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According to Parkinson's Law, data will always expand to fill available storage. We may have petabytes for rack, but 4K videos are coming. wiki.c2.com/?Parkin

by motoboi 10y ago

According to Parkinson's Law, data will always expand to fill available storage. We may have petabytes for rack, but 4K videos are coming. wiki.c2.com/?ParkinsonsLaw

krallja 10y ago
Coming? The iPhone 7 already records at 4K.
- bcook 10y ago
  By "4K videos are coming" I think he meant that 4K will soon become the norm, not that it is currently impossible.
stordoff 10y ago
I'd say 4K videos are already here. My Lumia 950, released late 2015, records in 4K by default, and the iPhone 6S, released around the same time, also supports it. They aren't the norm, but I imagine YouTube sees a fair number of 4K uploads.
Dylan16807 10y ago
> 4K videos are coming Yes, but screens increase in resolution very slowly, and you're physically limited in how much resolution you can get on a small sensor. And video compression is improving quite impressively. So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos. I'm sure there will be plenty of demand, it comes through changes in the way we use things.
- drawnwren 10y ago
  Luckily, we're just starting an appetite for 360 videos and videos with depth are somewhere on the horizon as well.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  > So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos. Is that true? I've been pricing hard drives recently, and they seem to have stagnated for the last few years, staying at about the same price, with the best value per Gb at around 4Tb. I thought h265 took about half the space of h264 for the same quality, but a 4k screen is actually 4x the pixels of 1080p... So I'm guessing 4k h265 would be about double the bitrate of 1080p h264.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    The price of hard drives is still dropping, there were just some setbacks from the flood. http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm More importantly, don't just look at a year or two. 1080 availability is significantly more than a decade old. In fact, you should probably be comparing against 1080 mpeg-2. That gets you nearly the same bitrate between then and now. In that time hard drives have gone from ~1GB per dollar to 35GB per dollar.
doh 10y ago
I do agree, although I think the 4k will take longer than it may seem. For instance 99% videos uploaded to YouTube are smaller than 4k. And the trend is not improving much (or at all). By comparing video uploads to YouTube from last two years, the trend is roughly the same: only 1.1% of videos are in 4k [620M videos, 7M in 4k for 2016; 322M videos, 3.6M in 4k].

by motoboi 10y ago

According to Parkinson's Law, data will always expand to fill available storage. We may have petabytes for rack, but 4K videos are coming. wiki.c2.com/?ParkinsonsLaw

krallja 10y ago

Coming? The iPhone 7 already records at 4K.

bcook 10y ago
By "4K videos are coming" I think he meant that 4K will soon become the norm, not that it is currently impossible.

stordoff 10y ago

I'd say 4K videos are already here. My Lumia 950, released late 2015, records in 4K by default, and the iPhone 6S, released around the same time, also supports it. They aren't the norm, but I imagine YouTube sees a fair number of 4K uploads.

Dylan16807 10y ago

> 4K videos are coming Yes, but screens increase in resolution very slowly, and you're physically limited in how much resolution you can get on a small sensor. And video compression is improving quite impressively. So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos. I'm sure there will be plenty of demand, it comes through changes in the way we use things.

drawnwren 10y ago
Luckily, we're just starting an appetite for 360 videos and videos with depth are somewhere on the horizon as well.
brokenmachine 10y ago
> So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos. Is that true? I've been pricing hard drives recently, and they seem to have stagnated for the last few years, staying at about the same price, with the best value per Gb at around 4Tb. I thought h265 took about half the space of h264 for the same quality, but a 4k screen is actually 4x the pixels of 1080p... So I'm guessing 4k h265 would be about double the bitrate of 1080p h264.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  The price of hard drives is still dropping, there were just some setbacks from the flood. http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm More importantly, don't just look at a year or two. 1080 availability is significantly more than a decade old. In fact, you should probably be comparing against 1080 mpeg-2. That gets you nearly the same bitrate between then and now. In that time hard drives have gone from ~1GB per dollar to 35GB per dollar.

doh 10y ago

I do agree, although I think the 4k will take longer than it may seem. For instance 99% videos uploaded to YouTube are smaller than 4k. And the trend is not improving much (or at all). By comparing video uploads to YouTube from last two years, the trend is roughly the same: only 1.1% of videos are in 4k [620M videos, 7M in 4k for 2016; 322M videos, 3.6M in 4k].