8K by 4K or Octo HD - the real SUHDTV technology - Page 16

3.16 PH is based on 60 pixels per degree which is 20/20 vision. That is simply nominal vision and as this article explains some people are born with better vision.

That was based on a 2004 article from Mark Schubin who refers to 20/20 vision on his blog:

You can always aim higher and that is the problem with the idea of trying to aim for an ideal goal. Super Hi-Vision is flawed in that as an ideal goal it is both unrealistic due to cost and yet given enough time it is still likely not sufficient for all possible applications.

That would require a higher resolution since 8K UHDTV is designed for a 100 degree field of vision.

Noob question: Is the 2K video we're getting now compressed in any way, and if so, would decompressed 2K look as good as compressed 4K?

^Yes, 2k video is compressed. The least compression occurs on the Blu-ray format, but it is compressed nonetheless. The second question is more difficult to answer as it depends upon the level of compression and how transparent (throwing away bits that won't be missed) the particular codec is to the viewer (the new codec proposed for 4K should be able to compress at a higher ratio with no visible loss in quality).

PS. Nice avatar and sig.

Good grief. Doesn't anyone believe in just raw bits anymore?

Until (and if) there's fiber to every curb, fuhgetaboutit. Lossless compression (in the digital audio realm) is a lovely thing, btw!

Whenever possible, I use PNG for images. I would use FLAC for music, but the data size/bandwidth impact is steep for local storage on (or streaming to) my phone.

Understood...I like to use FLAC for CD backup, and then convert said backup files to a much tinier format of my choice (such as Opus) for my portable/phone.

When there is fiber to every home, video transmission will still be compressed. It's not only about available bandwidth.

What would uncompressed video look like?

Would it look so great that people would go into convulsions looking at it?

Would it make 8K OLED look like dog mess?

If they showed it at CES would the whole building collapse?

If DirecTV was forced into having one totally uncompressed channel would they go bankrupt because they couldn't take it?

Uncompressed is overkill. Lossless is ideal (but even that is overkill most of the time).

You don't want uncompressed or even losslessly compressed HD. You really, really don't, The transmission would be so big it would be hugely prone to dropouts. And the quality would be -- at best -- marginally better than, say, a 10:1 compression. One issue we do have these days appears to be that transmissions at the source are being compressed too much that with further downstream transcoding and compression they don't look very good. (e.g. too many Fox football broadcasts.)

But the idea that you want to send gigabit broadcasts around -- or even half-gigabit ones -- is silly. Something would have to receive all that data on consumer-grade devices, decode it in real time and display it. And with cable glitches, and satellite reception issues, and the need for forward-error correction, that would be ugly hard to do well. And needlessly expensive.

In some fantasy world where 100% of video was delivered in ways that the transport mechanism itself was unconstrained (e.g. fiber-based cable TV and perhaps satellite that used your internet to deliver 100% of its VOD so all its capacity could be HD broadcast, no SD), you would still likely not send anything -- even 4K -- that would be at 100 megabits/second. It would not be worthwhile to do so for any perceptible quality. It would just get harder and harder to add more bits for no gain.

Sigh, when I stated "overkill most of the time," that meant I was aware of that. I was only speaking from an ideal perspective on a random network, if you demand nothing short of perfection (perception be damned), lossless video is the natural choice over uncompressed (just as it is in audio). Beyond that, I would be happy with Dolby Digital Plus audio for the majority of instances given its transparency to the master even in laboratory settings. I am no stranger to compression and its remarkable knack for being able to discard bits of no perceptible use.

I am aware that you are aware of things Vinnie.

The reason I replied was to explain to people that something like 10:1 video compression is actually better for almost every purpose. No one will be able to see the difference and the advantages in transport and electronics are pretty overwhelming.

That probably applies up to 30:1 or so to be honest...

What would 8K look like after DirecTV compresses it? I guarantee you that they will compress it so much that it will like like 1081P but they'll still claim it is great because 1081p is better than 1080p!

They'll charge a lot for it, too!

I say 720p

I am going to see a whale passing by my house before we see DirectTV feeding with true 8K content. They already compress 2K to absolute maximum and with cost of satellite transponders lease increasing I do not see how they cam squeeze another channel to the stream unless they degrade quality of less popular channels to free space for this unnecessary 8k gizmo.

So many gets excited about going to 4, 8 or 16k forgetting that the quality of 2k broadcast is slowly decreasing and there is so much that can be done to bring this quality back where its supposed to be in first place. This "sell sell sell" objective just makes us customers suffer forcing to spend on gear upgrades and trading our movie collections from one disk generation to another.

