Predictions for 2013 4K projectors - Page 7

Don't forget Sony Released the first ps3 without HD Bitstream audio support.


Current HDMI spec can handle 4k 24p.
Edited by space2001 - 2/6/13 at 12:52pm

Incorrect. The original fat PS3 supported multi-channel LPCM and also Dolby TrueHD. None of the original players supported dts-HD Master Audio. Had Sony not added support later I have a feeling dts would have not survived.

I think you should look into this. The Original Fat Ps3's did not support TRUEHD and DTS-HD since the HDMI chip on it did not support them.

It only supported LPCM Multichannel.

HD audio Bitstream came when introduced the slim ps3 and it had the New HDMI chipset to support it.

It decoded TrueHD internally and output it in LPCM. DolbyTrueHD is just a zip format for LPCM. Both TrueHD and dts Master Audio when decoded are nothin more than LPCM audio.

The slim PS3 was the first unit that could send the undecoded D-THD and dts-MA bitstreams over the HDMI cable. In truth, the original intention was always to decode the bitstreams in the players for the ability to mix the lossless audio with secondary audio tracks inside the player. That's why secondary audio tracks don't work when you bitstream the lossless audio over HDMI. Saying that the original PS3 didn't support HD audio is just plain wrong. My 60GB sent 7.1 LPCM audio over HDMI just fine and still does. As I said earlier the original firmware on the PS3 didn't support dts-HD MA, but a firmware update in early 2008 finally provided that ability.

The original PS3 didn't support HDMI 1.3, but HDMI 1.2 was fully capable of transmitting 7.1 LPCM up to 96kHz. The slim PS3 was fully HDMI 1.3 compliant so it could send the bitstream signal. The fact is that there is really no difference between decoding the audio in the player vs. the receiver.
Edited by Toknowshita - 2/6/13 at 12:51pm

Hehe I meant Bitstream. The Original Fat could not bitstream the Audio Codecs.

And now Back to the Future.

We may hear as early as two weeks from today if the Playstation 4 will be supporting 4K video in some form. The is from the AP story:

I came looking for projector predictions for 2013, and boy was i dissapointed... looked at the 3 last pages and now im leaving again.

Unfortunately, there just isn't much 4K projector news. So the thread will divert into historical discussions of audio capability. Its all good. Its all about a group of friends communicating with each other about interests in commonalility.
Edited by mark haflich - 2/7/13 at 12:52pm

I guess an on-topic summary would be:







so maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe

Now can we get back to the non-projector 4K discussions and other stuff we can't agree on.
Edited by Ron Jones - 2/7/13 at 8:25am

Well, we can agree on this great summary. That's a start

Doesn't JCV already have a " flagship " native 4K projector? Seems to me I saw it like 3 1/2 years ago -

http://pro.jvc.com/prof/attributes/features.jsp?model_id=MDL101929

But I didn't think that was being sold as 'consumer' product (5,000 lumens and a $150K price), thus Sony's claim that the VW1000 was the first consumer 4K projector. I do think JVC may introduce a sub-$20K native 4K consumer projector this year, or next. Unfortunately with the delays is finalizing the next generation HDMI standard (ver. 1.5 or 2.0), the availability of production chipsets supporting this new version of HDMI will probably be delayed until sometime in 2014. JVC and other manufacturers may want to wait until the new HDMI version can be included (perhaps along with support for HDBaseT) before releasing a new 4K projector.
Edited by Ron Jones - 2/7/13 at 10:36am

If I were a manufacturer and didn't have a modular construction where a new input board could be swapped in for $3K or so, I would wait.

Do the current hdmi allows for 10-12 bits?

Yes, HDMI 1.3 and higher allows for such color bit depths.

Just reading into Manni01 comments. I was watching my Oppo 103 today and the bit was 12. I saw that I had the feature on my Oppo set that way, which is probably upscaling the blu ray from 8 to 12 bits. With all the new hdmi talk, why would we need a new hdmi for 10-12 bits?

The Bluray standard is 8 bits.

