This article was originally published at http://mesalliance.org/
Earlier last month, various news reports came out that the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) had finalized standards for Ultra HD Blu-ray, the 4K Blu-ray spec expected to be the next generation of physical disc.
It was news to Victor Matsuda, chairman of the BDA’s global promotions group.
“Some things at the very least are incomplete,” Matsuda told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) about the 4K Blu-ray standard. “And there’s no information at this time that we can offer that differs from what we provided at the [International Consumer Electronics Show in January].”
Matsuda corrected two misconceptions making the rounds regarding the spec: The new 4K Blu-ray spec will support one mandatory High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology, with two optional that can be layered on, and while the Ultra HD hardware will be mandatory backwards compatible with current Blu-ray Discs, the 4K Blu-ray Discs will not work with current Blu-ray players.
Licensing of the new 4K Blu-ray technology is expected to start mid-year, with 4K Blu-ray discs and hardware available at retail possibly by Christmas.
“We were a little concerned that what’s been written was convoluted, unclear and certainly inaccurate,” Ron Martin, director of Panasonic Hollywood Labs told MESA. Panasonic debuted a first-of-its-kind 4K Blu-ray player prototype at CES last month. “The BDA has come up with a generic, mandatory signaling system for HDR that we believe will be quite revolutionary in and out itself. But we did not want to exclude those that bring an alternate technology to the table, offering a layered approach on top of the Blu-ray solution.”
For example, contrary to some reports, Technicolor has not authored an HDR solution, but has had a dynamic metadata package solution adopted to go with the HDR signal “so the players know how to handle the HDR data on the disc,” Martin shared.
In short, technical meetings for the Blu-ray 4K standard are still in progress among BDA member companies, and while “we’re making tremendous progress,” Martin said, there’s still work to be done.
“The message we have to share is that our next milestone is a mid-year licensing start, after completion of the specification,” Matsuda added.