4k news_news 26/03/2015 17:44 Page 2
T
he year of the goat (or
sheep) began with a
great hurrah for Ultra
HD as TV manufacturers
flocked to CES with
numerous screens capable of
displaying in 4K or better.
The good news is that UHD
sales are on the up while the
price-per-inch is falling, and
4K screens account for more
than 5% of the market (figures
from GfK). On top of that, in
2014 the average screen size
selling in British shops jumped
from 33.3 inches to 36.3
inches, breaking the 20-year
pattern of one-inch/year
growth in screen size
established since 1994.
Netflix and Amazon Prime
are both streaming 4K video
to subscribers, while
Hollywood studios and global
consumer electronics brands
have followed the example of
the DTG UK UHD Forum in the
UK by creating a UHD Alliance
to coordinate their activities.
But 2015 has also heard
bleats of concern over the
next generation of broadcast
entertainment, both from
within the industry, and
outside it from an increasingly
well-informed public.
Prompted by our members that’s broadcasters like Sky
and manufacturers such as
Panasonic - the DTG UK UHD
Forum began a programme of
‘plugfests’ in late 2014 to find
out how well the Ultra HD
market is shaping up.
In the best engineering
tradition, we took Ultra HD
screens already in the market,
combined them with a variety
of content sources including
prototype set-top boxes from
silicon vendors, and tried to
find out where they succeeded
and failed.
Our first plugfest focused
on HDMI to find out just how
the devices fared at
connecting up
(interoperability) and showing
4K in a variety of formats. The
good news is that they all
showed some 4K content. The
bad news is that many
displays could only show 4K at
25Hz or 30Hz, less than 10%
4K ready
Simon Gauntlett, technical director at
the DTG, reports on the group's recent
activities in ensuring CE brands and
digital entertainment platforms are
geared up for Ultra HD.
could show all the 4K modes
tested, and there was poor
support for 10-bit colour or
50/60Hz progressive scan
modes.
Plugfest 2 took on HEVC,
the codec family chosen for
the majority of Ultra HD
services but which is also seen
as a way for standard and HD
services to save bandwidth as
terrestrial TV increasingly
cedes wireless capacity to
mobile users. The HEVC test
signals were encoded in the
standard's Main and Main 10
profiles at a variety of
resolutions, frame rates, bitdepths and colour space, into
a number of retail and
prototype TVs, as USB files,
satellite streams, DTT streams
and MPEG-DASH streams.
The 2015 models all
supported HEVC at up to
50/60Hz, but the 2014
models fared less well: 60%
did not support HEVC at all,
and only 30% supported HEVC
at 50/60Hz - the frame rates
expected to be used for
broadcast services.
Additionally, there were
scaling issues, motion judder,
poor contrast, flat colours and
lip sync issues, while support
for the HEVC Main 10 profile
was not universal.
Ultra HD will not go ahead
without copy protection
between the source and the
sink (display) - or through the
switches and other devices en
route - so the next plugfest
will look at end-to-end support
for HDCP 2.2.
These results aren’t too
surprising - similar problems
arose in the early days of HD but today’s consumers are