HDR10 Plus Adding Movies but Distribution Limited; Conference Told
A newer high resolution format is adding movies, even as apart from Amazon and Netflix it lacks wide distribution, the 8K Display Summit was told in New York Tuesday. The coming fourth tranche of tariffs on Chinese products will affect a wider array consumer tech than past versions, attendees also were told.
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More than 140 movies have been “committed or released” in HDR10 Plus, which has 70 “adopters,” and more than 200 “listed products that are certified,” said Bill Mandel, Samsung Research America vice president-industry relations and point person for the HDR10 Plus consortium of Fox, Panasonic and Samsung, which started licensing the dynamic-metadata-based HDR platform a year ago as a royalty-free alternative to Dolby Vision.
“Everything on Amazon Prime has been in HDR10 Plus for a while,” said Mandel. “That’s a lot of content. There’s still not a lot of distribution, and that’s what we’re working on now.” All TV makers “have access now in their SoCs to HDR10 Plus,” said Mandel. “This will enable putting the HDR10 Plus metadata on the whole lineup” of TVs from a given manufacturer, not just on selected models, he said. “I think you’re going to see a lot of volume that way.”
Expect announcements soon on HDR10 Plus support “from various TV makers,” said Mandel. “There’s one major American TV maker that’s not on the list” of HDR10+ adopters, but the chip it’s using supports HDR10 Plus and “it’s a pretty advanced solution,” he said.
The Trump administration’s threat to levy List 4 Section 301 tariffs of up to 25 percent on Chinese-made TVs and all other goods not previously dutied is “much broader, much deeper and much less likely to be resolved with a quick deal” than the Mexican import tariff threat, said Bob O’Brien, president of Display Supply Chain Consultants. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better with respect to China.”
List 4 is “going to hit TVs, it’s going to hit phones, it’s going to hit monitors, it’s going to hit laptops,” said O’Brien. “You’re going to see supply chains shifting.” More TV units come from China, “but more dollars come from Mexico,” he said.
Don’t expect the first manifestations of the next-gen Versatile Video Coding (VVC) codec (see 1903140012) to deliver on its promised 50 percent bit rate reduction compared with H.265, said Mauricio Alvarez, CEO of Spin Digital, which specializes in video compression solutions. VVC, also known as H.266, is scheduled to be published as an international standard in July 2020, said Alvarez. Tests that Spin Digital has run using VVC “reference samples have delivered 37 percent bit rate reductions over H.265, he said. Reducing bit rates using VVC definitely has its costs, he said. Achieving the 37 percent reduction requires VVC encoders with 10 times the “complexity” of H.265 equipment, he said.