What format do movie theaters now use?

Question

I know that in earlier times, feature films were distributed on large format tape, and these were what were distributed to theaters for showing. A given feature film would have several reels. The theater would have two projectors and a projectionist would need to queue up the next reel and start it at the correct time.Are feature films still distributed to theaters in this fashion? Or do modern theaters now use digital projectors, such as what might be used in a home theater? (By digital I mean DVD/Bluray)

Answer 1

The format is called a Digital Cinema Pack and beyond the uncompressed WAVE or AIFF audio in 5:1 or 7:1 dolby or whatever, the images are actually encoded using a still image format called JPEG2000.

It's a wavelet based image compression technology that allows for either visually lossless or lossy compression. https://jpeg.org/jpeg2000/applications.html

A great link is this... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package

It also has interesting applications in other areas. Such as video streaming, but in a "film" context. None of this MPEG (1, 2, 1 + layer 3 (audio), 4), garbage which is actually a format that type that was NEVER designed for use over top of of TCP/IP based networks (ie the internet) yet dominates streaming technology today. Which is why streaming still sucks.

Check this out.... https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/44/1d/19/422bc1c3eb164e/WO2001099430A2.pdf