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Apple's A8 Chip In The iPhone 6 And iPhone 6 Plus Enables Support For 4K Video Playback

This article is more than 9 years old.

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have resolutions of 1335x750 and 1920x1080 respectively, but both Apple devices are still capable of 4K video playback. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will not be able to display the same level of detail expected from 4K videos (3840x2160 resolution) since the native displays on the devices are lower, but the ability to playback 4K is still impressive. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are able to playback 4K video because of the powerful Apple A8 64-bit system on a chip (SoC) built into the devices. The A8 has 25% more CPU performance and 50% more graphics performance than its predecessor, known as the A7.

A device that has 4K support essentially means it has a horizontal resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels. 4K video takes up a lot of storage so I doubt many people will keep ultra high-definition videos on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. One hour of RAW 4K video content requires nearly 110GB of storage, according to VideoMaker.com. That is nearly 2GB per minute of video. This does not seem practical for people that have iOS devices with small storage sizes.

Softorino, a company that developed Mac software for uploading music and video files to iOS devices called WALTR, told TUAW that they discovered the 4K video playback capabilities in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus while testing their app. The WALTR Mac app lets users upload files to iOS devices that are not supported by iTunes like MKV, AVI, WMA and FLAC files.

“Uploading 4k videos to iPhone 6 is only possible with the app softorino.com/waltr. This is video proof of [that the] iPhone 6 with [an] A8 chip is able to playback 4K video content packed in H.264,” wrote Softorino in a YouTube video that shows 4K video playback on an iPhone 6:

There are some apps available in the Apple App Store that claim to support 4K video recording on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus like ProCam 2 and Stop Motion Studio. ProCam 2 says that 4K resolution is achieved by upscaling the maximum 8-megapixel camera resolution of 3264x1836 (16:9 aspect ratio) to 3840x2160, an upscaling of 17%.

When Apple announced its latest iMac, it was revealed that it would support 5K (5120x2880 pixels). The 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display has about four times the number of pixels as the standard 27-inch iMac display. To create the Retina 5K iMac, Apple developed a display with the performance to light up 14.7 million pixels. Looking at the direction Apple is taking with its high-definition displays, it seems likely that a near-future version of the iPhone will likely support 4K video natively.

There is also speculation that Apple will introduce 4K into the Apple TV soon. Apple’s latest Apple TV — which is known as 3rd generation Rev A — launched in January 2013 and has an A5 processor. The current version of the Apple TV supports 1080p video playback.

4K has become widely adopted over the last few years. In 2010, YouTube started to support 4K video uploads. When I searched for “4k” on YouTube, it returned about 3.8 million results. Three years later, YouTube started using the VP9 video compression standard, which they said was better for 4K than High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Earlier this year, Netflix started streaming House of Cards and Breaking Bad in 4K for TVs that have HEVC decoders, which I highly recommend checking out.

What are your thoughts about the 4K market in general? Do you predict that future versions of the iPhone will natively support 4K? Let us know in the comments below!