You can't upscale bits. You can increase the length of a bit number by a variety of ways which involve I believe over sampling. Its done in audio all the time however its really quite different in video. Increased bit length increases the number of colors possible within a color space but does of course not increase the size of the color space. Increased bit length, more steps, is what would elimnate the present banding in 8 bit video which several nasties can be employed to make the banding less obvious.

HDMI 1.4 is limited at the upper resolution to 4096 x 2160 at 24 fps. At 4HD 3840 x 2160 the frame rate can go to 30. The new standard will among other things allow or require the carrying capacity of a higher frame rate.
Edited by mark haflich - 2/8/13 at 9:27pm

Mark, is $3K about what you expect the Sony to cost for its future hardware upgrade, assuming that it does indeed come about?

I am just guessing. Obviously, its not going to be $10K. the qualia mod was about $3K if I rember correctly. I doubt it would be much less than $3K. But I really am just stabbing.
Edited by mark haflich - 2/8/13 at 7:26am

Hopefully this would include any other tidbits of upgrades to HW and SW that have taken place since the 1000's initially came out.

What Mark replied is correct, this is why I mentionned bluray 4K as well, to simplify, it doesn't need to be optical, what I mean by that is a standard for content improving on the 8 bits with half chroma (YCbCr420) of bluray.

The 12 bits of your Oppo is a nice marketting trick. What "deepcolor" does for bluray is get the player upscale the color depth, through interpolation, which is what the display would do internally if sent the untouched bluray content. It's simply a joke, but it makes customers happy.

It's exactly like the new sony bluray player upscaling to 4K. A joke. Upscaled 1080p cannot be used without a 4K display, and any 4K display on the market is bound to have a better upscaler than the player, or at least you would hope so given the price difference. The VW1000, for example, definitely does. So having the upscaler in the player doesn't give you anything. Except that the upscaling takes place in the player, possibly - probably - giving you a worse picture than if you let the display do the upscaling. Plus of course when the new bluray 4K or HDMI standard is released, they won't be compatible.

So to clarify again, you need a few things to things to improve on bluray 1080p content:

- better color resolution than YCbCr420 as encoded in bluray. We're hoping for YCbCr422 at 10 or 12 bits. This would be part of a new 4K standard, whether it is based on an optical bluray (what I called bluray 4K) or another support (hdd, ssd, sd, download, etc). Because it means higher bitrate, it might also need the new HDMI standard to support this at high frame rates in 4K, unless the new content format is better compressed to fit on existing bluray discs, as in that case the content might fit throught HDMI 1.4 still compressed, and be decoded within the player (similar to HD Audio, DTSHD and Dolby TrueHD are sent compressed, while LPCM is decoded in the player and sent uncompressed, which requires more bandwidth). This (4K fitting on standard bluray) is unlikely to happen, but still a possibility I guess as red claims to be able to compress 4K within the same footprint as 1080p bluray. Also it would be a solution for 2D only, 3D 4K would definitely need the higher bandwidth of the new HDMI standard.
- better horizontal/vertical resolution in the content itself (no upscaling), which will need the new HDMI to deal with the increased bandwidth at rates higher than 24/30 fps in 2D and for 3D 4K, which isn't handled by the current HDMI at all
- so you will most likely need a source and a display updated to the new HDMI format to benefit from these improvements to the content format. Provided the new e-shift JVCs get the new HDMI, they should be able to support the increased color resolution fully, and the increased horizontal/vertical resolution partially (half of what a true 4K display could do, but twice what a non e-shift display would). Without 4K inputs, the new JVC would give you the same interpolated 4K lite with no color resolution increase and upscaled 1080p. They will not be able to display native 4K content at all. If Ron's timing for the new HDMI boards is right (and he is usually right), this is bad news for the fall 2013 generation.
- of course everything in the video path between the source and display need to be updated too, which means VP, darbee, AVR or you fall back to 1080p. The AVR is a special case as if you handle input switching through a VP (or a 4K switch with separate output for audio) you can get it out of the video path and not upgrade. Same thing if you use only one 4K source which has a separate HDMI out for audio. No improvement for audio are planned in the new 4K format or bluray 4K as far as I know, upgrading the AVR is only needed if you use it to switch at least one 4K source.

