, they're not significantly better than ATSC. Modern discs, using AVC on a 50GB disc, that's another story. If well compressed -- there's an art to that, too. Encoding engineers can apply overall low-pass filtering, manually vary encoding bitrate, etc. to deliver a consistent visual experience. Auto-compressed discs do the latter algorithmically, the former not at all, so they don't look as good, unless they just crank up the bitrate to compensate.
All intraframe video compression algorithms rely on a small number of independent frames and good redundancy in-between them, P and B frames in AVC and MPEG-2. When the motion search algorithms can't rely on redundancy, as in the case of fast motion, the encoder lacks the bit-budget to encode that video without motion artifacts. There's more latitude in Blu-ray than broadcast, of course, both in bitrate and the option to use VBR, but it's not unlimited. On Blu-ray, there's also the option of going to 720p60, but film is usually 1080p24. Much of the visual artifacting comes from differences between adjacent DCT blocks, thus, applying a global low pass filter in such areas (which you'll see in use in any very fast motion on nearly any commercial DVD or Blu-ray) lessens or eliminates the artifacting, and given the likely motion blur on 24p film transfers anyway, may just pass without being obvious. Of course, that's not true of video shot on AVC or MPEG-2 camcorders... the camera itself may warn the operator about motion that's crushing the encoder, but it doesn't selectively blur the overall image.
You don't need to quite scale it directly. We were doing SD at 8Mb/s (ish) with DVD, but didn't need to scale that to 48Mb/s for HD. In fact, while the spec allows for 19.4Mb/s, you're correct to note that most broadcasters are going to include a few SD side-channels. So you're not even twice the bitrate in practice, scaling DVD to ATSC HD. And that was a factor-of-6 increase, not a factor of two. Going by that rule of thumb, you'd be happy with MPEG-2 at 25Mb/s or AVC at 12Mb/s. I don't actually believe that, but that's the math of what came before. And maybe not that far off... Netflix already claims they're happy with 4K at 15Mb/s. Then again, they're also happy with 720p24 at HD.
Not sure that's sufficient, but it should be pretty obvious that you don't need a linear increase in bitrate. And the Red-ray encoding, whatever that is, suggests that the same 19.4Mb/s with advanced encoding ought to deliver 4K at acceptable quality for broadcast, given sufficient encoding cleverness. But I wouldn't hold my breath -- the industry doesn't like to push hard on these things. They'd probably consider AVC, but not HEVC or something even better... they're likely to pick the best mature technology. Which is why these standards are always behind the curve. But they're also thinking about realtime encoding, transport stream re-encoders once you get into cable and satellite, etc. Commercial encoding, via disc or download, has to budget to do it very off-line if necessary, fully tweak it by encoding engineers, etc.
Not surprising... this looks to be a perhaps customized version of an NXP embedded ARM processor, the M7 that is. If I'm paying as little as $3.50 for these, I can only imagine how cheap they are for Apple. And this should make practical a slew of applications that could be done without it, but would likely run down your battery in no time flat. The little IOP can sample and cook data for the main SOC all day without using much juice.
Google introduced a small, powerful tablet last year: the Nexus 7. Apple introduced a less small, less powerful tablet last year: the iPad Mini. Sure, the new one is better, both of them. It has yet to be shown how the dual-core Mini compares in performance to the four-core Nexus 7.
I'm currently using a plenty fast Samsung Note 8.0... small enough, powerful enough for anything I'm currently doing on tablets. That's what really matters. Markedly better than the recently-dropped Asus Transformer that preceded it. And the real win on a small tablet is the "S-Pen", the wacom-style digitizer. Far more accuracy on-screen than a finger on a 10" tablet, so you're not suffering at all with the smaller screen, at least for interactive use. A bit small for reading my guitar music, but this may only be temporary, or maybe just for around the office. Best device ever for note-taking.
5c is just the 5 in a new case. It's supposed to appeal to a different market than the 5/5s did, expanding the reach of the iPhone a bit, perhaps. We'll see. It's hardly any risk, the design was paid for long ago, this is just packaging it a little cheaper. If it doesn't work, don't expect a colorful 5s-remake next year.
Apple's always had a little diversification in their Mac line... and generally much less than any major competitor. Today they're at an all-time low I think, far as models go, at least since laptops were possible. They nixed the 17" laptops, all laptops are SSD/no-optical now, etc. They still really doing just one iPhone per year... no good reason to stop making the old one if it's still selling. Contrast that to Samsung, who seems to have one new smartphone model per month. Same with tablets.
