bluray drive 4K for the future

[iChip]

Hello I was thinking to buy blu-ray drive but Im not exactly sure if it can run 4K videos. As we all noticed there's lots of 4K TVs nowdays in but as far as I know blu ray discs (movies) are in fullHD resolution. So I wonder if I'd buy bluray drive now, could it run 4K movies in the future. Or I mean what is the content to run for your 4K TV if you the blu rays are supposed to be only 1080p, or am I wrong ?

 

[Math Geek]

the only 4k content i know of is streaming from the web. blueray can handle 1080p for a full length movie but 4k is 4x that amount. so even without the extras, blueray would only get at most ~1/3 of a movie on it maybe less.

i'm thinking 4k movies will have to be sold on flash drives. perhaps an sd card or something since many players already have the slots and would only need firmware update to decode the 4k movie. that assumes they have the processing power to even handle decoding 4k video. i'm not sure what kind of cycles it takes to decode 4k.

 

[iChip]

Thanks for relpy. So if I understood it correctly buying standard bluray drive would be kinda useless as it wont read the 4K content anyways and for that matter I would need different drive in the future anyways? Is that correct?

 

[hexcs]

Yes if you want to play 4K Blu-Ray you would have to get the updated Blu-Ray drive once they are released. The're already some that can upscale to 4K but as you are probably aware it's not the same.

 

[iChip]

thanks a lot

 

[Math Geek]

we won't know until it happens what type of format 4k movies might be sold in. somehow i don't think it will be a conventional disk like we have now. blue ray is up to 50 gb in a dual layer disk. 4k is 3840 x 2160 which is about 135 GB for a 90 min movie if 1 pixel is 1 bit and this does not include audio. so i just don't see how they will be able to compress it enough to fit what we have now.

and i got that number by multiplying (3840 x 2160 x 24 fps x 60 sec) = 1 min video x 90 minutes = a lot of bits/8 gives roughly 134,369,280,000 bytes for the video (again assuming 1 pixel is 1 bit which i am not sure is right or not but i think it is)

so again just a guess but an sd card or thumb drive would be the only way i can see for it to be sold unless they can figure out what color of light has a smaller wavelength than blue to cram more sectors onto a disk.

 

[hexcs]

Not a guess , but already confirmed info. There will be Triple layer Bluray discs:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/ultra-hd-blu-ray-finalized-4k-discs-headed-to-the-home-theater/

 

[Math Geek]

nice link. that answers my concern. i did not realize they were even working on a triple layer blue ray disk to get the needed space. thats a bump to 33 GB per layer. i thought the 25 GB was the max they could get to the layer. of course "Consumers will have to upgrade to new hardware to play Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. However, those players will be backwards compatible and play older movie formats such as Blu-ray and DVD." so the player will need upgraded processors and new versions of hdmi to get the " frame rates potentially up to 60 frames per second, high dynamic range color as well as support for advanced audio formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X."

very interesting indeed. thanks again for the link. i never saw this before and it's months old now. i spend too much time on the forum to keep up i guess.....