By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
SvennoJ on 26 September 2015
Edit Thread
BraLoD said:
Bofferbrauer said:
BraLoD said:
Well, I'll just throw it here, but I really wanted to see the HVD actually being a thing.

You'll get at least Blu-Ray 4K pretty soon, first discs are expected for the Holiday season this year


Well, the thing is that HVD was based in a 3D way of recording and reading data, it was a really cool concept and I really wanted to see it being a thing, 4K BD is cool and all, but I wanted to see a new format like that, it was really exciting.

It might still happen. Japan is already working on 8k 120fps and a blu-ray disc is not going to cut it.
4K blu-ray can do upto 128 mbps (which is still only half of what a 2K cinema master can go upto) with 100 GB discs.  The actual transfer rate will be lower as 128mbps is about 1GB per minute and max 100 minutes per disc is a bit low. You can add more layers yet you can't physically spin the disc faster, 8K will need a new disc format or other solution.

As comparison, blu-ray can do upto 54mbps. 4K blu-ray is only about twice as fast yet h.265 is also about twice as efficient. 4K netflix runs at 15.6 mbps, also in h.265 so slightly exceeed the average blu-ray video quality. (blu-ray tends to average around 25mbps for video) However you still need blu-ray for the lossless DTS HD-MA soundtrack.

Streaming doesn't look so bad at those low bitrates, yet it gets blurry a lot faster in action scenes. I use Netflix for tv content, way too expensive to buy whole seasons on blu-ray. Yet when I put a movie on after it's always an eye opener how much sharper and more vibrant everything looks. (That's on a projector though, the difference would be a lot smaller on a tablet I assume)

Here's a comparison between 4K Netflix and Blu-ray (1080p)
https://www.avforums.com/article/is-4k-netflix-better-than-blu-ray.10589
So, is 4K Netflix an upgrade over Blu-ray? Well, you win ever so slightly on video and you lose a bit on audio but it’s looking more and more like we need a physical format to drive home the resolution advantages, whilst maintaining lossless audio codecs. But that’s ignoring the vital factors of price and convenience. As part of a £6.99 monthly subscription, you can access both seasons of House of Cards and all five of Breaking Bad, which is quite simply ridiculous value and the costs of the equivalent Blu-rays would be magnitudes greater.

I assume the situation will be the same with 8K, 8K streaming matching 4K blu-ray, New 8K discs needed for the actual benefits.