4k Blu Ray Auf Normalen Player

LAS VEGAS—Seven years subsequently the Blu-ray Disc Association announced at CES that information technology had completed the technical specification for the format, the Blu-ray format continues to forge ahead—and its proponents must ponder its time to come when 4K HDTV televisions are all the rage here at this week's CES.

The starting time Blu-ray player was priced at $1000 from Samsung, merely yous tin can now buy a Blu-ray histrion for about 1-tenth of what a unit cost in 2006. According to the Blu-ray Disc Association, the format is being widely adopted: l million households at present accept Blu-ray playback capability.

That's nifty for a physical disc-based format that grew up with the cloud of, well, the cloud and digital distribution over the Net.

Andy Parsons Blu-Ray Disc Association — Andy Parsons

"Despite the dire predictions about net distribution making physical media obsolete, Blu-ray has thrived," says Andy Parsons, BDA president. Projected unit sales are for 2012 are up 21.3 pct year-over-year, according to Screen Digest, led by marquee titles similar The Avengers, Brave, Ted, and Twilight.

Catalog sales of those classic titles from years gone by are likewise growing, according to industry association the Digital Entertainment Grouping. Parsons notes that this trend is encouraging. "People have been buying older titles that have been released on DVD, and now they're replacing them on Blu-ray," he says.

The attractive price drops of itemize titles, including sub-$10 bargains, has had a big impact on sales and is the reason for the boost in the by year; afterwards all, studio acquirement on these sales has only increased by slightly under 10 percent.

Why Blu-ray rocks

For one affair, Blu-ray remains the well-nigh consequent and highest quality option for watching video. The boilerplate home has only 6Mbps bandwidth, which often is not enough for viewing loftier-definition content.

This disc-based media also has the reward of content ownership. As Parsons rightly observes, with "streaming services like Netflix or Hulu Plus, content that was there a couple of weeks ago may disappear. That's when the benefits of ownership are becoming clear over the benefits of streaming, in terms of the quality of the delivery and the availability of content."

Studios continue to eternalize the appeal of Blu-ray Disc movies and television shows past adding value to the discs. You can often get Blu-rays in combo packs with a DVD, a Digital Copy option for use with a digital media player, and UltraViolet support for streaming or downloading via a digital locker.

And while the promise of BD-Live'due south options for supplemental connected content never really materialized in a pervasive way, studios are increasingly finding means to extend the value of Blu-ray—the latest mode being by creating a second-screen app that ties into the Blu-ray Disc or picture show via either time codes or sound cues. For example, the Sherlock Homes app would provide a map that showed the whereabouts of the detective at whatsoever given betoken in the picture show.

Next upward: Extending the Blu-ray spec

With all of the talk of 4K this CES, the big question looming is how we can get 4K content onto these neat new HDTVs? Sony has already appear it will offering customers a protected server with 4K content on board; just that's a express play.

Could Blu-ray Disc go the distribution mechanism for this next-generation data? "We created a task force three months agone to study the prospects of calculation new technologies to the format," Parsons reveals. "We will evaluate iii criteria, starting with the technical feasibility of doing 4K, which is four times the picture quality of 1080p." The technology also has several variations between habitation and Digital Cinema use, all referred to generically as "4K."

As a format, Blu-ray Disc is capable of treatment the necessary capacities involved in 4K. But it would need to either adjust boosted layers to add chapters to the disc, or utilize more aggressive video codecs to compress the video. Current Blu-ray flick discs peak out at 50GB for a dual-layer disc; just today we already have BDXL media for use with up to 100GB rewritable discs, and 128GB write-once disc.

It'southward not clear to the working group whether 4K can be added to the Blu-ray format inexpensively. Later all, if a moving-picture show costs more than the player does, no one will rush out and purchase it—awesome 4K quality or not.

The second benchmark is market demand for 4K media. (Information technology seems so, afterward seeing the differences between 4K and current 1920-by-1080p content hither at CES.) A third question is the bear on to the existing installed base of operations of Blu-ray players if a 4K disc is inserted into an older player.

While questions remain, it's expert to hear that 4K is at least under consideration for Blu-ray—peculiarly because that studios take been scanning motion-picture show masters at 4K resolution for several years already. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment even announced at CES that it will first selling Blu-ray Discs labeled as "Mastered in 4K." while such discs are clearly intended for today's 1920-by-1080-resolution Blu-ray players, y'all'll still encounter actress detail in discs made from a 4K master, so keep an centre for these titles equally they roll out this year.

For more blogs, stories, photos, and video from the nation'south largest consumer electronics testify, check out consummate coverage of CES 2013 from PCWorld and TechHive.