posted 10-16-2015 02:02 PM                       

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No 4King way: Dolby snuggles its high-def TV tech into MStar SoCs

16 October 2015

Will 4K TVs become obsolete as soon as next year?

Dolby Laboratories seems to be one step closer to pushing its version of High Dynamic Range into the TV ecosystem, with a collaboration announced this week with mega smart TV player MStar Semiconductor, which said it would deliver a Dolby Vision 4K Ultra HD SoC (System-on-a-Chipset) to go into TVs next year.

This fits in with our assertions at Faultline that next year all 4K TVs will become obsolete with the release of HDR-ready devices in 2016.

Dolby says that MStar has been working with it for the past two years to optimise Dolby Vision for integration into its MStar video processing engine, and will begin delivery of a SoC within the next year.

Given that MStar claims a 70 per cent market share for the chips that drive smart TVs, Dolby’s presence on the device is a significant boost. However, you could also make the argument that as a chip-maker MStar has to offer this HDR variant, as well as the two other popular ones – from the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers and from Technicolor – in order to satisfy all of its customers.

But the Dolby Vision VS10 universal HDR playback solution supports both dual-layer and single-layer Dolby Vision streams and other HDR profiles so it includes the SMPTE ST 2084 standard. This enables displays to take full advantage of a combination of peak brightness, local contrast, and wider colour gamut.

“As early adopters of Dolby Vision, MStar has collaborated with Dolby for the past two years to optimise the HDR engine with MStar’s expertise in display technologies, which will enable the delivery of Dolby Vision to a broader range of TVs,” said Sean Lin, general manager, TV Business Unit, MStar.

Just a few weeks ago Dolby Laboratories announced that China’s HiSilicon had agreed to offer Dolby Vision 4K UHD in its SoC for set tops in the DVB, IPTV and OTT markets, including on Android set tops, which use the HiSilicon Hi3798C V200 chipsets. This was the first global Ultra HD set top chipset solution to support Dolby Vision HDR.

Back in June, Technicolor submitted its own HDR process for standardisation to the Motion Picture Experts Group and said that testing is underway with chipmakers including Marvell and STMicroelectronics.

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posted 11-01-2015 10:49 AM                       

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Fox Reveals First 4K Blu-ray Titles...

3 September 2015

Twentieth Century Fox has revealed the first batch of titles that will be released on 4K Blu-ray. They are Exodus: Gods and Kings, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Fantastic Four, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Life of Pi, The Maze Runner and Wild.

At IFA in Berlin, Mike Dunn, president of Fox Home Entertainment said: "We are committed to releasing our slate of movies going forward in Ultra HD with high dynamic range, day and date, with the Digital HD and Blu-ray release. We believe it is critical to have rich, compelling content available to consumers as the UHD TV market continues to grow."

Also at IFA Samsung introduced its first 4K Blu-ray player, which is expected to arrive on the market in early 2016.

Hanno Basse, chair of the UHD Alliance and CTO at Fox, who attended the press event for Samsung's new player commented: "We've made a lot of progress. We're getting close to finalizing our technical specifications, as well as our certification and logo programs. Since the announcement of the Alliance earlier this year, we've almost tripled our membership, and we now represent a large segment of the device and content industry from around the world. And we hope to share a lot more details in the coming months on the launch of our licensing program and the availability of new products in the market."

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posted 11-13-2015 08:51 PM                   

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This Year, Buy a TV That’s Actually Better
High dynamic range, or HDR, is a bigger deal for picture quality than Ultra HD 4K or more gimmicky TV upsells

By Geoffrey A. Fowler Nov. 10, 2015 -- The Wall Street Journal

sub-headline: High dynamic range, or HDR, allows this year’s top TVs to show more colors, lights and darks. WSJ Personal Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler explains why, when it comes to picture quality, HDR is a bigger deal than Ultra HD 4K.

Can you spot the difference between someone on TV and a person actually standing in front of you? Of course, but it’s hard to put your finger on why. A screen wipes out the little details—the glint in an eye, the spring of a curl.

TV’s next leap takes it closer to real life. It’s not 3-D, or more pixels. Instead, new screens can show the highs and lows that color reality: the reflection in an eye that’s 500 times brighter than the pupil next to it, the countless gradations in a head of hair.

Called high dynamic range, or HDR, this lust-worthy feature is available in the fall’s best TVs from Samsung, LG and Sony. It may sound like some geeky perk, but unlike with Ultra HD 4K TV sets, normal humans don’t have to scoot the couch closer to notice HDR. From what I’ve seen, it’s the best argument in years to upgrade your set.

HDR will become standard in the coming years. The price for getting it first is $2,000 and up. Way up.

The term HDR may be familiar from a shooting mode on your smartphone camera. On a TV, HDR screens do a better job of reproducing the astonishingly wide range of colors our eyes take in. High-end cameras, the ones Hollywood already uses, capture much of this information. But to make video compatible with standard TV’s narrow range of tones, a lot of this detail gets thrown out.

What does HDR look like? You’ll know it when you see it. Nothing I can show you here—in video or photos—can quite reproduce it.

It helps to view it side-by-side with a standard video, as I’ve been doing with a few movies in my gadget vault for the past three weeks. A standard video might look brighter overall, but the HDR version is more heightened and detailed.

Spider-Man’s costume becomes a more intense red, even in darker scenes. “The Lego Movie” characters look like they’re actually made of plastic. HDR video can get so bright that an on-screen explosion can actually be, momentarily, uncomfortable.

