Ultra HD Forum
Ultra HD Forum is an organization whose goal is to help solve the real world hurdles in deploying Ultra HD video and thus to help promote UHD deployment. The Ultra HD Forum will help navigate amongst the standards related to high dynamic range, high frame rate, next generation audio, and wide color gamut. The Ultra HD Forum is an industry organisation that is complementary to the UHD Alliance, covering different aspects of the UHD ecosystem.
History
On July 21, 2015, the Ultra HD Forum announced that they had over 20 member companies after incorporating as a US-based non-profit a month earlier.On April 18, 2016, the Ultra HD Forum announced industry guidelines for UHD Phase A content.
The Ultra HD Forum also announced that it had increased to 46 member companies.
On January 5, 2017, the Ultra HD Forum announced that their guidelines had been updated to version 1.2 and that additional companies have joined which includes Google.
On September 14, 2017 the guidelines were updated to version 1.4
UHD Phase A
UHD Phase A covers broadcasting services to be launched by end of 2016 or early 2017. The guidelines for UHD Phase A are:- Display resolution of 1080p or 2160p ;
- Wide color gamut ;
- High dynamic range – at least 13 stops ;
- Bit depth of 10-bits per sample;
- Frame rate of up to 60 fps ;
- 5.1-channel audio or immersive audio;
- Closed captions/subtitles.
also document live and pre-recorded production, as well as the combination of HDR and SDR video content and conversion between BT.709 and BT.2020 color spaces and different HDR metadata formats. Broadcasters are advised to provide backward compatibility by using HLG10 with BT.2020 color space, or simulcasting PQ10 or HDR10 streams.
UHD Phase B
An April 7, 2018 Ultra HD Forum published UHD Guidelines for phase B.Technologies that have been included in UHD Phase B, which targets UHD services launching in 2018-2020, include:
- Next Generation audio codecs supporting multiple audio objects ;
- Scalable Video Coding to encode spatial, temporal, color gamut, and dynamic range differences to provide backward-compatible video signal within a single program stream;
- Up to 12 bit color depth;
- High frame rates greater than 50/60 fps;
- UHD 8K resolution;
- Dynamic HDR metadata for per-scene coding :
- * Single-layer HDR ;
- * Dual-layer HDR ;
- ICtCp color encoding;
- Color Remapping Information.
Founding/charter members