Canadian Broadband → Re: 4K movies will be over 100 GB each!

100GB is already considerably compressed:

3840 x 2160 x 24fps x 3bytes/pixel x 7200 seconds = 4TB

So 100GB is already 40:1 compression and that does not even include the soundtrack... so make it 45:1 to leave some room for that, menus, subtitles, etc.

You're over accounting for the audio. Uncompressed 8 channel 32 bit @ 48KHz would take 10Gb for 2 Hours, that's 0.25% compared to the uncompressed video. Sure if you were to carry it uncompressed you'd get 10GB of the final 100GB so that's 10% of the file contents leaving 90GB video for a compression of 44.4:1, but I assume that sony would use at the very least loss less compression to such an exaggerated audio spec.

You are under-accounting for everything else I said the extra space may be needed for.

Most movies come with multiple audio tracks, multiple subtitle tracks, animated menus, extras, commentary tracks, etc.

Also, you need to add the MPEG framing overhead.

But most or all of those things are going to be constant. There isn't any difference in audio size between a 1080p and 4K disc, the overhead for framing is minimal, the difference in menu size is inconsequential...

If we accept that 4K content should require roughly double the bitrate (some argue less than that is required, I say 2x to keep it simple), and then consider that most blurays are single-layer (25GB) discs, 100GB for a 4K video becomes incredibly excessive, to the point where there's a danger that a longer 4K film (like three hours) would not fit on the biggest currently available quad-layer (128GB) bluray discs.

EDIT: Of course, if they try to throw in Dolby Atmos (64.1), that's another story entirely. Atmos should have significant bandwidth requirements, but when you've got that many audio channels for a single video, there are likely some pretty crazy compression tricks you can pull. If you're trying to pan a helicopter over the ceiling grid, for example, you've probably got more or less the same sound in all of them, just at different intensities.

Well, some argue it can take more than 2X 1080p bitrates for highest quality encodes since 4K is 4X the resolution. His numbers could make some sense if he is talking about long movies encoded with H.264. H.265 is a different story though.

Furthermore, even if they somehow managed to get it down to 25 GB per movie (which is possible depending on the quality desired), there are very few people out there who really want to stream that.

Overall, personally I think 4K will pretty be much irrelevant for the mainstream for the foreseeable future, with that foreseeable time frame being the next five years. Those of us with huge image sizes from projectors (90" in my case) represent the 0.01%, and those with 4K projectors are the 0.000000001%. For most seating distances with regular sized TVs (ie. less than 70" or whatever), 1080p is sufficient.

and we all know 1 mbps connection is sufficient for our everyday life.

main keyword in your text : personally.

it seems silly to try and do 4K streaming with h264. sure it's doable but it's a large strain on the networks. h265 seems really designed to handle 4k and and 1080p streaming too.

as for those saying BluRay isn't compressed? yes it very much is, just not as much as 'web' video or pirate releases with a lower bitrate. Blurays mostly use h264 or other similar codecs.

Interestingly, the few people here who seem to want 4K are talking about conventions and malls and stuff. That isn't the mainstream consumer market. That is the pro market.