My aha moment came watching the movie “Life of Pi.” There’s a scene where young Pi is attacked by flying fish. By the end, he looks like he’s covered in beads of water. But when I watched it in HDR, I realized that wasn’t water—those were fish scales, remnants of his battle. The HDR version could show enough of the tones in each scale for me to make it out.

In many of these sets, the extra colors are made possible by awesomely named quantum dots, which emit more colors on an LCD screen. (Kudos to Samsung for figuring out how to do this on its SUHD TV line without the toxic metal cadmium.) LG produces HDR images using a more expensive technology called OLED, which can show even more colors.

These TVs are also much brighter. To geek out for a moment, we need to pick nits—no, they’re not lice, but units of measurement to gauge brightness. Back in the 1990s, when our current video standards were set, the assumption was that a TV could produce, at most, 100 nits. Flowers in the noonday sun are closer to 14,000 nits.

A TV doesn’t need to be that bright. Samsung’s latest SUHD TVs can put out 1,000 nits. That’s enough for a neon sign to look like it’s glowing amid the inky dark pixels of night.

There’s just one problem, and it’s a familiar one: TV makers are much further along than Hollywood in adopting the new technology. There’s no HDR broadcast TV or live sports, at least not yet. (Can you imagine how awesome it would be to watch the Olympics in HDR? Please get on that, NBC.)

Here’s what you can get today: Amazon streams HDR versions of a handful of movies, including “Amazing Spider-Man 2,” and original shows (“Transparent,” “Mozart in the Jungle”) to compatible smart TVs. Netflix plans to offer HDR, too, but it wasn’t live on any sets I tested.

Other sources don’t exactly make it easy for early adopters. Online movie store M-Go sells HDR films, including “Life of Pi.” You can play them on Samsung TVs—if you have a compatible external hard drive. The app is buggy, and it took me three days to download a file before I could watch my movie.

To make matters worse, there are competing HDR formats. (Seriously, again?) Samsung, Sony and LG are all behind HDR 10, which Amazon is using.

But the entertainment wizards at Dolby Laboratories, largely responsible for jump-starting the idea of HDR, have their own system, Dolby Vision, which could lead to better images. So far, in the U.S., Dolby has only signed up Vizio, which has been promoting a TV I saw in prototype, but wasn’t able to test. Netflix and Wal-Mart ’s movie service, Vudu, are early Dolby Vision content partners.

Still, there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful for HDR. Unlike Ultra HD 4K video, HDR doesn’t require creators to use new cameras. Distributors don’t really have to pick a side in the format war—they can offer both Dolby Vision and HDR 10 over the Internet. And HDR doesn’t take much more bandwidth to transmit to your home. 21st Century Fox has already committed to making all new movies available in HDR. And Samsung announced a Blu-ray disc player that supports 4K and HDR.

Samsung’s 65-inch $4,000 JS9500 uses quantum dot nanotechnology to enhance the color on an LCD panel.

Before recommending my favorite HDR sets—all of which are also 4K—I want to warn you about shopping. Many retailers don’t have HDR demos in stores, and since they usually set all their TVs to a garish vivid mode, it would be hard to spot genuine HDR content amid all the shock and awe. HDR isn’t bright all the time—just when it should be.

If money is no object, the year’s best HDR-capable TV, hands down the best TV of 2015, is LG’s 9500 OLED line. Its prices run $3,000 for a 55-inch model, and $5,000 for 65-inch. With max brightness of 400 nits, these OLEDs aren’t as bright as competing LCD models, but because OLED can get as dark as the old plasma sets, both HDR and non-HDR video look more lifelike. They’ve got stunning color, and I can confirm the screen is viewable from every corner of the man cave. I also prefer LG’s snappy WebOS 2 interface.

Vizio’s $6,000 Reference Series set looked great when Dolby showed it to me, but Vizio wasn’t able to deliver me a shipping TV. (They’re now on sale at Best Buy ). I can’t recommend a TV without testing it first.

The HDR TV with the most impressive color came from Sony, but the $3,800 65-inch X930C model I tested came in last in darker scenes. Sony says its 75-inch $8,000 X940C model doesn’t have that problem thanks to a different backlight technology.

If spending more than $3,000 on a TV might put you in divorce court, I can recommend Samsung’s JS8500 ($2,500 for 65 inches) as a good compromise with the best lineup of HDR content.

And what if you just wait? That’s always the rub with TV tech. This year’s models will surely be on sale by Super Bowl 50, even if the game won’t be ready for HDR until Super Bowl 51 or later. And I’m sure next year’s models will show even more colors, with better processors to handle HDR in any format. They’ll also likely get brighter, especially LG’s OLED models.

After years of dubious upgrades—how many times did anyone actually watch “Avatar” in 3-D?—there’s finally a TV technology improvement that’s instantly obvious to the naked eye. With HDR, the pieces are finally in place for TVs to compete on what mattered all along: the most realistic picture.

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posted 01-08-2016 05:44 PM                       

• HDCP 2.2 Compatibility with legacy equipment
  The current belief is that unless you have HDCP 2.2 equipment in every part of your chain, you will not get any content from a UHD disc. It will not be down-rezzed to 1080p for legacy equipment unless every component in the chain supports HDCP 2.2
• Atmos/DTS:X on the included Blu-ray in the UHD Combo Pack in addition to the UHD disc
  The Fox announcement seems to say that while the UHD disc may have Atmos/DTS:X, the included Blu-ray will not.
• Atmos/DTS:X on the standalone Blu-ray titles of movies that are released on UHD in Atmos/DTS:X
  One could assume from the Fox announcement that even if a movie is released on UHD with Atmos/DTS:X, the standalone Blu-ray titles will not.