By the end of the year, new Blu-ray UHD 4K discs will be on sale
Comparison of 1080p and 4K (clickable)
If you bought a TV with a resolution of 4K, and do not know why, you are in luck. By the New Year (or, as the Americans say, by Christmas) , discs with the content of the new standard , Blu-ray UHD (3840 × 2160), will appear on store shelves . The new standard, approved in May this year , supports HDR-image, an expanded gamut of colors and a function called "digital bridge". The first player to support such discs was unveiled at CES in January .
Improvements to video standards are becoming less obvious. One could easily notice the difference between a DVD and a VHS cassette; one could easily find the differences in a 1080p picture and a standard DVD. But are the differences between the pictures at 3840 pixels and 1080 already important, especially on TVs no larger than 32 "?
And even if you notice the difference and enjoy it - the era of digital media is a thing of the past. It makes no sense to store and use discs when you can watch any movie on the Internet - just have a good internet connection. The convenience of using streaming content lies in the fact that you can easily start watching a movie on a TV, then switch to a laptop, and then to a tablet. Many users have not touched disks for a very long time, and have replaced the optical drive in laptops with an additional SSD.
Comparison of Netflix and Blu-ray (clickable)
Optical disc manufacturers understand this, and therefore, together with the new Blu-ray standard UHD, they also offer a new digital bridge service. A player that supports this standard will have two functions - copy and export. Copying content can be done on an “authorized” media, and export to other devices that support this scheme.
How the media for copying will be authorized is still unknown. But it’s approximately clear how DRM protection will work when “exporting” data. While you do not need an Internet connection to watch a movie from a disk on the main equipment, you will need to connect it to the Internet to export the video stream to another device, where the cloud system authorizes this operation.
The new content will use the H.265 codec and will be delivered on two- and three-layer disks of 66 GB and 100 GB, respectively. This is enough to accommodate even a three-hour movie - but at the same time additional content will have to be delivered on a separate disk. The content will also support the latest DTS sound schemes: X, Dolby Atmos and Auro-3D.
However, such a system still looks rather cumbersome and confusing . The differences between good streaming video and watching a movie from a disc are already hard to tell by eye. It is difficult to say how many people will rush to stores for the next “improved" copy of the same films converted from 1080p to 4K, given that the latest video consoles from Sony and Microsoft do not support UHD-standard disks.
