Charger196904
New member
So Disney found a way around the injunction, and the answer looks like VP9. Heise reported the codec, and Disney itself has only said it adopted an alternative technology and started restoring 4K UHD. The logic writes itself: HEVC is the thing InterDigital is fighting them over, so out it goes and the pixels come back through a codec nobody is suing about. Denmark is confirmed as part of the rollout, everything else is a shrug about market and device.
The device list is where it stops being clever. Selected Android TV and Google TV models from Google, Philips and Sony, Amazon Fire TV, LG sets from 2020 onward, Sky Glass and Sky Stream. Not Apple TV 4K. Not Samsung smart TVs. Not consoles. I have a Samsung in the living room with an Apple TV feeding it, so I am zero for two on a Premium subscription that stayed the same price the whole time the resolution was gone.
And resolution is only half of what went missing. HDR10 has not come back, Dolby Vision has not come back, the 3D catalogue has not come back, and Disney will not put a date on any of it. On a half decent OLED, HDR is the part you actually notice from the couch. A clean 4K SDR stream is a perfectly nice picture, but it is not the thing Premium was sold as.
If you are in an affected market and did get 4K back, has anyone watched the actual bitrate? A VP9 ladder rebuilt in a hurry could easily be sitting well under what the HEVC one was doing, and that would matter more than the badge in the info panel.
The device list is where it stops being clever. Selected Android TV and Google TV models from Google, Philips and Sony, Amazon Fire TV, LG sets from 2020 onward, Sky Glass and Sky Stream. Not Apple TV 4K. Not Samsung smart TVs. Not consoles. I have a Samsung in the living room with an Apple TV feeding it, so I am zero for two on a Premium subscription that stayed the same price the whole time the resolution was gone.
And resolution is only half of what went missing. HDR10 has not come back, Dolby Vision has not come back, the 3D catalogue has not come back, and Disney will not put a date on any of it. On a half decent OLED, HDR is the part you actually notice from the couch. A clean 4K SDR stream is a perfectly nice picture, but it is not the thing Premium was sold as.
If you are in an affected market and did get 4K back, has anyone watched the actual bitrate? A VP9 ladder rebuilt in a hurry could easily be sitting well under what the HEVC one was doing, and that would matter more than the badge in the info panel.
