Forget 4K, Now 8K is Coming

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by raygendreau

Netflix will be using HEVC H.265 for their UHD streaming and :

"Will Netflix be streaming content at a higher frame rate than that any way?

"We will. Initially, I think it's not there. But we will have HFR content. We have test content up to 60fps, just not real-world content. But we can stream at 60fps.

"There are three things that go into Ultra HD. One is the resolution, the other part is the frame rate, the final part is the colour depth - you go from 8-bit colour [at 1080p] to 10-bit colour [in UHD 4K]. We can do all those things streaming, but then it’s up to the TV whether it’ll support all those elements. Some TVs might have a wider colour space than others."

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/1264...get-4k-content

Several manufacturers will have sets with the app necessary for Netflix UHD in the spring, just a few months away. Netflix needs to acquire a lot of UHD content to spur the adoption rate. I think we will have some good feedback from early UHD adopters by June or July. I think if Sony worked out a favorable deal with Netflix to stream the 140 plus UHD movies that are currently only available via download to the Sony" Hockey Puck" media server, it would benefit both of them. Sony recently added Captain Phillips and Hustle to the list of available downloads.

I have had limited exposure to UHD (demo running on a Sony at Best Buy.) What attracted me was the extended color space. Greens and Reds were impressive. I wasn't attracted by the increased resolution, but I had nothing to compare it to in the store.

Ray, despite your seemingly constant promotion of streaming on a forum devoted to packaged media, I like your open-mindedness about 4K/UHD but something you say and quote should be clarified despite what is said by a ‘director of global communications' for Netflix and reported by consumer audio video websites like that of which you’ve linked.

60 fps (Hz) is considered ‘full frame rate’…nothing more. Amongst engineers familiar with and working at 4K rez, p50 or p60 does not qualify as “HFR” for television, see…https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...fr#post8663112

The reason 100 fps is selected in the above ^ post is that despite what is written on the Wikipedia page at the moment and regardless of what more seemingly diligent consumer A/V journalists like to quote as the gold standard reference url (http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/...8-I!!PDF-E.pdf ), 100 Hz has been added to the frame frequency parameter - https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...00#post8536132

As to the ‘color’ of the Sony demo running at BB, the imagery is not a wide color gamut (WCG) of which most company agnostic standards-makers folks desire “UHD” to settle out at in years to come. Without getting overly technical, Sony’s x.v.Color (xvYCC ) can be thought of as keeping the RGB primary colors from Rec.709 but, negative values are allowed for coding out-of-gamut colors for which the gamma curves must be extended for those negative values and that in itself is a questionable use of gamma functions. Most likely the reason this ‘color’ was chosen by Sony was because the x.v.Color signal is pretty much compatible with legacy Rec.709 TVs, the color errors being not too dramatic.

But, you’re on the right tract as to truly WCG ( https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...or#post8673664 ) being more easily appreciable by Joe6pack at BB, or in the home, rather than simply a bump up in rez from 1080p -> 4K. However, 10 bit B.T.2020 with increased brightness would be a better choice combo-parameter on which to build next gen video to last us for 20 or 30 years.