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HD already outdated? YouTube now supports 4K

post #1 of 17
7/13/10 at 2:20pm
Thread Starter 
YouTube to Support, Host '4K'-Format Videos

Several articles including this one from PC magazine detail the new 4K service from Youtube. While requirements for connectivity and processing is steep by today's standards, there is now precedent for delivery of the best image to the home coming from the internet. With faster support for new resolutions and codecs, it looks to overtake physical media and transmission standards for quality. We may see better source material than currently displayed at most digital theaters. This may push for faster adoption of theatrical 4K presentation.

Obviously it will require a high resolution display to take full advantage of these 4K files. Professional models exist, but the availability of source material may prompt the manufacture of consumer 4K displays. Even home video acquisition could be moving to 4K. Some may argue that 4K requires a large display to take advantage of the higher resolution, but average screen size seems to be gradually increasing.

Experimental systems with 8K resolution exist such as Super Hi-Vision. However 4K is becoming a common format for features so there is already mainstream source material. With the possibility of delivering 4K to consumers, episodic television could go in this direction for future proofing as they did a decade ago with the anticipation of HD.

Many broadcast stations are not taking full advantage of their capability to deliver quality due to multicasting. ATSC is pretty much written in stone and it will likely be some time before new improved standards are adopted. Blu-Ray offers much better quality but still requires updates to existing standards for higher resolutions. Open systems, such as HTPCs, are much more adaptable to changing standards. A setback could be data caps by the providers, but it could also be an opportunity to supply new services with true theatrical quality.

Is HD already outdated?
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post #2 of 17
7/13/10 at 2:29pm
I saw this about youtube as well. I highly doubt HD is dead anytime soon. Cable is still broadcast in 720p and only a small handful of people are capable of shooting 4k content. I think it will be a good while before mainstream 4k displays start popping up.
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post #3 of 17
7/13/10 at 2:36pm
Well that settles it then. Any HD stuff I have in my house, is going out for the sanitation engineer.
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post #4 of 17
7/13/10 at 2:47pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by cinaibur View Post

I saw this about youtube as well. I highly doubt HD is dead anytime soon. Cable is still broadcast in 720p and only a small handful of people are capable of shooting 4k content. I think it will be a good while before mainstream 4k displays start popping up.

Theatrical motion pictures could easily adopt a 4K standard especially at the point where digital capture at 4K becomes standard fare (right now 2k is the accepted norm which is still above even 1080p) or the costs of 4K film scanning and DI become cheaper. That is a big enough market to be a killer application for 4k technology at some level, but probably never at the consumer broadcast level unless there are huge advances in content delivery made. But as the above poster noted, outside of theatrical motion pictures, there is very little 4K material available (but then again the same was said for 3D just a year or so ago).
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post #5 of 17
7/13/10 at 3:04pm
Bitrate is very low on the 4k videos.
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post #6 of 17
7/13/10 at 3:32pm
Youtube's gonna beat OTA? LMAO!!

If they want more people to visit their site, they should stop deleting all the good videos rather than call terrible looking PQ videos "HD".
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post #7 of 17
7/13/10 at 4:10pm
Thread Starter 
With the addition of mobile services the bitrate of OTA may decline further. OTA is limited to MPEG2 (aside from the ATSCM/H mobile services standard which uses MPEG-4/AVC) and the technology may not see significant improvement beyond what is available now. MPEG 4 encoding continues to improve with the availability of greater processing capabilities.

What is interesting is the availability of 4K material using open mainstream distribution. It further establishes 4K as a distribution format and not just for production. Early HD seemed certain to fail as its technical requirements appeared to be insurmountable to provide mainstream service to the viewing public. 4K distribution could evolve relatively quickly as data networks and encoding improve.

Perhaps the Youtube 4K may not presently be the highest quality material at that resolution, but the significance is that 4K is being distributed to the general public. It could be a catalyst for further support in consumer products. 4K flat panels already exist such as the TV Logic LUM-560W.

HD is far from dead as support for legacy 4:3 displays is still required. However it seems that the 1920x1080 standard could be upstaged by higher resolution distribution just as it becomes mainstream.
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post #8 of 17
7/13/10 at 4:39pm
To me, with my "average joe consumer" hat on, TV or broadcasting, whether it be cable or OTA is a technology that needs to be stable. Once a standard is set, the public expects it to remain so. You don't want that investment you make in home entertainment to become obsolete. If you are going to change it on me, it better be for something incredible like color, or a large clean HiDef picture. I don't think the change from the current High Definition signals to 4k is going to be a large enough bang for the consumer buck to justify redoing the entire broadcast OTA and cable infrastructure and obsoleting sets. Remember also, with TV, consumers want to be able to walk into their livingroom and turn on the TV and tune in a channel, or perhaps call up a show on their DVR or insert a disk and have it work with the least amount of technical effort.