Apple's one-size-fits-all approach was good when they were the only one doing the job, and fine when they were the only ones doing the job well. But with other vendors building better devices, taking more risks, thus more innovation, they do at some point have to compete. Just being a fashion house isn't going to be enough forever. They're good at making each year's device "about twice as fast" as last year's... particularly when it comes to gaming. But that's about the only thing you can count on. Not enough for many users, who see larger screens, new I/O devices, built-in wacom digitizers, etc.
That's not to suggest Apple should make a radical change to the iPhone or iPad... and that's also not what anyone who's innovating does today. Rather, they try different things. So Samsung made a fairly predictable Galaxy S4, but they also followed it up with a few variations... a serious camera phone (Galaxy Zoom), the giant-screen S4, etc. They also pretty much created the "phablet" market, and made that work by adding the wacom, so a large phone screen could actually deliver tablet capabilities, despite your fingers still being the size they were last year. Apple needs to try some variations, try something new. They ultimately will have to something, whether that's experimenting on their own or copying the other guys. But I don't think they survive, not at their current "leader of the pack" levels anyway, if it's just about taking the best of Samsung or Motorola or HTC from this year into next year's devices.
Actually, with phones, Apple went directly from one tier to three-tier with the iPhone 4S... they offered the iPhone 4 at the $99 point and the iPhone 3GS at the $0 point. It was just that, since the iPhone 3GS was only for AT&T (GSM, and before T-Mo got involved), they didn't have that on Verizon or Sprint.
They are certainly upping the SKUs at a high rate: two iPhone 4S, five iPhones 5c, and nine iPhones 5s. But they have finally acknowledged, and rightly so, that the iPhone is a luxury item, and that pretty much makes it a fashion item. So while one size still apparently almost fits all, once finish clearly does not. Most other phone makers are not doing the "fashion statement" thing.... Nokia a bit, I guess, with their similar color selection.
And of course, the 5c isn't new, it's just the iPhone 5 cost reduced and put in a plastic case. This is what Apple's been doing, only now they're making more money at it and making it seem new. Targeting a different demographic than the high-end user. My college-age kids are both pushing for iPhones (where did I go wrong) for Christmas... the boy (first year Pharmacy school) wants the 5s, "because the new OS runs like crap on older models", the girl (second year Bio/Nursing) wants a 5c, "because they have pink".
Yup... they're removing any barrier to the new OS, and thus, any good reason for older users not to upgrade. That may kill off some old hardware faster, if there are machines that can't be upgraded, also maybe a good thing in the short term. And they're giving Mac users a big warm and fuzzy smooch on the cheek, at the same time their main competition has been pushing an OS that practically no one likes, for $100+ a copy. They're looking at PC users and saying "come over here, we have cookies".
I think everyone's missing the point of iWork... this is mostly just a shot at Microsoft. This is Apple deciding that selling hardware is more important for them than nickel and diming on apps... and given their 30-50% margins, that's probably a good notion. Microsoft's super powers in office automation came from them controlling the OS and pre-installing Office as a bundle with Windows for years. This effectively killed off the competition -- who's going to pay for WordPerfect when Office is "Free" (well, I did, back in the day, but most folks didn't).
Now Apple's selling a volume of devices that's at least interesting compared to the volume of devices that Microsoft powers with Windows. Dropping iWork on the iPad delivers an Apple-blessed office solution that's probably better tuned to the quirks of iPad users than anything from Microsoft would be. Including that on the Mac means full sync throughout the Apple ecosystem. And helps prevent Microsoft from establishing any kind of beachhead on the iPad, or probably what they're really thinking, via the collaborative parts of Office365 vs. iCloud.
In short, a smart move for Apple. Not pushed as much yet, but between Google Docs and Quickoffice, Google is already offering this same kind of free thing on Android. And Android outsold Windows last year, and they're killing it even more this year.
It's clear Microsoft Office became a corporate standard, but not clear why so many still use it -- it's pretty awful. Not that OpenOffice/LibreOffice are much better, themselves being too much clones of the bad ideas in MS-Office. But then again, I didn't have to pay $500 or whatever for either of those, or Quickoffice on Android. Microsoft trying to get me to use their tools on Android, for collaboration, or online, they have the same problem with mobile users that Wordperfect/Corel and Lotus/IBM had all those years... they're not the free thing anymore.
