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What the new video compression strategy from Netflix means for Apple and Amazon
- nickpsecurity 11y agoReally neat stuff. Can't wait to see it in FOSS software so we can save some space in our video collections. :)
- dublinben 11y agoYou can already achieve the same result using custom scripts and settings in x264. Most serious encoding groups have been doing this for years.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoDidn't know that. You got a link that makes it easy for people to learn how to do that in VLC player?
- toomuchtodo 11y agoNot VLC player, but equally good: https://handbrake.fr/ https://handbrake.fr/
- nickpsecurity 11y agoBut VLC can play the more clever encoding it generates, right?
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI'm not sure about that. You'd need to research or test to determine that.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoAight. Thanks for the link anyway.
- sangnoir 11y agoVLC can play anything! More seriously: the bitrates do not affect a player's compatibility with the container or video/audio format. For instance, if VLC can play H263, it doesn't matter if you use Handbrake to output 5100kbps or 100kbps.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoSweet! I'll try it out at some point then.
- astrange 11y agoHigher bitrates need higher CPU resources to decode, but it doesn't really matter. You'd run out of wifi bandwidth in your house streaming bluray images, though.
- brigade 11y agoOSS encoders (x264, Theora, VP9, Daala, Vorbis) already tend to have a constant quality rate control mode that they'd very much prefer you use unless you have an actual reason to need a specific bitrate. I'm always surprised at how many people try to reinvent it via abr... Netflix (and streaming services in general) on the other hand needs known bitrates with known constraints so their bandwidth estimation can work correctly without hiccups. Your personal video collection does not.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoSo, it only affects bandwidth and not storage space?
- brigade 11y agoNo - the point is that true constant quality has (almost) no constraints on local bitrate, so one section of a movie might be twenty times the bitrate of another section. Online streaming services continually estimate the current available bandwidth, then choose from a selection of pre-encoded streams to download. For this to work well, the selection must know the maximum local bitrate of each stream to match the estimation. If this local maximum isn't known or constrained, you get buffering because you're attempting to download a stream that's actually currently twenty times more than the available bandwidth. Whereas your personal video collection probably isn't being streamed over any link slower than several hundred MBit/s, which is more than enough for anything short of intermediate codec bitrates, plus significant buffering doesn't count against any data caps.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoMakes sense. Thanks for the detailed explanation.
- hanklazard 11y ago"But I suspect that was a problem. You see, it would probably be difficult to sell those VBR files — some of which were quite a bit lower than 256 Kbps and a few even lower than 128 Kbps — because customers might perceive a loss of value." The vast majority of customers do not care about the actual Kbps, as long as the sound quality remains above certain standards. Just market the different quality levels at different prices and most people would never think twice about it (and most would choose the cheapest version).
- ohitsdom 11y agoIf enough "audiophiles" repeat the claim that Apple or Amazon has worse audio quality, it could seriously hurt their brand's reputation.
- hanklazard 11y agoAudiophiles have and will say that regardless, since all of the discussed options are lossy. (I'm not ignoring Apple's lossless codec, just don't think it's relevant for this conversation)
- dexterdog 11y agoIsn't Apple + Beats enough to convince people that Apple is not about audio quality?
- eli 11y agoIsn't the popularity of Beats (not to mention default iPhone headphones) proof that Good Enough is fine for most people
- untog 11y agoWould it? It might harm their brand's reputation with audiophiles but I don't see the average customer caring.
- bitwize 11y agoNot only do customers not care, in blind testing young people prefer the sound of MP3 artifacts. It's this generation's "warm sound".
- SwellJoe 11y agoI wonder at his premise that consumers are choosing things based on wanting larger file sizes and higher bit rates. Most of my friends literally could not tell you anything about their mp3 or movie collection in terms of bit rate. Half of them you'd need to explain what "bit rate" means, before even asking the question. I only think about it for my DJ music collection (and VBR is fine in that context, I'm just ruling out CBR stuff below ~192kpbs, because sometimes it sounds a little harsh on the high end over the big speakers); never worry about it for video or music streaming. If it's HD and looks/sounds OK, I don't think about it at all. Netflix and Amazon both have acceptable quality, so I don't think about it, I just consume it. I think the success of Spotify and Pandora and Rhapsody are proof that consumers don't care about quality. I don't know exactly what bit rate they're streaming at, but, it sounds pretty bad on mobile, so I assume it's something quite low. But, even though I recognize the crappiness of it, sometimes I listen to them in the car (my truck has a crap stereo, anyway, so no big deal there). In short: Cool article, but the suggestion that consumers will stop it because they want bigger files seems weird.