On the other hand, most consumers are fine with having to deal with technical issues when it comes to narrowcasting via PC or other networked device. We also sort of accept that the quality may be compromised or that we have to jump through hoops to get that image on our PC or other display. Technically oriented consumers (such as most AVS Forum members) will have no problem doing what they need to do in order to watch a different kind of image.
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post #9 of 17
7/13/10 at 5:28pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mscottc View Post

To me, with my "average joe consumer" hat on, TV or broadcasting, whether it be cable or OTA is a technology that needs to be stable. Once a standard is set, the public expects it to remain so. You don't want that investment you make in home entertainment to become obsolete.

I would argue though the public is much more forgiving or even accepting of evolving technology, whether its Blu-Ray over DVD, iPhone, newer faster computers, etc as opposed to paradigm shifts. One of the problems with the HD proliferation was that digital and the means to implement it represented a paradigm shift not just an evolution, people had to rethink how they watch TV, what channels to use, how to deal with aspect ratios, new cable boxes, 5.1 audio, etc. This is one of the reasons I am skeptical of 3D going mainstream (at least at the consumer level) as watching TV with glasses is at worst gimmicky and at best novelty. 4K over HD in the home is much more of an evolution than revolution and incremental increases in display technology haven't slowed sales one bit, even if they are silly like 120/240Hz processing and "soap opera effect". I mean after all they are marketing and selling 3D displays with almost no content available.

The difference may not be big on a consumer level but as TVOD pointed out 4K for distribution is huge potentially resonating across a number of businesses from theatrical motion picture exhibition, to outdoor LED display technology and web content. Imagine Apple TV or Netflix being able to stream 4K movies to your display from iTunes.
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post #10 of 17
7/14/10 at 8:03am
I saw this, but I have to ask - even *if* someone actually uploads something in 4K H.264 to YouTube, what exactly are you going to get to play it? H.264 in that size is hard enough to play on a modern CPU when using software decoding. Most hardware decoders don't yet support a decode surface large enough for 4K (because they're all typically limited to ~2048x2048 or so, since Blu-Ray is what the hardware decoders are aimed at). Plus you have to deal with the slowness and nastiness that is Flash. Cute idea, but sounds 100% impractical to me for any real use.

Edit: At least for the moment. Also, just checked, and confirmed that the hardware decoder on my nVidia graphics board is indeed limited to 2048x2048 for all codecs (and it does PV3, yes).

Edit 2: Also, you can't even scale or colorspace transform on the board (since the surface for that is too small), so you have to do the scaling and YUV->RGB colorspace transform in software. That'll eat CPUs and system buses for breakfast.

Edit 3: I guess they mention in the article that you need high end hardware... but who's browsing YouTube on a high-end-enough system to do this? Seriously?
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post #11 of 17
7/16/10 at 6:39pm
Finally a reason to buy a $1000 6 core CPU.
Seeing as consumer LCD moniters only go up to 2560x1600 and the content is likely going to be the meme of the week upscaled to 4K I wouldn't worry about it.
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post #12 of 17
7/17/10 at 6:06am
Red One digital-cinema camera users/production-houses have been processing 4K (~3.2k effective res) files for several years now. For Red users not downscaling to 2k or 1080p, perhaps that hardware is currently applicable--assuming access to 4k production files. Suspect there's detailed discussions about hardware at Reduser.net . Recall some older threads about various 4k displays at the Ultra High-End AVS section and its D-cinema sub-section. Pro-gear, even lower priced RED-oriented hardware, can gradually shrink to higher-end consumer levels. Spotted an article in the Imaging Journal (SMPTE.org) a while back outlining a study that gradually decreased the pro (theater-distribution) bit rate levels for JPEG 2000 (digital cinema), which has a 4k spec, discovering images held up reasonably well at lower rates. -- John
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post #13 of 17
7/17/10 at 1:37pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Mason View Post

Red One digital-cinema camera users/production-houses have been processing 4K (~3.2k effective res) files for several years now. For Red users not downscaling to 2k or 1080p, perhaps that hardware is currently applicable--assuming access to 4k production files. -- John

The Red cameras have spawned 4K support among many systems. Red workflow is a buzz word. Until now 4K material was only available in production environments. Now that it's being made available to the public, there is possible incentive to support it further down the scale, perhaps to the consumer level. Technologies like CUDA, FireStream and OpenCL could aid with utilizing these higher resolutions.

When HD started, source material was not readily available to the public until ATSC broadcasting began. This is different in that source material which exceeds capabilities of nearly all home displays, not to mention theatrical digital, is obtainable. The idea is being planted that 4K to the home is not some far off technology. It opens the possibility that home theaters could display the native resolution of the material. It also shows that network distribution can develop faster than other forms. 100Mb internet connectivity is offered in parts of the world to the consumer, and Google's planned 1Gb would greatly improve the practicality of 4K.

I've said many times that HD was considered a dead technology for many of its early years. Nice experiment but nothing more. It took decades before it finally became mainstream with digital compression being the breakthrough. 4K has developed much quicker. 4K displays may be prohibitively expensive now as their demand is relatively low, but the possibility of consumer demand could accelerate their numbers.

