Blu-ray 4K Under Consideration by BDA

[ronjones]

After nearly a year and a half of spectulation about the potential for a future version of blu-ray that could support native 4K Ultra High Definition recordings, there is now word of activity within the BDA. As background, I'm not talking about 1080p blu-ray discs sourced from 4K movies nor players that simply upscale 1080p discs to a 4K 24Hz output. Rather I talking about discs recorded at the full native 4K resolution and players that can play these discs and output the 4K video to displays with native 4K Ultra High Definition resolution (approx. 8 Mpixels).

Andy Parsons, the president of the BDA, is quoted as saying at CES 2013 (Jan. 2013):

“We created a task force three months ago to study the prospects of adding new technologies to the format,”……“We will evaluate three criteria, starting with the technical feasibility of doing 4K, which is four times the picture quality of 1080p.”

The standards for two of the enabling technologies should be in place in time to support any decision on the part of the BDA to proceed with the development of a next generation Blu-ray standard that includes support for a full resolution 4K Ultra High Definition format.

h.265 HEVC Codec - The first edition of the h.265 standard was recently approved and this defines the basic High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec for 2D video including support for 4K. However, a lot are desired features are still missing in the h.265 standard such as the extensions for 3D 4K video, higher frame rates, increased bit depth and higher fidelity chroma formats (e.g., 4:2:2 and 4:4:4). This recently released standard includes the "hooks" to add these extensions later and it is my guess that it will probably take least until late this year before these extensions are added to the h.265 standard. HEVC is claimed to offer approx. twice the compression efficiency of the AVC codec that is defined by h.264 and the HD version of which as used with the current Blu-ray standard.

HDMI - The next generation HDMI standard (prehaps called ver. 2.0) has been under development for just over a year by the HDMI Forum's technical working group. The lastest schedule is for it to be completed and approved by mid-2013. While the specific features to be included in the new HDMI standard have not been make publicly available, statements make by officials with the HDMI organization last year indicate that the tasking to the working group has included adding support for 4K video with higher frames rates, such as 60 Hz, and support for deep color (e.g., 12-bit color depth). There will probably be support for additional audio formats and other technical improvements.

I suspect that if the BDA decides to move ahead with the development of a next generation Blu-ray standard that includes support for 4K Ultra HD video, we are probably looking at sometime in 2014 for that standard to be finalized. Hopefully we will hear something out of the BDA within a few months as to a decision to move forward. Of course such a major update to the Blu-ray standand might also address technology improvements in support of 1080p, such as the use of the HEVC codec, higher frame rates, increased bit depth and improved chroma coding.