The Blu-Ray Disc Association (BDA) used CES as its opportunity to expand on its previous announcement that 4K Blu-ray discs will be on shelves by Christmas 2015.
The organization has revealed the format's official name will be Ultra HD Blu-ray, says The Hollywood Reporter, while tech site Hexus has the specifics.
The BDA's board has defined Ultra HD Blu-ray as discs that can handle resolution up to 3849 x 2169 and frame rates up to 60fps.
The new format will also feature a wider color range (to up REC 2020 or BT2020) and 10-bit color depth, Hexus says, and a mandatory, open HDR specification will be crucial to the format overall. Though not all 4K movies have HDR at this time, that may be a future-proofing measure.
The new Ultra HD Blu-ray discs will range from 66GB in dual-layer to 100GB in triple-layer, while Ultra HD Blu-ray players will include the HEVC (H.265) codec, support HDMI 1.2 and 2.0 and be backward-compatible with existing Blu-rays, DVDs and VCDs.
Rising from the dead
Panasonic already announced a 4K Blu-ray player at CES, and it seems it may have been the first, though it won't be the last.
Early in 2014 Sony's own reports suggested 4K Blu-ray discs were dead before they even arrived, and now here we are, less than a year later, reading announcements about the format's specs. It just goes to show that things are sometimes not as dire as they seem.
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