When you're dependent on Apple for your hardware, the new Mac Pro is certainly better than the old Mac Pro. Unless you need a different GPU, of course.
Compared to the PC market, it's crazy overpriced. I put together a system with more i7 cores, more RAM (64GB), a larger SSD (960GB), a built-in RAID10 (6GB effective), and ok, less GPU power (just one high-end ATi card), but with room for three more if I ever need that... for less than half of this price.
I guess Intel's running late on the 12-core version of that CPU, though... Apple had claimed when they introduced the new "Macintrash" design that they'd be shipping in the fall, and then, pretty much just talked about the high-end model.
Firewire hasn't been the standard in professional video for quite a few years. For digital video transfer these days, it's SDI on the high end, HDMI on the low end. Firewire was only fast enough for compressed video transfer.
Media wise, modern camcorders use flash media, SDXC on the low-end, proprietary cards like P2 (a four-SD RAID, a Panasonic standard), xQD (PCIe based memory, mostly a Sony thing), or just plain old SATA SSDs (Red, BlackMagic). And these connect to PCs via... you guessed it... USB! That's because Firewire was never used as a data transfer mechanism, but a video transfer mechanism. Realtime only... so if you have a 42min tape to transfer, that's going to take 42 minutes. Or about six minutes over USB... the memory card is the bottleneck here for SD cards, not the USB 2.0 interface.
All USB interfaces since USB 1.0 have a dedicated chip to manage the USB transfer. It used to be part of the "South Bridge" chip, at least back when I was designing PCs with it (late 1990s). These days, it's part of an "I/O Hub" in PCs, an SOC in pretty much everything else. Yeah, one of your four or six or whatever CPUs needs to be a little more involved in a USB transfer than a Firewire transfer, because a Firewire device can master the bus, a USB device can't. Same rule applies to SATA... only your PC can master the SATA bus, not a SATA device. That doesn't make Firewire faster than SATA.
Firewire always needed an EXTERNAL chip to do the processing, not because of any issue with how processing can be done, in or out of chips. But rather, the industry's rejection of Apple's licensing terms kept pretty much every chipset company from including Firewire in a PC chipset. You wanted Firewire, pretty much relegated to being a specialty item, you bough a chip for your motherboard or a card for your PC... like mine (I have an external RAID on Firewire... not much faster than USB 2.0 in practice, but I'm sure part of that's Windows... neither is acceptable for a modern RAID. I'll move to USB 3.0 or GigE at some point, but I also have an internal RAID -- that's the one for speed. The external one is mostly for short term backup.
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Not so pointless. Yes, you do need a large TV for 4K to be worthwhile. My current HDTV is 70", I'd benefit from an 85" 4K television in the same media room. But most people by 32-40" televisions... the format could certainly suffer the way high definition audio did, just not enough people interested to hit consumer saturation.
Steaming, or at least net-based downloading is certainly possible today. Red's Red-ray player is using some new CODEC (possibly eyeIOs or something home grown) at only 20 Mb/s. Sony's doing something similar with their HDD-based player. Netflix (certainly not a leader on picture quality) claims they're good with 4K at 15Mb/s. ISPs may render these problematic with monthly download caps, but the technology is certainly there. Yes, it'll look even better on disc. Disc looks better for HD than streaming, broadcast, or cable/satellite. That didn't make non-disc formats pointless.
It's not a replacement, it's augmenting it. The ATSC 3.0 committee is discussing 4K. I wouldn't hold my breath; it took six years just to decide analog vs. digital for ATSC 1.0 :-)
The first HDTVs were ATSC compatible, but not ATSC compliant -- no ATSC tuners. Full 1080i60/720p60 compliant, but no tuner built-in. And it's not just one thing... this was the greater HD industry dealing with things like analog YPrPb vs, digital HDMI or whatever.
As for that ... very few modern Blu-ray players have YPrPb outputs. Usually just HDMI. They can be had, for a price... I found one on Amazon from Toshiba, $125. Probably some more there, but they're fading. Or you get a digital to analog converter from Monoprice (which may downrez, depending on what HDCP tells it to do). Not a highly compatible situation.
I'm on my third large HDTV (65" analog, 71" DLP, 70" LCD-LED) since they were first available. If you bought before digital, you were an early enough adopter to get hosed on that. There is future proofing of a kind... the Sony PS3 was a future-proof Blu-ray player. But very rarely, and even more rarely when a technology is new. It was a foregone conclusion that HDTV was getting digital inputs, they just hadn't been invented yet when the first TVs materialized. And we were going though a huge shakeup in display technology, also moving analog to digital.
