Oh! Will check it out to see if I can find it - thanks for the tip.
I noticed that Amazon lists Legion season 2 in both regular and UHD 4k variants. The 1080p version can be licensed for $25.
The 4k version is only available by the episode. It gives the impression they are not interested in selling licenses to it.
UK. I’d be surprised if even, say, The Man In The High Castle isn’t in HDR in Canada. It’s not like there are licensing issues or it costs them anything other than bandwidth to make it available everywhere. It was probably just hidden. As discussed above, Amazon doesn’t do the sensible Netflix thing of just having a single entry for each item and showing it to you in the best quality your system and subscription allow. It forces you to find the UHD version manually. And these days they’re really hiding that for some reason.
Does HDR require extra bandwidth?
I was thinking about that a little bit, although I stopped short of doing any actual research.
I believe HDR video content is 10-bit color, while the previous uses 8-bit color. I don’t know the color space they use, but supposing it’s basically RGB, it’s going from 24 bits per pixel to 30, or a 20% increase. That’s before compression, which usually reduces the size quite a lot, but I think we can presume that it will grow by a decent amount still.
I’m sure there’s companies out there researching new compression techniques that take HDR video into account, and this may wind up improving the bitrate. That has its own costs, though, presuming it’s a more computationally expensive procedure than the current compression algorithms.
There are also non-bandwidth-related business costs associated with HDR content. More storage space is required for the content – perhaps more than double, if they need to keep the non-HDR version separate. Do video providers now send them extra versions of the files – that’s more bandwidth on the other end of the pipe. Switches need to be upgraded. Content testing needs to be HDR-enabled. Comcast needs to get paid off.
There’s enough reason to justify the upcharge.
Despite the completely incorrect post above this one, yes it does. 8 bit per pixel to 10 bits per pixel. Multiply by number of pixels. The math ain’t hard.
I did the math.
24 bits = 16777216 decimal
30 bits = 1073741824 decimal
Or 64x the data.
So, if you want both 4K and HDR, you need 256x the bandwidth of regular 1080p.
This is ignoring any increase in framerate, such as from 24fps to 48fps (The Hobbit).
I don’t think I could stream that much video.
[edit]
My math may be wrong.
Now I am confused, I read that even if a person’s internet isn’t fast enough to stream a 4k/HDR stream at 4k, they can still get HDR on the 1080p stream.
Surely there’s some person on the internet that has measured bandwidth from netflix when watching a 4k stream relative to a 4k/HDR stream?
See my edit.
Maybe the HDR data can be compressed more aggressively.
Bits are already a measure of data size. No need to convert to decimal. 10 bits represent 4x more numbers but only take 25% more data than 8 bits, in the same way that four decimal digits represent 100x more numbers than two but only take twice as much space to write down.
Turning in your nerd card is insufficient. Your nerd commanding officer needs to slice off your nerd epaulets with his nerd sword.
Is porn improved any by HDR?
Umm, you do realize that video isn’t transmitted losslessly, yes? It’s compressed, and the bitrate required for a given quality does not scale linearly with resolution.
It’s even more complicated with compression than you would think, because the move from 10bit to 8bit in the colorspace happens to elminate a lot of banding that compression can struggle with. Anime is a good example of this, it went to less than half the file size over night with better quality by switching to 10bit. Much more of a dramatic change than you would think, and in the opposite direction.
Can’t wait until 10 bit support actually starts getting built into some hardware.
In the latest Amazon app update, they’ve made it a bit easier to find again. If you go to the TV tab at the top, you only have to scroll down 5 rows to find “Included with Prime: 4K Ultra HD TV”
My app updated yesterday and it seems different - there are no settings of note at all, to tweak anything like that. But content was automatically being shown in HDR when available (think I tried Goliath to test) as well as 4k – much better than it was before!
That said, Amazon Canada content is such a poor sister to Netflix Canada they aren’t even comparable services - it’s like Netflix vs a mom & pop 90s rental store.
Looks like Netflix is starting to get a handful of non-original UHD movies. There’s a special tab for it now in the latest version of the LG app and I found Taxi Driver and Ghostbusters II among others. Strange choices, but better than nothing.
Picked up a 65" LG C8. It turned itself off a couple of times when my son and I were playing Fortnite on the Xbox One X, but turning off power saving and various CEC-type settings seems to have cured that. I hope.
Right now everything’s coming in through one HDMI port, as I was using my Denon tuner as an HDMI switcher due to my previous Samsung LCD’s horrible software.
Thinking of moving a few devices to their own port as everything right now is being viewed at “Game” settings due to the aforementioned shared port. But trying to find out if LG will pass through Dolby Atmos audio properly over the HDMI return channel to the tuner. I noticed the built-in apps, weirdly, only seem to be supporting Atmos over the built-in speakers and not over my HDMI connection.
Setup and power issues aside, it’s a beautiful set once you tune the stupid-dark initial settings.