- swang 11y agoI think you're missing the point. Consumers don't care, until some listicle website or advertising firm points out that Amazon/Apple short you on your mp3s by not even offering 128kbps all the way through. Or imagine Amazon goes with pure VBR, then Apple makes an ad claiming their sound quality is "better" because their bitrate never dips below 128kbps. It's bullshit, but how is an average consumer suppose to figure this out? They'll probably err on the side of caution and buy the CBR version since, "it can't be any worse than the VBR one, but I don't lose bits and it's the same price!" The whole article was talking about streaming vs. downloading. Streaming is _fine_ and Netflix will probably get away with their compression, but will Amazon/Apple be able to do that with downloads? He doesn't think so. People are fine with Spotify/Pandora because there is no perceived ownership of the songs they're streaming. People who actually buy and download audio or video, they have money in the game so they want "the best" and any loss of that is viewed as Amazon/Apple screwing them over.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
- kevin_thibedeau 11y agoI would bet money that Amazon ran into this same conundrum with the unconstrained VBR mode of the LAME MP3 encoder which they use. Lame has always had a way to set minimum and maximum bounds on the VBR bit rates. I would bet that Amazon has at least one employee who knows this. I used to use this a lot with a hardware player that couldn't handle VBR above 224 kbps.
- shmerl 11y agoI'm waiting for something like Daala + Opus starting being used by huge services like Netflix. Youtube already uses Opus. Apple? It will take them another 50 years to start using free codecs. UPDATE: A post on IETF blog about standardized free video codec effort: https://www.ietf.org/blog/2015/09/aiming-for-a-standardized-high-quality-royalty-free-video-codec-to-remove-friction-for-video-over-the-internet/ https://www.ietf.org/blog/2015/09/aiming-for-a-standardized-...
- gillianseed 11y agoI'm somewhat confused, is this a different effort than the royalty free codec which is being developed by Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel under the name 'Alliance for Open Media' ?
- shmerl 11y agoRegarding the video codec, it's the same thing, except one in IETF is the actual engineering group, and that AOM is more of an administrative one that synchronizes all the bureaucratic stuff probably (legal as well I guess). UPDATE: See here: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/67752.html http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/67752.html
- gillianseed 11y agoAh, thanks, makes sense.
- reiichiroh 11y agoAre they just using H265 HEVC?
- azinman2 11y agoOk everyone is stuck on the bitrate argument and consumer choice. However I'm more focused on if this plan is even possible. Could Netflix really want to throw so much money at transcoding so many ways? Are there various tricks to do this at a reasonable cost? Like grab random 10 seconds across 15 points in a movie and try just that? Work with top n most popular first? Sort by existing biggest movies?
- angryasian 11y agothe transcodes is not where the money is spent. Its primarily on streaming costs. Every company wants to maximize quality and reduce cost to stream. Right now everyone wants 4k streams. The size and cost are becoming ridiculous. Its worth it in the end to use better encoders as well as do what Netflix is doing.
- lnanek2 11y agoDoing the transcodes is pretty much a drop in the bucket for NetFlix. Even transcoding the same movie 1000x at full length is pretty meaningless to them since it is a fixed cost against their library size. What they really care about is things that are multiplied by the number of users they have. Saving 5% of bandwidth on 100k users is very meaningful to them. So doing extra transcodes to figure out what to send is very valuable. They've come and given talks at Cloud dev meetups and just an unexpected bump in bandwidth or delay in server response time causing traffic to back up is enough to knock over their servers and they do things no one else would even think of, like having their clients upload code to their servers to batch requests together in the optimal format for the clients, just to reduce bandwidth and load on their network.
- JackuB 11y agoI was running small project that encoded videos with SaaS in multiple formats/sizes (~10) and then distributed it over CDN (no major traffic). CDN price was about 99% of project costs. Transcoding and storage on S3 was fraction of a cost. I was also trying every trick in the book to make files smaller, just to cut on traffic.