Some of that, certainly... Beta was a Sony-only thing, due to their not licensing it. Much as HD-DVD was a Toshiba-only thing, due to their selling it below cost (because Toshiba got money per disc, like a gaming console), making it impossible for other companies to even want to make an HD-DVD player (other than Samsung's brief experimentation with Blu-ray players that could also read HD-DVD).
VHS had a head up on rentals, too... the first VHS players ran 2 hour tapes, Beta only one hour. So rentals didn't make much sense until the second generation Beta, and at that point, running the tape slower, Beta wasn't as good as VHS. And a business like a video rental store really wants to pick just one winner.. they'd rather diversify their shelf-space than have to support multiple formats carrying the same thing.
And the claim is made that the Pornography Industry also helped VHS win. They put porn out on VHS, due to the cheaper licensing deals... porn studios, at least in those days, were all very small. And for the first time, folks could discretely get their freak on, on demand and at home. This was a factor for sure, not certain just how significant.
Actually, both were pretty much established by the content providers. HD-DVD was set up to fail, launched more like a video game console than a disc format, a virtually proprietary Toshiba/Microsoft venture, sold below cost. That actually did resonate with buyers, even the bleeding edge folks. What really decided it was the content people. In January 2008, Warner Bros. announced they were dropping HD-DVD, followed in February by Paramount announcing they were going Blu-ray. Toshiba officially threw in the towel a few weeks later.. Universal announced they were going Blu-ray only the same day. Of course, it wasn't just that. Even though Sony didn't have stand-alone Blu-ray players out in any volume, they had sold 10 million PS3s before the first million HD-DVD players had been sold. Blockbuster (remember when they mattered?) went Blu-ray only summer of 2007, and Wal-Mart and Netflix both went Blu-ray only in February 2008, while Best Buy was only recommending Blu-ray starting then. Lots of dominoes, all falling the same way.
VHS grabbed an early dominance due to a lower price and a two-hour recording time... users could time shift a whole film, not just a prime time TV show. Beta soon offered a 2-hour format, but they had to drop to below VHS quality (slowing the tape speed from 1.5ips to 0.75ips, versus VHS's 1.3ips), particularly after VHS-HQ debuted, which pretty much put VHS on par or better than Beta. And once video rentals drove VCR sales, VHS had an easy win. Yeah, it was horrible quality, but so was broadcast in those days.
And the brain adjusts pretty quickly, learning to ignore the bad stuff unless specifically looking for it. That's also why people accepted the early TiVo, which had terribly artifacty recording, and DVD, despite its faults, and cable/satellite/broadcast digital TV, all of which is overcompressed.
Supposedly the Blu-ray folks have a committee going on 4K discs. And actually, if they rolled this out like 3D, that's not a bad thing. 3D Blu-ray (Profile 5) was actually kind of a substantial change... a 3D player needs a 2x BD drive, versus the 1x drive for all previous profiles. But that's entirely hidden from the customer, and pretty much any 3D disc package also has a standard 2D disc, and probably a DVD and/or digital download, also included. So marketing it that way, as something in the Blu-ray family, has a much better chance of success, IMHO, than launching this whole new disc format.
And storage-wise, it's kind of a no-brainer. Either sticking with 50GB discs and using HEVC (or something better) for 4K compression, or going to the already exising BD-XL standard (up to 100GB on three layers or 128GB on four layers) and sticking with AVC, delivers enough storage for 4K use. I particularly expect this approach because Sony has already announced that the upcoming PS4 can do 4K video. Keep in mind that the PS3 supported every new profile so far announced for Blu-ray... Sony found it pretty handy to have that software-driven BD platform available for their development purposes, and to drive adoption of Blu-ray (when I bought mine, it was one of the cheaper BD players, and in retrospect, the only future-proof model).
Sony's FMP-X1 4K media player is apparently using eyeIO's video CODEC, claimed to have a higher compression efficiency than HEVC, on this player... at comfortable-for-today's-Blu-ray encoding rates. Given the need for new players, that's maybe the most interesting aspect of this. If they're getting quality 4K at the same bitrates as today's AVC-encoded Blu-rays, that suggests the 4K format is exactly just another kind of Blu-ray, in both normal and 3D models, just as we have today. Same disc hardware, same disc manufacturing, etc... just different code and/or electronics. That would really help establish this. Given the rise of streaming media, it's unlikely a stand-alone 4K format could launch today.
