5 ms·

This and I want as much content as possible in 4K/HDR, I’m really sick of the second tier streaming services being limited to highly compressed 1080p. If a ser

This and I want as much content as possible in 4K/HDR, I’m really sick of the second tier streaming services being limited to highly compressed 1080p. If a service came along that truly had the TV and films I wanted with a preference for 4K content, I’d happily pay $40-$60AUD a month for it. Right now I subscribe to: - Netflix - Stan - Apple Music - Usenet related services - Audible - Plex Premium - Getflix content unblocking services And in recent times: - Pandora (cancelled as they’re leaving Aus) - Amazon Prime video (cancelled as they have hardly any content and a terrible interface) - Spotify (cancelled as I prefer Apple Music) - Last.FM streaming (cancelled when the service went EOL) - Several private trackers (avoid BT now) There’s a lot of opportunity for consolidation there, I realise I’m probably not in the majority but I WANT to pay and I WANT media creators and artists to take my money.

remarkEon 9y ago
Curious. Why do you prefer Apple Music? Has something changed recently? I had both for a while but found the UI, playlist building capacity, the generated playlists, and the ability to share music on Spotify to be superior so I dropped Apple.
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Howdy, I have been running both macOS and iOS betas on my personal devices and both iTunes and Music have had a significant UX overhaul on macOS 10.13 and iOS 11, they’re not perfect - but it’s a good step forward. A bit high level but here’s my list of pros: - I’ve found a lot less missing tracks / albums, especially for more underground / lesser known artists I had real problems with this on Spotify. - Significantly less bandwidth usage compared to Spotify. - Unified interface to my music library (1.2TB~) and streaming / downloadable music on both the desktop and phone. - The ability to have my own music uploaded as part of my library and available on all desktops/laptops and my phone. - Apple Music data is unmetered on my mobile provider (I average around 8GB/mo of mobile music streaming on my phone) - The Music app on my phone is /really/ good at figuring out what music/playlists/albums to sync (prefetch if you will) onto my phone, I set the data limit (to 128GB) and it just figures it out nicely, often when I go to listen to a new album from an artist I follow / like - its already there for me (note: I believe this is opt-in functionality) What I don’t like about Apple Music / think needs to improve: - Playlists, They’re not as nice or as fast to manage as on Spotify but at least tracks don’t go missing randomly. - Artist/Album workflow performance, at times it still feels very ‘webframe’ (if that makes sense?) when browsing artists and their albums, the UI latency really annoys me and I liken it to the feeling that JavaScript ‘apps’ give you.
  - jm547ster 9y ago
    Sorry, your lists are impossible to read on mobile for those in anyway impatient, requiring lots of horizontal scrolling
    - mrmondo 9y ago
      Sorry - HN doesn’t support standard markdown (un)ordered list style syntax, I’ve reformatted them for you without the pre block
  - RugnirViking 9y ago
    It sounds as though the spotify IOS client is somewhat behind on features compared to android. That, or its not obvious enough how to access some of these features, because many of these are available on android such as : changing stream quality for bandwidth, and downloading music on phone, using own music on phone (admittedly a bit of a hassle, you have to put it on a playlist on pc then sync download that playlist on mobile)
    - shinratdr 9y ago
      > using own music on phone (admittedly a bit of a hassle, you have to put it on a playlist on pc then sync download that playlist on mobile) This really isn't the same thing at all. With Apple Music or Google Play Music, your own library and cloud tracks are seamlessly integrated and can be streamed and accessed from anywhere and any device. A kludgy solution where you can use Spotify like a 90s MP3 player really doesn't cut it. If Apple, Google and Deezer can offer local library support, Spotify has no excuse. It's a huge gap, and makes Spotify unusable for many people or only supplementary. I don't expect a streaming service to have everything in history all the time, just have as much as possible, and let me fill in the gaps.
- shinratdr 9y ago
  Apple Music is rapidly evolving. They're putting a lot of effort into it. OS integration is a big one for me, Apple Music is just so seamless. Personally I hate the Spotify UI, search is among the worst, and just like Google Music I find it has way too much Karaoke bullshit cluttering up results when it doesn't have the song you want. That plus Spotify having no way to upload your own local files makes it a complete non-starter for me. Apple Music is getting way better on the radio & playlist front. The New Music Mix knows me surprisingly well. I'd give it another shot if you haven't tried in the last 6 months to a year.
- theshrike79 9y ago
  The "Radio" channels that have been curated by an actual human are nice. Also the recommended playlists (built from my likes and listen counts) seem somehow better on Apple Music than on Spotify.
Buge 9y ago
>limited to highly compressed 1080p. It's worse than that. Netflix is limited to 720p in Chrome and Firefox.
- mrmondo 9y ago
  That can’t be right, I’m fairly certain I tried 4K streams on my work / home iMacs (5K) and on my MBP (3.5K)
  - dimillian 9y ago
    I don't want to advance anything (don't have time to find the source), but I think Apple have something special built in Safari/Webkit for Netflix. That relate to decoding, quality and battery combustion while streaming.
    - ascagnel_ 9y ago
      Safari & Edge support a more advanced version of HTTP Live Streaming (it's the same tech Apple uses for their event live-streams) plus the DRM scheme Netflix uses.
  - justinclift 9y ago
    Their "System Requirements" doc says 4K is only available on Windows, and only with Edge: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 It is possible that doc isn't kept up to date though. :)
- fabian2k 9y ago
  The only way I found to actually get 1080p for all content on Netflix on a PC was to use the Windows 10 Netflix app. In any browser, some of the content would be 720p or 480p otherwise. Edge gave 1080p sometimes, but Firefox and Chrome maxed out at 720p in all cases where I looked at it (Ctrl+alt+shift+D to see the actual resolution).
  - angus-prune 9y ago
Aloha 9y ago
