High Frame Rate Blu-ray?

[SirStephenH]

48fps is not possible on Blu-Ray at the moment and will most likely never be. The current standards do not support it and hardware is required to support the standards in order to be Blu-Ray certified. No major revisions to the standards will likely be made while 4k and future disc technologies are in the works.

As for the hardware, almost all the hardware in existence is only just able to handle the current standards, mainly in order to keep costs down because there's no reason to support more than what's required of it. This would require new hardware which would be a tougher sell to consumers than 3D and would generate a great deal of confusion. The doubling of the frame-rate would also almost double (don't count the audio twice) the size of the movie which would lead to lower bit-rates and multi-disc movies. It's highly unlikely that companies will use these stop-gap measures with better disc technologies on the horizon.

It would technically be feasible to increase the frame-rate to 60 and encode it in 720p but the frame-rate conversion would create jitter and the video would be a lower resolution, eliminating any advantage of the higher frame-rate. It's been brought up that 1080i50 and 1080i60 are part of the specs but there's an enormous flaw in this argument besides what I just brought up. The "i" in those numbers stands for interlaced. Interlaced videos show half a standard (progressive) frame each interlaced frame so every two interlaced frames equals one standard. So 1080i50 is the equivalent of 1080p25 and 1080i60 is the equivalent of 1080p30. Interlaced video displays the odd lines of a single progressive frame then displays the even ones and does this for every standard frame, this happens so quickly that it appears to be a whole frame. There's only one clear advantage to this process and that's that it uses a little less bandwidth which is why the antiquated standard has stubbornly found a home in broadcast television. Few also claim that it displays motion a little better but the only difference most people see is an overall reduction in quality vs progressive scan. Progressive scan on the other hand displays each frame in it's entirety. So to summarize, it takes two interlaced frames to make up one progressive frame so the higher interlaced frame-rates aren't really higher at all.

The reason why a PS3 can run games at 60fps but not movies is differing standards and technologies. A PS3 is essentially a computer and is therefore more flexible, it's also a single standardized piece of hardware. Sony can update it to do just about anything it's capable of because the hardware is standardized and they know it's exact capabilities. Also there're few actual videos in games, most of it is created on the fly and are actually adapted to the hardware it's self by the developers. Blu-Ray on the other hand is designed to be compatible with a wide range of devices and has to play nice with every one. It cannot be reworked to take advantage of a single device's hardware because that would put it out of spec with everything else. I would also like to point out that in order to maintain a smooth 60fps, nearly every game on all the current major consoles (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, and PS4) run natively at or just above 720p no matter what it says on the game's case.

We'll most likely see HFR video on cable and the internet first, the same with 4k. This will make it to market sooner than the new disc technologies that would be required for this content and will make it cheaper for the consumer early on due to it mainly using existing technologies, reducing the need for expensive bleeding edge equipment (remember the $2000+ Blu-Ray players?).