Passive LCD uses a different film, but it's not a significant extra expense. LCD panels have a polarizer on them, all of them. If you doubt it, wear a pair of polarized shades or, for that matter, RealD glasses around and tilt your head around those many displays in your life. The passive displays require an alternating circular pixel aligned polarizer, so yeah, it's a more complex version of an existing step in the process.
My new-last-spring Sony has passive 3D. I find it far superior to active... no significant dimming of the screen is a big one.
3D is like Blu-ray these days... if you buy any old video player over about $50, it does Blu-ray. It's a feature, even if some won't use it. 3D is the same thing.. it was cheap to implement (which is why the television makers jumped to that as their Next Big Thing) and now it's just going to be there in any television above a certain threshold.
It's possible 4K goes the same way. Given that LCD panel makers are pushing 2.5K displays onto 8" tablet panels, it's pretty likely that the pixel resolution over time is scaling faster than price. So maybe. If video DSPs are fast enough, they might sell a few on the promise of HD upscaling, much as quite a few folks seem satisfied with DVD upscaling on HD screens. But I don't see it really taking off unless media (whether streaming or disc-based) and television embrace it. And even then, many aren't going to see any difference... and some will still have that one yellow RCA-ended CVBS connector driving their 4K display :-)
The TV makers are the guys pushing 4K... not the TV networks. Just as in the case with 3D TV.
See, they got spoiled on TV upgrades. As you say, NTSC ran for over 40 years... ok, sure, that whole nasty color switcheroo in the early 60s, and the vast might of the world's brain power spent on adaptive comb filters and other things in a hopeless attempt to turn the pig's ear of analog TV into some kind of silk purse. So TV evolved, but slowly. And you probably kept that old TV for 10 or 20 year at least... TVs actually wore out!
But then HDTV came along. And a bunch of use early adopters went out and bought the first generation analog HDTVs... really just SDTVs with CRT-driven HD displays, no digital tuner, no digital inputs (well, sometimes Firewire, but that only worked with MPEG-2 input). Even though this was a fairly small group... many decided to pass on a 600lbs., $4000 TV with no content (sadly, not I), it was a huge boon to the TV industry.
And followed up in 5 years or so by the first generation digital HDTVs, the move to digital displays (plasma, LCoS, DLP... even LCD, but back then, on the low end)... so for me it was another $4000 for a digital TV, this time a 71" DLP (died last spring). And because of Blu-ray, and ATSC/cable/satellite had gone HD by then, and football looks so good in HD you never want to see it in SD again, they sold crazy numbers of new televisions. They were now hooked to this 5-7 year upgrade cycle... doesn't take long to love success.
And it kind of looped again; the vast might of the world's brain power this time set to make LCDs not look terrible, since plasma screens had high cost, crazy power requirements, and burn-in, but pretty much everyone was now demanding a TV that hung on the wall like a gigantic picture frame. But there wasn't a Big New Thing to sell you on, other than that hanging on the wall and not sucking thing. Some of it was just price... making LCD panels the size of double-garage doors in one shot, they could make big screen much cheaper... my DLP replacement, a 70" Sony, was just over $2,000 this time. But they figured on 3D as a big hook, since Avatar did so well, and... ok, since Avatar did so well. And, sure, because folks were dumping cash at the movies on 3D films.
Only problem... 3D at home kind of sucked. Particularly the LCD shutter glasses -- they dim the display with low duty cycle, even with that, crosstalk, etc. My latest TV had 3D -- you basically can't get a premium model without it, but it's passive 3D (they rig the LCD polarizer to alternate lines, then use RealD style circular polarizers... sounds like it might be bad, but it's actually an improvement). About as useful as 3D film -- occasionally good, but usually just a distraction. The nice thing about passive, too, is that you can get 2D glasses, which let you view the "3D" video without the 3D effect. But I digress.
4K doesn't have any of the problems of 3D... no need for glasses, primarily. The problem is more along the lines of the problem we've had establishing a followup higher-end digital music format. Ok, today that's Blu-ray, but mostly because Blu-ray just exceeded the other attempts as part of the main stream spec. And the format wars between DVD-Audio and SACD -- both of which required a new player -- were not pretty. But the main problem there was just that most people buying CDs didn't have home stereo systems that did justice to CDs... much less something with twice the resolution. And also, these entered the market just as the digital download revolution was kicking into high gear. The average listener was more concerned with getting all their music in a pocket sized player, even if that meant high compression and relatively lousy sound (but still historically great, compared to AM radio and the typical turntable owned by most folks in decades past).