- JshWright 11y agoNetflix's internal instance spot market means they can pretty easily throw unused EC2 instances at transcoding tasks.
- mrdrozdov 11y agoMajor question about this comment. > They all have the same server farms. Owned by Amazon, no doubt. And there aren’t any technical hurdles. It’s just more computation. Does Apple use Amazon's servers? I thought Apple ran its own hardware/data centers. I've definitely heard war stories of Apple towing trucks full of racks into the desert so they could bump their capacity for cheap.
- olau 11y agoApple's contemplating building a server farm not terribly far from where I live, so no, I don't think they're using Amazon. I think that comment is supposed to mean that they all have access to big clusters, not that it's the same clusters.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoAll they need is a half dozen powermac supercomputers. But seriously, could they not be using Amazon until they finish building out their own farm?
- pngat2x 11y agohttp://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf http://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf Page 41, Second paragraph: "The keys, and the file’s metadata, are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure."
- Someone 11y agoThey did about two years ago. http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14.pdf http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iOS_Security_Fe... (emphasis added): "Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES-128 and a key derived from each chunk’s contents that utilizes SHA-256. The keys, and the file’s metadata, are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure."
- jordache 11y agoauthor's point is weak. users of netflix is not concerned with knowing what bitrate the video is. It just needs to have an acceptable quality.
- sangnoir 11y ago> users of netflix is not concerned with knowing what bitrate the video is That's part of the author's point: if netflix can halve their bandwidth without users noticing, they will earn massive savings. Apple & Amazon will also want in on the savings (being competitors and all)
- jordache 11y agothat must have been a nuanced point. He had much more emphasize on the strategy of differentiation via bitrate.
- thecosas 11y agoLove the closing sentence from this article: I don’t know. It’s hard to predict because consumers… well… we’re fucking stupid.
- KaiserPro 11y agoWhy would apple et al follow? Unless there is any noticeable affect on quality/streaming ease then consumers won't care. You have to remember that most people can't/won't tell the difference between blueray and DVD, let alone bitrate change. More importantly they have lots of silly TV effects that actively fuck with the picture (Sharpening, Aspect ratio stretching, over saturation, active motion, and other horrid "enhancements") The only reason netflix et al is a thing is because of the content, not the platform. (just look at how shit iTunes is to use) You can make the most wonderful interface in the world, but if there is no content, there is no point. Streaming does cost money, but that's not the main cost of business. Most cost comes from licensing the content in the first place. (Then paying all your staff to do fancy things) Seriously bandwidth is pretty cheap, compared the the cost of buy the license to broadcast a top rated movie. (a high ranking movie is easily a few $million. custom TV series is anywhere between 1 and 30+ million for a season.)
- sleepychu 11y agoOne of the big things that drew me to amazon's platform was their 'ASAP' streaming. It wasted my bandwidth to begin streaming all the stuff I might be about to open and as a result it seemed seamless. If Netflix can make my film stream at a high resolution faster and buffer less, over time I'll notice the buffering more on other platforms and just use Netflix instead.
- johngunderman 11y agoThe article seems to focus too much on the consumer side of the bandwidth equation. I think the real win for Netflix is the aggregate egress bandwidth savings from their DCs. If Netflix can halve their bandwidth (as the article seems to claim) without any appreciable loss in quality, they've just saved substantially in the infrastructure and peering contracts needed to deliver their content. I have no idea how much money Netflix currently spends on bandwidth/CDN, but I'd guess it's certainly in the 100s of millions. I can imagine that Amazon and Apple would be very interested in emulating those savings.
- sbouafif 11y agoI think Apple already does that for the content delivered by iTunes
- grandalf 11y agoAs more video moves to higher resolutions (such as 4K) the amount of bandwidth wasted by inefficient encoding increases exponentially. While consumers only care if the quality is "acceptable", it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a crisp 4K picture and a 1080p picture, and also easier to see encoding or bitrate artifacts. So I think this is probably an attempt to improve the margins a bit on content delivery costs without sacrificing quality. Netflix has also embraced 4K content with its original series, so it is in a unique position to leverage the shift to higher resolution content for maximum profitability.