Consider for a moment that 4k resolution is not easy to obtain from film - you need to shoot the whole thing digitally to really get the right product. I also don't much care for how 4k looks - or the bandwidth needed to transport it around.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  > Consider for a moment that 4k resolution is not easy to obtain from film Why's it not easy? You just do a 4k scan of the film don't you?
  - mrmondo 9y ago
    Indeed and there's many methods for this that are being used to restore many old films from archive. Modern film cameras used by major networks record at 4K-6K (full open). Beyond that even if the cameras on set are recording at 3.2K or 2K pro-res etc... it doesn't mean that the post-production and up-scaling upon rendering doesn't benefit from a final output of 4K. Finally - we must think to the future and not hold back technology to the lowest common denominator.
    - ancientworldnow 9y ago
      VFX are substantially more expensive to complete at higher resolutions. Even in major films released at 4K, fx are frequently lower resolutions because of time and budget constraints. Going back and rescanning older films that have lots of cgi usually results in very ugly vfx scenes. And again, resolution is just a small component of the final image quality. There is a major 3.2(ish)K camera on the market that has substantially better IQ than 4 and 6K alternatives. And another 6K camera that has substantially better IQ than 8K options. As for upscaling, we're probably better off leaving that for the end user as better upscaling algos are created and deployed all the time and baking it in from the studio locks us into what will soon be old methodology.
- gambiting 9y ago
  Really? I was under the impression that a good quality 35mm film can resolve to as much as 8K without much trouble. Why would extracting 4K out of it be a problem?
maccard 9y ago
I'd pay more than £40 for it; right now I pay £12/month for a TV licence (basically a BBC subscription fee), £20/month to sky, and £7.50/month to Netflix. I've also paid £7.99/month for Amazon for a few months to try out prime video, but never found it worthwhile. That's just for TV/movie content. I don't want to manage 4/5/6 subscriptions.
- askew 9y ago
  Doesn't that pretty much become Sky Movies?
  - maccard 9y ago
    Not quite. In an ideal world, I want Spotify for movies (every mainstream movie in the last 40 years pretty much on demand in HQ and reliable access) and I'm willing to pay for it, like I do with Spotify. (I'd be willing to pay Spotify lots more but they don't have a bonus plan to pay more).
4ad 9y ago
> I want as much content as possible in 4K/HDR Not just 4K/HDR, but high bitrate as well. It's pretty ridiculous that an 1080p BluRay looks better than ANY 4k stream today (NetFlix, youtube, etc) because it's much less compressed. BluRay's are about 40-50Mbps. I want the same quality for 1080p, and higher for 4k!
- jerf 9y ago
  Dirty secret of video: The resolution matters a lot less than people tend to claim. Pixels are not created equal. I can easily give you a "24K" video stream with the same bitrate as your current 720p stream. It may choke your video card dealing with it and you may have nothing that can display it, but I can give it to you, easily. It just won't look any better than the 720p stream and will probably look worse (due to the compression algorithm blocks now being too small to work properly). I've seen "1080p" streams that were of lower quality than a DVD release, to say nothing of the BluRay you mention, which are better than DVDs both in encoding quality and bitrate, making them actually quite a bit better than DVD. Bitrate matters a lot more. Only once your bitrate has saturated a given resolution is it really worth moving up to the next resolution. I actually like "4K" streams because to even pretend to be 4K, they have to bump the bitrate up. Prior to me getting a 4K TV, I played some 4K streams to my 1080P display, and they were of a visibly higher quality than the 1080P streams. You're not "supposed" to do that test; it really breaks the 4K illusion. (You can do this with youtube-dl by forcing it to grab the 4K stream and then playing it on something with enough hardware acceleration to still play it at 1080P. You can't just go to YouTube with a 1080P display because it'll feed you the 1080P version of the stream even if the video name has "4K" in it.) (Another place you can see this is cameras, especially cell phone cameras. Take your cell phone outside into broad daylight and take a well-focused photo of pretty much anything. Take the photo in to your computer and zoom in until every pixel of the photo is three or four pixels on your monitor. Can you find sharp color changes between those pixels, or does it look like your camera snuck an impressionist Instragram filter into your picture when you weren't looking? A lot of us have high end phones that may be able to pass this test, though as the megapixel count keeps jumping even that may be dubious, but even mid-range phones can't. That said, they may still be taking very, very good photos, especially considering all the headwinds a phone camera faces optically. It's just that they're very good 4MP photos rather than 12MP photos.) (I'd love some sort of JPEG processor that analyzes a photo for its real information/high-frequency content, and then downsizes the JPG to accurately reflect its real information content. You can get big savings on both digital camera photos and videos by doing this, integer multiples of the file size with no visible differences when examined side-by-side, but it's quite tedious by hand. Perhaps the promise of BIG SAVINGS would encourage a DropBox or some photo startup employee to have a look at this?)
r3bl 9y ago
I'm basically you, but for music. The same way you like your video content to be high quality and have devices that allow you to enjoy such quality, I want to do the same for music. I have a high quality sound system and I want to listen to lossless music. And subscription services are not even an option. Neither are the popular music selling services (iTunes / Google Play Music / Amazon). Luckily, I listen to a lot of electronic music, so I can pay ~$0.5 dollars more per song to get lossless quality on Beatport[0] and Juno[1]. My free estimate is that I was able to chase down ~30% of my music collection in lossless formats[2]. (0) https://www.beatport.com/ https://www.beatport.com/ (1) Warning: website stuck in the 90s, both security-wise and design-wise http://www.junodownload.com/ http://www.junodownload.com/ (2) About a third of those are pirated because I couldn't find a way to purchase lossless versions.

