If you love home entertainment you'll likely already know about Dolby Vision: the Dolby-licensed version of high dynamic range technology that seeks to enhance the HDR experience by providing TVs with scene by scene ‘instructions’ on how to make images look their best.
With most people who’ve seen Dolby Vision in action coming away impressed by its impact on picture quality, the technology’s only big issue up to now has been that it’s fairly hard to find. Not least because any AV equipment that wants to offer Dolby Vision has had to integrate special hardware - a relatively costly process that has to be considered right from the start of a product’s development.
Now, though, that’s all set to change. For Dolby has revealed that Dolby Vision is now available in a full software solution.
The PS4 Pro should be more than powerful enough to run the Dolby Vision software solution. (Pic:... [+]
This means, in essence, that Dolby Vision could be added to almost any bit of AV kit - games consoles, set top boxes, TVs, Ultra HD Blu-ray players etc - that has enough processing power to handle the software implementation to Dolby’s satisfaction. As Dolby puts it:
“There are implementations that can run Dolby Vision in software, certainly in the console space but also in the TV SoC space. Specifics vary on a case-by-case basis depending on the hardware capability of the silicon in question, but we have development kits for various types of implementations, depending on the application: full hardware, hybrid of software and hardware or [and this is the crucial bit] full software.”
Flexible friend
I put a specific list of potentially upgradable devices to Dolby that included games consoles, TVs, the Nvidia Shield, Android TV set top boxes and Apple TV, and Dolby confirmed that its software implementation could indeed be applied to such devices.
Two examples of Dolby Vision via firmware update have already been announced, in fact. Sony revealed at the CES in January that its fantastic (and, crucially, ultra powerful) Z9D televisions will be getting Dolby Vision via firmware later this year, while Oppo’s also outstanding UDP-203 Ultra HD Blu-ray player is set to get a Dolby Vision update in the next month or so.
It’s tempting to think that software versions of Dolby Vision might not run as effectively or efficiently as hardware implementations. However, when I put this to Dolby Laboratories’ VP of Consumer Imaging, Roland Vlaicu, at January’s CES, he confirmed that there was no loss of performance when running Dolby Vision purely in software, adding that a software implementation would only pass Dolby’s rigorous certification procedures if it worked without any performance compromises.
Latest connections not required
As if all this wasn’t already significant enough when it comes to the potential for Dolby Vision to spread through the AV world, Dolby’s HDR system also has another brain-bending advantage up its sleeve: the ability to run over old HDMI 1.4 connections. It doesn’t need kit with HDMI 2.0a jacks like the industry standard HDR10 format does.
In fact, Dolby has previously done a ‘proof of concept’ demonstration of Dolby Vision running on an original PS4 to make this HDMI point.
There are, though, a trio of things stopping Dolby Vision from rocking up on pretty much any half-decent bit of home entertainment hardware.
The first is cost. Even if a product runs an all-software version of Dolby Vision, the brand that makes it will still, of course, have to pay Dolby the requisite license fee.
Second, some TV brands are currently philosophically resistant to Dolby Vision. Certainly Panasonic and Samsung have repeatedly stated that they believe their own processing and knowledge of their own TV screens means they can deliver pictures using the HDR10 industry standard that are at least as good as those you can get with Dolby Vision. Samsung is additionally starting to champion its own royalty-free rival dynamic metadata solution.
Brain power
Finally, while Dolby couldn’t define for me exactly what sort of power and architecture a product’s processing engine might need to handle Dolby Vision in software, its lengthy answer to my specific question on this subject does suggest that it’s likely something only relatively high-end products will support:
"It’s usually a question of: Can the available set of CPUs and GPUs handle the operations required. Some of the more modern high-end TV SoCs are incredibly powerful, so implementing Dolby Vision playback blocks on those chips is possible, even if they haven't been designed for Dolby Vision from the outset.
“Our set of hardware blocks that we propose as part of our development kit mostly benefits those chips that are cost-optimized for mass market applications where every square millimeter counts. That’s where we prescribe what is necessary while keeping the incremental die area to a minimum. Of course, all of this is also possible with FPGAs but clearly those are only used in rare situations, mostly when time-to-market is most critical.
“All of the above work in the same way: the performance characteristics of the respective model are measured in production and then programmed into the implementation to tell the TV precisely how to perform the mapping function.”
With almost all types of AV product now being pretty much forced to carry ever more powerful on-board processors, though, it really does seem to me that Dolby’s firmware-addable software solution has the potential to be a genuine HDR game changer. So keep an eye on my Forbes channel for further developments.
--
If this story interested you, you might also like these:
HDR Made Easy: A Jargon-Free Guide To The Next Big Thing In TV Technology
Oppo UDP-203 Ultra HD Blu-ray Player Review: The Return Of The King
Welcome To The Revolution: Hands On With Samsung's QLED TVs
Sony XBR-65Z9D TV Review: TV Of The Year
Amazon To Start Streaming Dolby Vision HDR
