Beyond HDTV 354
The Hub writes "The Economist writes a thoughtful article about the next generation of HDTVs and how they will provide resolutions beyond 1080p. The drive for higher resolution is driven in part by the demands of 3D content. Also, some see streaming higher resolution content to the home as a way to make up for declining DVD sales. This would mean the studios would have to better embrace services such as Netflix or stream directly to the consumer. Mind you, picture quality is driven by more than the number of pixels."
HD formats are a kind of DOS attack (Score:5, Interesting)
hear me out..
many of us have HTPC's. we store our media on hard disk.
how much space does blue ray take, natively? a shitload, that's how much. many more times what a dvd takes in its native form; and many people take dvd and compress THAT further before storing on htpc.
add in HD audio (which is beyond what consumer DACs and preamp stages can do; so this is clearly overkill for playback systems at home) and you end up with huge file sizes.
I actually do think this was on purpose. and now that disks are getting bigger, still (of course they are) the entertainment cartels want to keep the storage requirements absurdly high to 'convince' us to use the native shinydisc stuff, which is chock full of DRM. and commercials. gotta LOVE that 'do not skip' stuff, too.
I'm actually ok with upres'd dvd's on my TV. and I like how they don't chew up nearly as much space; plus the drm on dvd is trivial to break. drm on hd discs is a bit harder and much more hassle to deal with.
think about it. making the files so large (and taking up more room than they really need to; lets be honest) is actually a DOS. denial of service; by taking so much room on your system, it denies you the ability to store a large library, in practical terms.
Can't deliver 1080p now. (Score:5, Interesting)
Few sources, even Blu-Ray, consistently deliver 1080p now. Get close enough to a display to see the pixels, and notice the compression blur that stabilizes once motion stops.
The next logical step is a higher frame rate. 24FPS for movies is way too slow. Cameron ("Titanic", "Avatar", etc.) has been bitching about this for years. He likes pans over highly detailed backgrounds, which produce strobing effects at 24FPS. Movies should be at least 48FPS, and maybe 72FPS. (The Showscan tests [wikipedia.org] indicate that viewers notice improved quality up to about 72FPS, but not above that, so that's the limit of human perception.)
Personally, I'd like to see framefree compression. [framefree.com] This is a concept out of Kerner Optical (a Lucasfilm spinoff). Instead of merely switching from one frame to the next, the player computes a morph between frames. This allows running at any display rate, allows arbitrarily slow motion, allows much higher compression ratios than MPEG-4, and requires substantial computation in the decoder. They never did much with the technology, though; it was sold to Monolith in Japan, which hasn't done much with it. It's worth looking at again, now that putting a GPU in a TV isn't a radical concept.
Re:Oh please no (Score:4, Interesting)
Vertical resolution has been actively shrinking as wider screens have been produced. Basic laptop models have gone from 1280x800 (16:10) to 1366x768 (16:9). So they're not just getting wider, they're also getting shorter. Many browser games can't even fit in a 768p laptop display. On the desktop, 1920x1200 has been completely replaced by 1920x1080. You can't find 1200 displays anywhere in retail stores, and online you'll pay twice as much for a 1200 display vs a 1080 display.
1200 is the minimum vertical working resolution as far as I'm concerned. I agree you can fit information well in a 960x1200 half of such a display, but at 1080 you are in the range of losing the ability to fit decent information without vertical scrolling, or zooming out uncomfortably far.
If 25:9 goes anywhere in the next few years, and goes any higher vertical res than 1080, I'll eat my socks. Chances are, they'd shrink it vertically to fit, like 2500x900 pixels.