In terms of feature production HD and 2K is already becoming outdated.
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post #14 of 17
7/17/10 at 8:53pm
It's debatable whether or not Red One is truly a 4k camera.

From Cinematography.com http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=44370
Quote:


The main objection is simply the fact that in film scanner terminology that long preceded the RED One, “4K” specifically meant that each of the 4096 individual pixels in each horizontal row are individually “interrogated” by separate red, green and blue sensors. That is, the data from a single row of pixels consists of 4096 trios of red, green and blue pixels, a total of 12,288.
Stating that the RED One has “4K” horizontal resolution implies that the decoded colour images produced by the RED One’s Mysterium sensor are similarly made up of 4,096 trios of RGB pixels. That would indeed be the case if the camera used three 4K sensors and a dichroic beam splitter prism as is used in “3-Chip” cameras. In reality, the use of Bayer masking means that in each of the 4,096 rows of photosites on the underlying monochrome sensor, each photosite only responds to a single colour; red, green or blue. That is, two of the colour values of each pixel are not measured and have to be estimated from the values in the surrounding pixels

So while the final “4K” output may well consist of 4,096 RGB values per horizontal row of pixels, these values are the result of calculations and guesswork by the processing computer, not actual measurements. Some people outright regard this as misleading, but most people are simply concerned by the difficulty of pinning down the actual resolution...

...A point that is often raised is that if it was really possible to produce a true “4K” output from a 4K monochrome sensor with a Bayer Mask, it should also be possible to produce true HD (1920 x 1080) RGB output by Bayer Masking a single 1920 x 1080 monochrome sensor, of the type that have been used in 3-chip HDTV cameras for the past 15 years. While cameras with such sensors are available, they do not produce anything like the image quality of a camera that uses 3 such chips and a dichroic prism for RGB separation.
At present there are no 4K versions of the popular 2/3inch 1920 x 1080 3-chip format, although the technology to achieve it is certainly available. The main reason no such products exist is simply that there is currently no perceived market for them. However this could well change with the development of affordable “4K” projection and other display technologies.

One would also have to ask what such a device would be called, since “4K” appears to be already taken.


Long story short with current technology, a true 35mm sized (4:3 or 16:9 - RED is 16:9) CMOS 4k sensor with de-Bayering process would require very small RGB photosites and smaller pixels. RED is using a bit of fuzzy math to accomplish it's results. The problem with smaller pixels is less light hits the photosites (as the surface area is smaller) causing an unacceptable sacrifice in dynamic range and response, choking latitude (already a major issue against digital capture over film) RED's primary competitor the Arri Alexa realizing the difficulties of this has opted for essentially a 3ish K sensor that downsamples to 2k but with much larger photosites making the (probably correct) argument that contrast and dynamic range of an image is more important than resolution and counting pixels alone.

Or of course you could just shoot on 35mm film with a 4k scan which would offer the best results. There was an 8k demo at NAB by NHK a few years ago of course that's a long way away for any practical use.
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post #15 of 17
7/18/10 at 9:18am
4K at 400 fps would be quite good (4K TV at only 24 fps wouldn't be good), but 8K at >=400 fps would be better (especially if the sensors didn't need to get too big and didn't get too noisy - I wonder if they could use many normal sensors and lenses instead of one - and that would help with 3D). They could also do many layers of 4K or 8K for proper 3D without glasses until hologram TV is made - but that might not be till 2022
http://hd.engadget.com/2010/07/17/ja...-world-cup-20/
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post #16 of 17
7/18/10 at 9:31am
Whilst 4k is an interesting format - particularly for motion picture production - the YouTube aspect is a bit of a red herring.

YouTube's 720p and 1080p quality is pretty woeful when compared to Blu-ray 1080p and H264 1080i /720p broadcasts I watch in Europe... The fact that they support low-quality 4k alongside low-quality 1080p and 720p doesn't really seem relevant to very much in TV programming terms to me.
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post #17 of 17
7/18/10 at 1:27pm
Thread Starter 
It wasn't that long ago when YouTube was only pixelated 240x320 offerings. Web video was almost unwatchable. Audio streams were 11Kbs and far less quality than AM radio. Now audio streams can exceed what is available on FM, and HD video is becoming common. Perhaps the YouTube HD material is not as high a quality as what can be obtained through other distribution, particularity Blu-Ray, but it is steadily improving.

4K from Red and other Beyer based images is perhaps not "true 4K" in that there are not elements at each pixel for each color. However, being a single sensor also has advantages in registration. But, regardless of the source, the end result is a 4K file format.

Other advancements, such as color, stereo and HD were met with skepticism, especially the latter. There is a saying that it's not how well the bear dances, but that the bear can dance at all. The YouTube experiment may go nowhere, but the fact that it's being tried at all shows that the internet holds promise for advanced formats. This as broadcast TV seems to be at its limit and slowly degrading presentation as more services are added to the 6 Mhz channel and increasing clutter is being added by misguided programmers, some which goes across all parts of the screen!

I don't expect to see much of 4K being utilized by the public for some time, but at least the door is open. How soon until the 4K section of AVS is created?
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