Happy birthday to 4K Blu

As the UHD disc celebrates its fifth anniversary, Team HCC gives a lowdown on the format's specifications and hardware... and its future

ON FEBRUARY 14TH, 2016, the first wave of 4K Blu-ray discs was released (in the US at least, UK buyers had to wait until April). The titles chosen to kickstart the new state-of-the-art format were an odd bunch, ranging from the expected blockbusters (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian and The Amazing Spider-Man 2) to catalogue filler (Ender’s Game, Hitman Agent 47 and Salt). But the genie was out of the bottle, and owners of 4K TVs – which had been in the market since 2012 – at last had an upgrade on their silver disc collection.

Specs appeal

The 4K Blu-ray specifications were completed in May 2015 by the Blu-ray Disc Association (the BDA, an industry body comprising hardware manufacturers, film studios and technology groups) By and large, the specs have remained the same ever since. This wasn’t the case with its Blu-ray predecessor, which went through various profiles.

The BDA outlined a format boasting 3,840 x 2,160 resolution. As the marketing machine put it at the time, that equates to four times the pixels of regular 1080p Blu-ray. These pixel-packed images are encoded using High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, also known as H.265) with frame rates up to 60fps – which is the reason why you won’t see any 120fps releases to make use of new TVs with HDMI 2.1.