Hope this clarifies and helps!
Edited by Manni01 - 2/8/13 at 9:43am

Could 'they' provide 4k material pressed into 2 or more current BluRay disks, these are loaded into the PS4, which transfers the information from the disks to it's internal hard drive rapidly and plays back from there....could be a cheap but effective stop gap measure till internet speeds get to multiple Gbps...just a thought....
Edited by Highjinx - 2/8/13 at 1:21am

Sure but you'd still need the new HDMI interface to deal with the increased bit rate in 2D (and even more 3D) to send this larger file to the display. Unless the 4K content is compressed more efficiently so that it can fit through the HDMI 1.4 interface and is decompressed in the display (least likely option to happen), an HDMI interface with a higher bandwidth is needed.

Using existing blurays with more efficient compression (like Red) is only a delivery option (from the distributor to the consumer), not really a hardware connection option (from the player to the display) unless the display does all the work.

As I recently wrote about in my blog at projectorreviews.com, the recently approved h.265 standard defines the High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) that has twice the efficiency of the AVC codec defined by h.264 that is widely used today for encoding 1080p for blu-ray discs. Thus HDVC can encode 1080p to have half the file size as the HD version of AVC used today with Blu-rays. HDVC also supports 4K and should be able to encode 4K video, with 24Hz frame rates and 8-bit color depth to around the same file size as for AVC encoded 1080p used on today's Blu-rays (i.e., also limited to 24Hz and 8-bit color depth). The new HEVC standard only includes the definition for the basic parts of the encoder for 4K support and has extensibility to support the addition of such things support for higher frame rates, 3D, increased color depth and higher fidelity chroma encoding. These extensions are being worked and will be included in a future update to the h.265 standard. While HEVC may be not as efficient as the codec being used by RED (we don't really know how they will compare), it should be possible to put full length 4K movies, in 2D at 24Hz and 8-bit per color, onto a single dual layer Blu-ray Disc by using HEVC. 4-layer BD-R data discs have already been defined by an 2010 update to the Blu-ray standard and it should be easy to incorporate support for 4-layer BD Roms (i.e., used for commerical movie discs) as the same time that a 4K Ultra HD format is defined by an updated Blu-ray standard (assuming the BDA decides to move ahead to add 4K support). The 4-layer discs will probably be needed to support the "enhanced" versions of 4K, including those with 3D, higher frame rates, increased color depth, etc.

Ron. It is sacriligious to say 8 biys and 4k in the same breadth.. The ITU 4K standard does not allow 8 bit but requires a minimum of 10 bits.
Edited by mark haflich - 2/8/13 at 9:28pm

Thanks Ron. I heard about H265, but I also heard that it wouldn't be ready for a while to be part of the upcoming 4K standard (if there is ever such a thing), probably due to these missing extensions you are mentionning. At the moment H265 sounds good for bluray as it's more efficient than H264, but not really for anything improving on that.

Honestly 4K at 8 bits sounds pretty unsexy, so I really hope some new content standard will come up with better color resolution/bit depth and full chroma. Otherwise I might just skip 4K entirely and wait for 8K:).

For example, I would be very surprised if RED was delivering their content in 8 bits with half chroma. Do you know which format they are using on their proprietary redray?

EDIT: just found this on Red's website re the .RED format:

"Blu-ray is an optical disc media supporting HD and 3d content at 8-bit 4:2:0 color precision, while REDRAY is an IP Network based media player supporting 4K and 3D content at 12-bit 4:2:2 color precision at 24, 48 or 60fps. This technology allows you to seamlessly distribute and view your content as it was originally intended to be seen."

As the redray player seems to be using HDMI 1.4, I have no idea how they can display up to 3D @ 60FPS. Is the compression that efficient? They say 90mn (2D 4K @24p) only takes 13.5GB. That sounds mad! More info here.