Mark my words when in a few years when 4 or 8k hits the market, the 2k broadcast quality will be equal to today SD so it will be much easier for providers to convince average Joe to upgrade to next gen super high definition bs.

History shows same happened with audio when studios and merchants convinced 95% of he market that 128kbps mp3 is as good as cd and 32kbps sirius sat radio quality us better than regular fm. It's a joke.

Same process is most likely going to happen to video and on some markets it has already started.

I rather to spend 2 hours watching true HD quality 2k movie on my blue ray disk rather than paying premium for ability to watch pseudo-8k broadcast or vod which effective quality will probably be equal or less to today's bd.

What are you talking about? That never happened.

Yes, it did with plunging down CD sales after mp3 format was popularized. Remember what iTunes used to sell and how long it took them to make files with higher bitrates available? The fact that you or me are part of conscious, smart 5% of the consumers does not mean rest of them think the same way.

I know what you're trying to say, but nevertheless that was AAC, a completely different animal than MP3. And also WMA for non-apple. MP3 had no DRM. And the MPEG was clear from the get go (though it was also a bit of a crock): Their claim was that MP3/320 was "CD Quality".

Further, there were a lot of claims regarding the suffering CD sales. Wired magazine used to bring these up a lot: CD album prices artificially high, a reluctance to sell singles, Napster (and later P2P), and (this theory was my personal favorite:) People were "losing interest" in buying music. Take your pick.
Edited by tgm1024 - 2/15/13 at 9:59am

128 kbps in modern formats (especially AAC) actually is close to CD transparency (and reaches it for a lot of people). I require more headroom to allay my fears of audible quality loss with serious listening, but psychacoustics have come a long way from the early to mid 90s.

No, I'll not go that far. I don't care what MPEG-2 testing was done: AAC/128 is no where near CD quality IMO.

IME, AAC is "vastly better" than WMA, and WMA is (merely ) "better" than MP3.

And I always rip everything to MP3. LOL.....

Opinions aside, double blind testing is the only way to verify, and the results will vary depending on the individual's hearing and sensitivity to artifacts of course (it's not unheard of for people taking the test to be unable to identify the master versus QuickTime AAC at said bitrate). Perceptual encoding has come a long way no doubt.

The fact is VBR ~320kbps MP3s are absolutely indistinguishable (except perhaps by a few "golden ears") from CDs, which use roughly 4x that data. With something like AAC, you can go to closer to 8x compression and achieve the same thing.

This points out that compression is not necessarily even at all. And with video -- especially H.265/HEVC -- I suspect that 20x compression will be very, very hard to tell apart from the uncompressed 4x originals. But you will never see 20x compression. Today's uncompressed 2K is 1.5 Gbps. An uncompressed 4K signal would, therefore, be around 6Gbps. If you apply 20x compression, you are talking 300 Mbps, a consumer product that will never, ever exist anywhere, period.

If we get a "SuperBluRay", we will likely see a 75 Mbps bursty kind of bit rate, which will likely look freaking awesome. If broadcast is done at 20 Mbps, it will also likely look pretty good.

What appears likely, however, is that there will efforts to squeeze 4K into 30 Mpbs on BluRay discs and into 10 Mpbs on broadcast. While these will have some attributes that exceed the quality of existing 2K images, they will also be worse in some significant ways. In the event this occurs, actually selling 4K as a quality thing will be nigh impossible. Marketing it and giving it away, however, will remain very plausible.

(EDIT: This post originally contained a typo, caught by vtms and now corrected).
Edited by rogo - 2/17/13 at 12:32pm

^Good on you for whipping this thread back on-topic.

ALL I know is back in 2006 Dish looked great and when they first started compressing more--the quality has never been the same since.

If you saw pre 2006 satellite quality you know it looked good then and doesn't look good now regardless of whatever blasted codec or compression algorithms are employed.

I think a super duper blu-ray would be great for 4K content--I wonder if Mark Cuban were to start a satellite company that instead of having a million channels--if it only had fifty--maybe something like that could make 4K visually a step up from 1080p but 8K? That ridiculousness just isn't going to happen!

^ sounds great, but I doubt it's actually true (image quality looks worse now than it did 7 years ago- let's not even consider display quality progression).

Most of what I see of directv- this undoubtedly "absurdly compressed garbage"- looks fantastic- some of it is junk.

James

Anyone else have the sense that now that once we've finally reached the point where many of us have all the bandwidth we need, we're suddenly thrown back into the 90's? Things seemed so rosey there for a minute....

8K has 16x the resolution of 2K, not 4x. Anyway, from what I read, 25Mbps for 4K HEVC will be enough; so 100Mbps for 8K.