- lern_too_spel 11y agoI see it more as an attempt to offer better quality to people with crappy ISPs as they expand to more countries. Previously, they would have seen a low-res Bojack, but now that Netflix can decide that a full HD encode of Bojack can fit in a smaller bitrate, those people will see a high-res Bojack. It might even be related to the T-Mobile announcement that allows people to watch Netflix without eating into their data caps as long as the bitrate is capped.
- hondo77 11y ago...it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a crisp 4K picture and a 1080p picture... Or not: http://www.cnet.com/news/why-ultra-hd-4k-tvs-are-still-stupid/ http://www.cnet.com/news/why-ultra-hd-4k-tvs-are-still-stupi...
- dogma1138 11y ago1080p bluray looks better than Netflix/Amazon Prime at 4K, when all things are even bitrate matters the 1080p quality of Netflix is close to 720p HDTV rips at this point.
- sbouafif 11y agoIt's completely normal for Netflix to work on that and end-consumers wont see a difference. That's exactly what's been done by illegal release groups (pirated content) which are very picky when it comes to time to release (encoding/sharing) and do their best to encode fast enough while having a good viewable quality. When it comes to encoding, even for a large library like Netflix's, time to encode is always lesser than time/bandwith saved while sharing/streaming. As of now, Netflix 1080p raw content (not transcoded) is delivered at a bitrate of 5200kbps/5900kbps with no differences between the content (animated or live action - here I compared BoJack Horseman to The Ridiculous 6). While many (or even all) high quality release groups encode animated bluray at around 3000Kbps (1080p) (around 5500kbps for very high quality) while live action is encoded at around 11.0Mbps. The same difference is applied when the content is capped from TV and then encoded.
- paulmd 11y agoThis also varies by the target audience. Stuff that is released via publically-tracked torrent (i.e. for mass-market audiences) often targets around 1.5-2 GB for a feature-length movie in 1080p. In contrast, releases aimed at Usenet (the technical crowd) are often 6-7 GB and sometimes as large as 11-13 GB for the same movie. On the other hand the situation is much more equitable for audio. Lossless audio torrents are pretty common even in the torrent world, and due to the typically greater number of torrents available the overall selection of lossless files is probably at least as large as on Usenet. I would assume that private trackers tend towards higher-quality releases.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoConsumers don't understand bitrate for videos. They only care if they can watch 1080p on their 1080p TV. It doesn't occur to them that resolution is only a minor player in digital quality.
- discreditable 11y agoPeople get really excited about this revolutionary "quality based" encoding and to me it just sounds like -crf in x264. For trying to hit a constant bitrate, I've heard of people performing a -crf pass, then taking the average bitrate of the result and using that for a constant quality encode. With this method, you let the encoder figure out the bitrate for the quality target you want to hit, then you can use that bitrate in a constant quality encode if you like.
- HappyTypist 11y agoLet's assume that consumers even know about or care about bit rate. Apple and Amazon could offer two downloads, VBR and CBR.
- ksec 11y agoThere used to be a group of people who cared about bitrate. They wanted 64kbps Audio that sounded better then MP3 128Kbps, which till today still isn't possible. Be it AAC, HE-AAC, Vobris, or the new Opus. Despite the hype every time a new codec arrived. There used to be a group of people who wanted codec that is the same quality as Lossless at 256Kbps to 320Kbps. Personally I think MPC ( Musepack ) accomplished it. And it is patentless as well since it is based on MP2. But the codec never caught on in Hardware world. Meanwhile AAC does about just as well @256kbps despite being more complex. That was in the Naspter -> iTunes download era, Then time flies, both group of people lost interest. Mainly for the same reason. Both group wanted to store as many music downloads as possible. 1st group dont mind a little quality loss, 2nd group wanted near perfect quality @256Kbps, however HDD prices dropped to a point where 1st group dont mind storing them in ~256kbps and 2nd group will simply store them as lossless FLAC. Then we come to the age of Streaming, that doesn't necessarily means only Apple Music or Spotify and the like, the largest music streaming is properly Youtube. People dont download anymore, They just click and play on Youtube. It tuns out, I think we have reached the stage of "good enough". Whether it is audio, or video. With Video, we can get huge improvement if we smooth out the noise / grain details. Our broadband speeds continues to improve, we will have G.Fast & VDSL2, the next generation of DSL broadband tech. Most kids or youngster of this generation dont care about Audio / Video quality as much, they would rather want instant and ease of access.