I have worked in digital video since the early 90s, and HD about as long as one could have. I know "better" when I see it. The 4K Sonys on display at many big box stores, playing 50Mb/s AVC 4K v
HD broadcasts in the UK use the DVB T2 system, which has a raw bitrate of up to 35.4Mb/s per channel. That's the effect of using 256-QAM and 8MHz analog slots, rather than the 8VSB used for ATSC... and pretty much only ATSC. US cable and satellite systems also use QAM modulation. DVB T2 also allows AVC encoding, not just MPEG-2.
So the BBC may suck, but it's not for lack of bandwidth, it's something else. Even the old 64-QAM DVB-T system delivered 24.13Mb/s per 8MHz slot, and that was just for SD broadcast.
First of all, all broadcast video is 4:2:0 decimated. That's an ATSC and DVB requirement. So you immediately have to cut your bitrates in half; that averages out to 12 bits per pixel.
And of course, ATSC transmissions are only 1920x1080 (technically 1088, but the bottom eight lines are blanked) or 1280x720. Most broadcasts are either 1080i60 or 720p60, though technically, 30p and 23.976 "NTSC Film" are also supported. Most broadcast stations transmit at least 13Mb/s on their primary channel, leaving the rest for a low quality SD channel or two. Yeah, there are some that claim to transmit three HD channels, but that's pretty rare.
Older Blu-ray discs use MPEG-2 compression on a single layer, they're not significantly better than ATSC. Modern discs, using AVC on a 50GB disc, that's another story. If well compressed -- there's an art to that, too. Encoding engineers can apply overall low-pass filtering, manually vary encoding bitrate, etc. to deliver a consistent visual experience. Auto-compressed discs do the latter algorithmically, the former not at all, so they don't look as good, unless they just crank up the bitrate to compensate.
All intraframe video compression algorithms rely on a small number of independent frames and good redundancy in-between them, P and B frames in AVC and MPEG-2. When the motion search algorithms can't rely on redundancy, as in the case of fast motion, the encoder lacks the bit-budget to encode that video without motion artifacts. There's more latitude in Blu-ray than broadcast, of course, both in bitrate and the option to use VBR, but it's not unlimited. On Blu-ray, there's also the option of going to 720p60, but film is usually 1080p24. Much of the visual artifacting comes from differences between adjacent DCT blocks, thus, applying a global low pass filter in such areas (which you'll see in use in any very fast motion on nearly any commercial DVD or Blu-ray) lessens or eliminates the artifacting, and given the likely motion blur on 24p film transfers anyway, may just pass without being obvious. Of course, that's not true of video shot on AVC or MPEG-2 camcorders... the camera itself may warn the operator about motion that's crushing the encoder, but it doesn't selectively blur the overall image.
Whoops, that was supposed to say "happy with 720p24 at 4Mb/s or less".
You don't need to quite scale it directly. We were doing SD at 8Mb/s (ish) with DVD, but didn't need to scale that to 48Mb/s for HD. In fact, while the spec allows for 19.4Mb/s, you're correct to note that most broadcasters are going to include a few SD side-channels. So you're not even twice the bitrate in practice, scaling DVD to ATSC HD. And that was a factor-of-6 increase, not a factor of two. Going by that rule of thumb, you'd be happy with MPEG-2 at 25Mb/s or AVC at 12Mb/s. I don't actually believe that, but that's the math of what came before. And maybe not that far off... Netflix already claims they're happy with 4K at 15Mb/s. Then again, they're also happy with 720p24 at HD.
Not sure that's sufficient, but it should be pretty obvious that you don't need a linear increase in bitrate. And the Red-ray encoding, whatever that is, suggests that the same 19.4Mb/s with advanced encoding ought to deliver 4K at acceptable quality for broadcast, given sufficient encoding cleverness. But I wouldn't hold my breath -- the industry doesn't like to push hard on these things. They'd probably consider AVC, but not HEVC or something even better... they're likely to pick the best mature technology. Which is why these standards are always behind the curve. But they're also thinking about realtime encoding, transport stream re-encoders once you get into cable and satellite, etc. Commercial encoding, via disc or download, has to budget to do it very off-line if necessary, fully tweak it by encoding engineers, etc.
