Great news from Blu-ray Disc Association! The Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray Disc specifications have been completed early this morning. This means both Blu-ray software and compatible Ultra HD Blu-ray hardware may appear on store shelves as early at the holiday shopping season at the end of the year. If you are luckily to have already upgraded to an Ultra HD 4K television set, you will have the opportunity to use this format to take advantage of native 3840 x 2160 resolution, up to 60 frame rates and high dynamic range colors as wells as support for advanced audio formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS: X.
Victor Matsuda, BDA promotions committee chair and vice president of Sony Blu-ray group, said “Blu-ray Disc has set the standard for high definition picture and audio quality for home entertainment for many years. Ultra HD Blu-ray will do the same for UHD home entertainment. You will enjoy an unparalleled, consistent and repeatable UHD experience with Blu-ray Disc’s technical capabilities, significant storage capacity and high data transfer rates.
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Greate advantage of the new UHD Blu-ray technology
Compare to the early adopters of this new technology, the availability of Utra HD Blu-ray discs will be more favorable due to the limited availability of streaming 4K content on services like Netflix and YouTube as well as the bandwidth requirements needed to streaming in Ultra HD resolution.
Another important issue we need to concern is the monthly bandwidth caps on volume of data streamed. The reason is that a typical 4K movie usually has a three to four times size of a 1080p version. And it will takes up at least 75GB of data to watch an entire season of House of Cards, if Netflix is adopting the new H.265 codec. According to the announcement, there will be a “digital bridge” feature on Ultra HD Blu-ray disc which will provide a method of movie ownership on mobile devices much like Ultraviolet works on Blu-ray disc today. Concerning data storage capacity on the new Ultra HD Blu-ray discs, 66GB of data will be filled up on dual-layer discs, while 100GB on triple-layer discs.
The software and hard ware for UHD Blu-ray disc
To play Ultra HD Blu-ray discs, consumers will need to upgrade to new hardware, which however, will be backwards compatible and play older movie formats such as Blu-ray and DVD.
The extra storage space on Ultra HD Blu-ray discs could be useful for gaming developers if it is possible that both Sony and Microsoft will release upgraded gaming console hardware to support the new format. In 2006, when Blu-ray format originally came out in 2006, adoption of the high resolution discs was impacted significantly by the adoption of the PlayStation 3.
UHD Blu-ray disc movies
The first films released on Utra HD Blu-ray will likely to occur later this year. The current gamut of summer blockbusters certainly could be the ideal content to showcase the new physical disc format. However, the release films on the new format will be up to individual studio.