Ultra HD Phase B Guidelines
April 9, 2018
The Ultra HD Forum – the global organisation responsible for promoting market adoption of Ultra HD – has paved the way for the next wave of UHD technologies by releasing Phase B Guidelines covering dynamic metadata, higher refresh rates, lower bandwidth requirement and next generation audio.
According to Madeleine Noland, Chair of the Guidelines Work group, Phase A Guidelines addressed technologies that were solidified in 2015 and 2016, then in the summer of 2017 the Forum ran a survey with Operators to guide the choice of the next phase of technologies.
The Phase B Guidelines introduce and de-mystify five areas for the future of UHD:
- Content Aware Encoding
- Dual-Layer HDR Technologies
- Dynamic HDR Metadata Systems (Dolby Vision and SL-HDR1)
- High Frame Rate (100/120 FPS)
- Next Generation Audio (Dolby AC-4 Audio and MPEG-H Audio)
“Our Guidelines are regularly updated, and further technologies will be addressed,” confirmed Noland. “Also, as with the Phase A guidelines, we remain strongly focused on backwards compatibility so that the introduction of new solutions doesn’t break what’s already in place. Phase B Guidelines will soon include end-to-end workflows for all distribution systems including OTA, MVPD and OTT, which is a hallmark of the Forum’s work.”