The FOX people were the last to the table doing HD at all, and they went 720p. So maybe they're not the best broadcast guys to ask.
Not surprising... this looks to be a perhaps customized version of an NXP embedded ARM processor, the M7 that is. If I'm paying as little as $3.50 for these, I can only imagine how cheap they are for Apple. And this should make practical a slew of applications that could be done without it, but would likely run down your battery in no time flat. The little IOP can sample and cook data for the main SOC all day without using much juice.
Google introduced a small, powerful tablet last year: the Nexus 7. Apple introduced a less small, less powerful tablet last year: the iPad Mini. Sure, the new one is better, both of them. It has yet to be shown how the dual-core Mini compares in performance to the four-core Nexus 7.
I'm currently using a plenty fast Samsung Note 8.0... small enough, powerful enough for anything I'm currently doing on tablets. That's what really matters. Markedly better than the recently-dropped Asus Transformer that preceded it. And the real win on a small tablet is the "S-Pen", the wacom-style digitizer. Far more accuracy on-screen than a finger on a 10" tablet, so you're not suffering at all with the smaller screen, at least for interactive use. A bit small for reading my guitar music, but this may only be temporary, or maybe just for around the office. Best device ever for note-taking.
5c is just the 5 in a new case. It's supposed to appeal to a different market than the 5/5s did, expanding the reach of the iPhone a bit, perhaps. We'll see. It's hardly any risk, the design was paid for long ago, this is just packaging it a little cheaper. If it doesn't work, don't expect a colorful 5s-remake next year.
Apple's always had a little diversification in their Mac line... and generally much less than any major competitor. Today they're at an all-time low I think, far as models go, at least since laptops were possible. They nixed the 17" laptops, all laptops are SSD/no-optical now, etc. They still really doing just one iPhone per year... no good reason to stop making the old one if it's still selling. Contrast that to Samsung, who seems to have one new smartphone model per month. Same with tablets.
Apple's one-size-fits-all approach was good when they were the only one doing the job, and fine when they were the only ones doing the job well. But with other vendors building better devices, taking more risks, thus more innovation, they do at some point have to compete. Just being a fashion house isn't going to be enough forever. They're good at making each year's device "about twice as fast" as last year's... particularly when it comes to gaming. But that's about the only thing you can count on. Not enough for many users, who see larger screens, new I/O devices, built-in wacom digitizers, etc.
That's not to suggest Apple should make a radical change to the iPhone or iPad... and that's also not what anyone who's innovating does today. Rather, they try different things. So Samsung made a fairly predictable Galaxy S4, but they also followed it up with a few variations... a serious camera phone (Galaxy Zoom), the giant-screen S4, etc. They also pretty much created the "phablet" market, and made that work by adding the wacom, so a large phone screen could actually deliver tablet capabilities, despite your fingers still being the size they were last year. Apple needs to try some variations, try something new. They ultimately will have to something, whether that's experimenting on their own or copying the other guys. But I don't think they survive, not at their current "leader of the pack" levels anyway, if it's just about taking the best of Samsung or Motorola or HTC from this year into next year's devices.
Actually, with phones, Apple went directly from one tier to three-tier with the iPhone 4S... they offered the iPhone 4 at the $99 point and the iPhone 3GS at the $0 point. It was just that, since the iPhone 3GS was only for AT&T (GSM, and before T-Mo got involved), they didn't have that on Verizon or Sprint.
They are certainly upping the SKUs at a high rate: two iPhone 4S, five iPhones 5c, and nine iPhones 5s. But they have finally acknowledged, and rightly so, that the iPhone is a luxury item, and that pretty much makes it a fashion item. So while one size still apparently almost fits all, once finish clearly does not. Most other phone makers are not doing the "fashion statement" thing.... Nokia a bit, I guess, with their similar color selection.
And of course, the 5c isn't new, it's just the iPhone 5 cost reduced and put in a plastic case. This is what Apple's been doing, only now they're making more money at it and making it seem new. Targeting a different demographic than the high-end user. My college-age kids are both pushing for iPhones (where did I go wrong) for Christmas... the boy (first year Pharmacy school) wants the 5s, "because the new OS runs like crap on older models", the girl (second year Bio/Nursing) wants a 5c, "because they have pink".