In any case, do you agree that we need to make a distinction between the content delivery mecanism (bluray, 4 layer bluray, hdd, sd, download) and the source/display connection (HDMI version)?

Even if we get to fit 4K content with H265 encoding on exisiting or enhanced blurays, I'm sure you agree the decoding/decompression is more likely to take place in the player than in the display (especially if we are talking about existing displays like the VW1000ES or the new UHDTVs), which means that irrespective of the way it is delivered, both players and displays will need the new HDMI interface to deal with this 4K content (unless we limit it to 2D 4K at 8 bits 24fps, in which case I'll personally pass as this is really unexciting and not worth the upgrade in my set up, where an increase of picture resolution alone - as demonstrated by eshift, I haven't tried true 4K - gives almost nothing).
Edited by Manni01 - 2/8/13 at 9:56am

Thanks guys.............looking into my biased crystal ball.........this is what I see

Using existing 2 layer BD's to deliver 4k with hardware capable of decoding and delivering the required signal to the display seems an economical alternative than do other methods other than downloads.

The disks are a mature technology, so no issues there. The disks could have a 1080p encoded section with a dialogue window, which will be displayed if the 4K disk is inserted into an existing BR player with a warning that the disk can only be used in a 4K-BR player. These disks I envision are a pure storage medium, with no direct playback possible. The 4K data on the disk/s will be encripted,once loaded into a 4K player the data will be decripted and stored in the players hard drive, no need to compromise on quality with agressive compression and limit the content of the movie to one disk, additional disks could be provided if required. Once the data from the disk/s are loaded into the player's HD, the movie will playback seamlessly in 4K.

Currently buy a 3D version, one has the 3D disk, the 2D disk and a DVD copy.........the cost of providing 4K(2 disks) plus a 1080p disk should be similar.......until 4 layer disk yeilds are up and cost effective. People can stil have their movie collections & manufacturers get to produce their 4K BR Hard Drive machines keeping the CE industry happy.

This delivery system is overly complicated. The whole point of a disc delivery system is to avoid the need for hard drive based storage and to copy the information on to a hard drive would be redundant and add cost to this new format. There's no reason, especially when we already have BD's that have much larger capacity than current dual layer discs and the blur-laser already capable of reading the information on those exxtra layers, that we couldn't use H.265 with 10bit color and still yield great results on 4K material. Once these new discs go into mass production using two 50GB discs would be more costly than to produce a single 100GB+ disc and would take out the need to swap discs (to load on a hard drive or watch a movie continuously).

If you used a single disc, in your proposed method of delivery, this would only rule out the need for a hard drive even further. There would be no reason why you couldn't un-compress and decode the media on the fly (even though with as much space as these new BDs give I don't think you would need to compress the media even further than what h.265 + currrent high res audio codecs already do). I think for a physical format to be successful companies are going to be looking for a way to deliver you that content as cheap as possible. If players had massive hard drives that would only drive cost up. The same could be said for multiple discs which would be utterly stupid to do considering we already have the appropriate technology for a single disc to be used. There is very little R&D needed for a 4K disc delivery system. You could use current BD+ security measures. All you really need to do is add h.265 decoding and an appropriate chipset that is powerful enough to decode at such bitrates. The last thing you would need to do is add the new HDMI port and you're all set. Your method adds cost through a lot of R&D, a lot of new standards to be made for extra compression, cost in developing possibly a new file structure on the harddrive once its decompressed, and cost when adding hard drives to players. We need (and I think companies want) to keep this as simple and cost effective as possible, otherwise we won't be seeing quality 4K coming our way.
Edited by Seegs108 - 2/8/13 at 3:37pm

Ahhh!.....the reason for the hard drive is future proofing/dual use for the download model.....which will eventually become the standard. Sure once the yeilds are up for 4 layer disks a single disk may suffice. There is an advantage using the HD, as the movie data capacity does not have to be limited to 4 layers worth of data. A 250GB HD is all that would be required........let's see what the PS4 will offer.