Ultra HD Forum releases UHD Phase B Guidelines at NAB 2018

Ultra HD Forum paves 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

LAS VEGAS — Ultra HD Forum today announced the release of Phase B guidelines.

Madeleine Noland, Chair of the Guidelines Work group said, “Phase A Guidelines address technologies that were solidified in 2015 and 2016, then in the summer of 2017 we ran a survey with Operators to guide the choice of the next phase of technologies.”

The Phase B Guidelines that are published today, in an 80-page technical document, 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)

Noland added, “Our Guidelines are regularly updated, and further technologies will be addressed. Also, as with the Phase A guidelines, we remain strongly focussed 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”.

To experience phase B technologies first hand, you are invited to the Futures Park in LVCC in North Hall, on booth N1131FP for presentations of HDR dynamic metadata solutions, Next Generation Audio, HFR @100FPS, Content Aware Encoding and UHD quality monitoring.