Yup... they're removing any barrier to the new OS, and thus, any good reason for older users not to upgrade. That may kill off some old hardware faster, if there are machines that can't be upgraded, also maybe a good thing in the short term. And they're giving Mac users a big warm and fuzzy smooch on the cheek, at the same time their main competition has been pushing an OS that practically no one likes, for $100+ a copy. They're looking at PC users and saying "come over here, we have cookies".
I think everyone's missing the point of iWork... this is mostly just a shot at Microsoft. This is Apple deciding that selling hardware is more important for them than nickel and diming on apps... and given their 30-50% margins, that's probably a good notion. Microsoft's super powers in office automation came from them controlling the OS and pre-installing Office as a bundle with Windows for years. This effectively killed off the competition -- who's going to pay for WordPerfect when Office is "Free" (well, I did, back in the day, but most folks didn't).
Now Apple's selling a volume of devices that's at least interesting compared to the volume of devices that Microsoft powers with Windows. Dropping iWork on the iPad delivers an Apple-blessed office solution that's probably better tuned to the quirks of iPad users than anything from Microsoft would be. Including that on the Mac means full sync throughout the Apple ecosystem. And helps prevent Microsoft from establishing any kind of beachhead on the iPad, or probably what they're really thinking, via the collaborative parts of Office365 vs. iCloud.
In short, a smart move for Apple. Not pushed as much yet, but between Google Docs and Quickoffice, Google is already offering this same kind of free thing on Android. And Android outsold Windows last year, and they're killing it even more this year.
It's clear Microsoft Office became a corporate standard, but not clear why so many still use it -- it's pretty awful. Not that OpenOffice/LibreOffice are much better, themselves being too much clones of the bad ideas in MS-Office. But then again, I didn't have to pay $500 or whatever for either of those, or Quickoffice on Android. Microsoft trying to get me to use their tools on Android, for collaboration, or online, they have the same problem with mobile users that Wordperfect/Corel and Lotus/IBM had all those years... they're not the free thing anymore.
When you're dependent on Apple for your hardware, the new Mac Pro is certainly better than the old Mac Pro. Unless you need a different GPU, of course.
Compared to the PC market, it's crazy overpriced. I put together a system with more i7 cores, more RAM (64GB), a larger SSD (960GB), a built-in RAID10 (6GB effective), and ok, less GPU power (just one high-end ATi card), but with room for three more if I ever need that... for less than half of this price.
I guess Intel's running late on the 12-core version of that CPU, though... Apple had claimed when they introduced the new "Macintrash" design that they'd be shipping in the fall, and then, pretty much just talked about the high-end model.
1999 called, they want their interface back.
Firewire hasn't been the standard in professional video for quite a few years. For digital video transfer these days, it's SDI on the high end, HDMI on the low end. Firewire was only fast enough for compressed video transfer.
Media wise, modern camcorders use flash media, SDXC on the low-end, proprietary cards like P2 (a four-SD RAID, a Panasonic standard), xQD (PCIe based memory, mostly a Sony thing), or just plain old SATA SSDs (Red, BlackMagic). And these connect to PCs via ... you guessed it ... USB! That's because Firewire was never used as a data transfer mechanism, but a video transfer mechanism. Realtime only... so if you have a 42min tape to transfer, that's going to take 42 minutes. Or about six minutes over USB... the memory card is the bottleneck here for SD cards, not the USB 2.0 interface.
All USB interfaces since USB 1.0 have a dedicated chip to manage the USB transfer. It used to be part of the "South Bridge" chip, at least back when I was designing PCs with it (late 1990s). These days, it's part of an "I/O Hub" in PCs, an SOC in pretty much everything else. Yeah, one of your four or six or whatever CPUs needs to be a little more involved in a USB transfer than a Firewire transfer, because a Firewire device can master the bus, a USB device can't. Same rule applies to SATA... only your PC can master the SATA bus, not a SATA device. That doesn't make Firewire faster than SATA.
Firewire always needed an EXTERNAL chip to do the processing, not because of any issue with how processing can be done, in or out of chips. But rather, the industry's rejection of Apple's licensing terms kept pretty much every chipset company from including Firewire in a PC chipset. You wanted Firewire, pretty much relegated to being a specialty item, you bough a chip for your motherboard or a card for your PC... like mine (I have an external RAID on Firewire... not much faster than USB 2.0 in practice, but I'm sure part of that's Windows... neither is acceptable for a modern RAID. I'll move to USB 3.0 or GigE at some point, but I also have an internal RAID -- that's the one for speed. The external one is mostly for short term backup.