Movie Industry Can’t Produce Enough 100GB UHD Blu-ray Discs

From the movies that Warner Bros. will release in UHD resolution this year, a maximum of 35 will be released as physical UHD Blu-ray discs. Most will be streaming only, as not enough 100GB discs can be produced.

Warner Bros. hopes to be able to offer 60 to 70 titles in uhd by the end of the year, but only 30 to 35 titles are physically on the market as uhd blu-ray. Jim Wuthrich, CEO of Warner Bros. in an interview on the film company’s own site. “It’s because of a problem with the 100GB drives. Production capacity is limited once we start producing them,” said the CEO.

He calls the 100GB drives “cutting edge” technology. “It’s not easy to make a 100GB drive.” According to him, that amount of storage is necessary for many films in UHD resolution with HDR. “You can make a 66GB drive, but that’s not enough. We really need a 100GB drive, which is coming out now.”

The UHD Blu-ray specification stipulated that discs can contain 66 or 100GB of data, on two or three layers, respectively. Current Blu-ray discs for movies can hold up to 50GB. From Wuthrich’s comments, it can be seen that the 66GB format is not sufficient for most films.

Ultra HD Blu-ray supports frame rates higher than 24 fps, such as 50 and 60 fps. The throughput speed with the 66GB discs is a maximum of 108Mbit/s and with the 100GB discs this is 128Mbit/s. Furthermore, the format supports playback based on Rec. 2020.

According to Wuthrich, the streaming services are working on optimizing the codecs to transport less data while still being able to offer UHD playback. He also reports that most content today is not recorded in 4k resolution, nor is special effects made in this resolution. Film studios therefore artificially increase the resolution. “In almost all cases there is up-rez’ing. We do it professionally with exceptional precision in the studio, where we up the resolution of the best masters to get the 4k quality.”