Your assumption and assertion are both incorrect. Let me help you understand 4K.
4K UltraHD TV's do not care about what compression standard the video is being decoded in, unless you are talking about the player running inside the TV. The reason that anyone would make such a statement as the article that you cite is simply to confuse the market and stem off competition.
If you are talking about a TV, in the sense of the final delivery of your video, all it cares about is the HDMI connector bringing the signal to it. At that point you have a digital image signal. The HDMI 1.4 specification, which is the most current spec, supports an image signal up to 4096x2160 @ 30Hz.
Current TVs can and do support and display true 4K images. We showed off our 4K live streaming at the shareholders meeting on June 15th. Not only did we show 4K (both 39 and 50 inch) we also gave live demonstrations of our 4K streaming using both 6MBit/s and 10MBit/s streams.
HEVC, or H.265 is a compression method for compressing imagery, and will be in use commonly next year. It is a progression of the current H.264 standard. HEVC requires a lot of horsepower to use, and it is just now starting to show up in hardware codecs being implemented into chips that will be used in the next generation of set top boxes and smart TVs. Claiming that it is required for 4K playback is a flat out lie. It's just a better, more efficient way to compress data. The difference is that you can get about a 50% reduction in bandwidth requirements by using H.265 (HEVC) over H.264.
If you have a very low power CPU in your player, you will not be able to support H.265 decoding. Most "Smart" TVs have a CPU built into them for your basic players such as NetFlix and Hulu. Brands like Samsung are trying to provide a basic TV solution without having to hook up a box such as a Roku. To do that, they have simply built in the equivalent of a Roku into their TV. This really has nothing to do with the TV itself, or its ability to display 4K content, it's just a player built into the TV. So if you want to stretch the logic, and try and claim that a "Smart" TV being sold today won't be able to playback HEVC content internally, then yes, you would be correct, but that doesn't mean the TV can't play 4K content encoded in HEVC, it just means that you can't do it on the internal hardware player.
I can connect my prototype Nuvola NP-1 player's HDMI output to any 4K panel, and play 4K content to it, in H.264. We are finalizing a software codec for HEVC (H.265) that will also run on the Nuvola NP-1 that will allow us to decode and playback HEVC encoded content to any 4K TV. Many people are waiting for HEVC to be available in hardware before launching their players. We chose to go with H.264 because we are able to stream 4K content using it and have selected a pathway whereby we can simply update via software our player and have full HEVC support when it becomes widely used.
The TV is not the gating factor, the playback device is. If you are relying on the TV to be your playback device, then yes, make sure you wait until the next generation of TV's that have HEVC support built in are what you choose. If you intend on connecting your 4K TV to a player, such as the Nuvola NP-1, then get any 4K TV you like, as the Nuvola NP-1 can playback H.264 and H.265 content. It's really just a matter of what your playback device supports and is it powerful enough to run HEVC codecs.
AI
