Posted Fri Sep 5, 2014 at 06:30 PM PDT by Steven Cohen
The BDA is in the process of finalizing 4K Blu-ray technology for next year.
At the IFA trade show today, the BDA has confirmed plans to finalize the spec for 4K Blu-ray development. The first 4K disc players should start rolling out to stores during the 2015 holiday season.
According to Victor Matsuda, chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association global promotions committee, the upcoming Ultra HD optical disc format will also offer a wider color gamut and a higher dynamic range to go along with the improved resolution. Likewise, the spec will offer support for 4K playback at 60 frames per second. In addition, while the new 4K format will be able to use existing BD-50 discs, it will take advantage of the H.265/HEVC compression codec instead of the currently used H.264/AVC codec. With that said, work is being done to develop larger capacity discs as well. Finally, 4K Blu-ray players will be capable of extracting data at rates around 50 and 60 megabits per second with possible support for rates as high as 100Mbps.
Currently, 4K content is only available through streaming services like Netflix and proprietary media players like Sony's FMP-X10. A physical disc format will offer improvements in picture quality as customers will not be subject to internet bandwidth limitations for playback. There's no word yet on which studios and manufacturers will be releasing movies and hardware, but it's likely that many of the major industry players will jump on board.
Source: CNET
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