Yes but based on their wording, it seems as if 25p and 50p are technically locked unless your UHD TV is a European model. It'd been nice if all UHD sets and players offered all the available frame rates without having to worry about which country your UHD TV set comes from.

Hopefully that is added before these units are released to the general public.

Any word on 3D capability?

The word out of CES is "no", although I haven't seen anything definitive/official.There is a 3D extension for HEVC, so maybe this is something that can be incorporated into players down the line...?

Which means I'll wait for that to become an affordable reality. I still like 3D flicks and would like to the see the home version of the format improved.

Precisely.

What a frustrating format this seems to be. So many specs I wanted (10-bit color, 60p) are there, so many (3D, universal 25p support) are absent. What bugs me is that the missing functions aren't missing because of technical limitations or high design/manufacturing/implementation costs; they could all just as easily be included as not.

How big would a 4k movie be? 4x the size of a blu-ray movie? Like 200GB? Pretty crazy.

What's the file structure like for blu-rays? Do they split them in 1GB blocks like with DVDs?

I think Sony and Oppo are the only players that can do 4k using dual-core CPUs. Does that mean most basic blu-ray players use single core CPUs?

Depends. Even DCPs use compression, I think that to get 4K masters onto a disc, you'd have to compress somewhat.

I think that's the whole point behind BDXL.

These discs will be using a different and much more efficient codec -- HEVC. They're talking about 66 gig and 100 gig discs, so they'll have to be smaller than that!

Nope. Unless it's a move with seamless branching, the whole thing is in a single m2ts file. Extras and basically every other piece of video would be in their own individual m2ts files.

Well, 66 GB seems way, way too small. Something will have to give when you've got 4x as many pixels and only ~1.25x as much disk space. More efficient codec or not, it means more information will have to be thrown away.

100Gb seems like it may just be doable for some of the shortest movies, ie under 90 minutes, with no extras.

Remember, we're taking about extended audio formats also, and they may take 15-20 GB per movie. So, that's 20Gb less for the video encode on the disc.

I think those who are willing to take the major plunge by investing in the technology will be picky, and cramming bits seems like a foolish thing to do at this point in the game. Give 'em breathing room -- 150 - 200 GB per disc will ensure that!

Considering HD-DVD in 2006 was 15GB and held a two hour movie, I would think 66GB or 100GB with 2015 2x better codecs should be plenty of space for 4x pixels. But I agree, the more space, the better.

3 layer BDXL discs are capable of 128 GB. I'm sure we'll eventually get versions of the disc format with even higher capacity.

Oh, blu-rays use m2ts, not vob?

That's interesting they decide to use a new codec like h.265. I think it'd be kind of like the Apple h.264 movies, e.g., 2GB m4v from a 6GB DVD for a 2-hour movie.

But, for BDXL, people would have to get a whole new player? A software update won't do it?

Yeah, it requires a totally different disc drive. The cheapest option would be to wait for the drives to go down in price and install one in to your existing PC.

I'm still looking for an inexpensive BD-ROM PC drive at this point.

Not trying to threadcrap it's just I've been wanting to add to this thread for a while now but I have nothing to say.

I have a Bluray player and most "new" titles are purchased on Blu, but I still have a ton of DVDs that will likely never be upgraded to Blu and we've also really come to appreciate streaming, either via Netflix/Hulu or outright purchasing on iTunes.

I simply have no excitement for a new format. Hell, they still haven't fixed the "resume" feature on Bluray, what promise is there that this 4K thing will be any more consumer friendly?

Don't worry! You're nowhere near threadcrapping. If there's a thread down the road where we talk about upcoming releases, the pros and cons of different players, or whatever, that'd be a different story. In this thread, talking about why you're not interested is absolutely valid.

I recently got this one for $65 on Amazon.

I see nothing wrong. Your concerns are valid. Also, I wonder if the BT.2020 spec will eventually be applied to streaming 4K movies. So perhaps physical media might afford some improvements for the streaming counterpart as well.

I don't see the big deal about the "Resume feature" which I've seen mentioned on several boards. I hardly ever watch movies in sections where I'd need to do that, and my Oppo player already can do that on discs that don't use Java (where you have to wait through those annoying loading screens) and even on several of those I've noticed if I stop a movie in the middle and play the disc again later, it will ask if I want to start from where I was last time. They do need to make it faster to just start and play a movie- some who advocate that streaming nonsense say they like that better because there's no forced previews or stuff at the beginning of those, but some still have the FBI warnings and I bet they'll start putting trailers on those too if more people buy them.

Bring on 4K. I'm not scared!

I don't plan to support it - unless it gets cheap really fast and has support and staying power from the studios (obviously a wait and see situation).
but I like Technology, I like advancement in technologies and that's why I'm embracing 4K.

There's a difference between embracing a technology which is beneficial to consumers in the long term, and being a guinea pig for companies who simply want to sell something in the short term to simply make a fast profit, leaving your Embraced Technology in the dust, becoming a beverage holder.

I don't see any benefit to 4K for consumers at the moment. We've been promised enough times to know what's going to happen.

Current Blu-ray discs could squeeze a lot of content on a BD-50, and whatever happened to BD-100s, anyway. We haven't even tried to master the Blu-ray disc, and now we have our usual folks marketing 4K to us.

Current Blu-ray movies are still compressed. If you eased the compression on these movies, allowing for a video bandwidth that went into the 50+ Mbps, you'd get something which would probably be on the level with a 4K transfer.

And fuck these FBI warnings. They're getting irritating. There's nothing more insulting than a goddamn plethora of warnings at the beginning of a fucking movie when you paid for the motherfucker.

4K is mostly getting pushed out so quickly because the electronics manufacturers demanded a new technology cycle to juice sales. Hollywood is only mildly enthusiastic about selling 4K content to consumers, they mostly realize it won't become a mass market format for years.

"Ever" is far more likely.

I'm not really worried about the business side of things on 4K.
Again, I'm just going to wait and see (for however long it shall take). If the finished product is awesome and looks nicer than my blu and is affordable, then...buy,buy if not then, I still got my blus.

It isn't. What "gives" is the combination of the more efficient (and processor-dependent) codec and the diminishing bit-budgets required of increasing video resolutions. Due to the nature of the relationship between motion video encoding/compression and cinematic subject matter, the higher the resolution of the video, the less additional information is required to describe the difference from a lower resolution. So, while a 4K image is spatially four times the resolution of a 1080p image, it doesn't require four times the data to encode it, source content being equal. A third factor is that the real spatial resolution of a lot of 35mm camera negatives actually falls somewhere between 1080p and 4K, so the content will dictate a lower data requirement there, also. 100GB discs will work just fine for 4K, with no apparent image degradation versus the quality that can be achieved with 1080p Blu-ray.