remarkEon 9y ago

Curious. Why do you prefer Apple Music? Has something changed recently? I had both for a while but found the UI, playlist building capacity, the generated playlists, and the ability to share music on Spotify to be superior so I dropped Apple.

mrmondo 9y ago
Howdy, I have been running both macOS and iOS betas on my personal devices and both iTunes and Music have had a significant UX overhaul on macOS 10.13 and iOS 11, they’re not perfect - but it’s a good step forward. A bit high level but here’s my list of pros: - I’ve found a lot less missing tracks / albums, especially for more underground / lesser known artists I had real problems with this on Spotify. - Significantly less bandwidth usage compared to Spotify. - Unified interface to my music library (1.2TB~) and streaming / downloadable music on both the desktop and phone. - The ability to have my own music uploaded as part of my library and available on all desktops/laptops and my phone. - Apple Music data is unmetered on my mobile provider (I average around 8GB/mo of mobile music streaming on my phone) - The Music app on my phone is /really/ good at figuring out what music/playlists/albums to sync (prefetch if you will) onto my phone, I set the data limit (to 128GB) and it just figures it out nicely, often when I go to listen to a new album from an artist I follow / like - its already there for me (note: I believe this is opt-in functionality) What I don’t like about Apple Music / think needs to improve: - Playlists, They’re not as nice or as fast to manage as on Spotify but at least tracks don’t go missing randomly. - Artist/Album workflow performance, at times it still feels very ‘webframe’ (if that makes sense?) when browsing artists and their albums, the UI latency really annoys me and I liken it to the feeling that JavaScript ‘apps’ give you.
- jm547ster 9y ago
  Sorry, your lists are impossible to read on mobile for those in anyway impatient, requiring lots of horizontal scrolling
  - mrmondo 9y ago
    Sorry - HN doesn’t support standard markdown (un)ordered list style syntax, I’ve reformatted them for you without the pre block
- RugnirViking 9y ago
  It sounds as though the spotify IOS client is somewhat behind on features compared to android. That, or its not obvious enough how to access some of these features, because many of these are available on android such as : changing stream quality for bandwidth, and downloading music on phone, using own music on phone (admittedly a bit of a hassle, you have to put it on a playlist on pc then sync download that playlist on mobile)
  - shinratdr 9y ago
    > using own music on phone (admittedly a bit of a hassle, you have to put it on a playlist on pc then sync download that playlist on mobile) This really isn't the same thing at all. With Apple Music or Google Play Music, your own library and cloud tracks are seamlessly integrated and can be streamed and accessed from anywhere and any device. A kludgy solution where you can use Spotify like a 90s MP3 player really doesn't cut it. If Apple, Google and Deezer can offer local library support, Spotify has no excuse. It's a huge gap, and makes Spotify unusable for many people or only supplementary. I don't expect a streaming service to have everything in history all the time, just have as much as possible, and let me fill in the gaps.
shinratdr 9y ago
Apple Music is rapidly evolving. They're putting a lot of effort into it. OS integration is a big one for me, Apple Music is just so seamless. Personally I hate the Spotify UI, search is among the worst, and just like Google Music I find it has way too much Karaoke bullshit cluttering up results when it doesn't have the song you want. That plus Spotify having no way to upload your own local files makes it a complete non-starter for me. Apple Music is getting way better on the radio & playlist front. The New Music Mix knows me surprisingly well. I'd give it another shot if you haven't tried in the last 6 months to a year.
theshrike79 9y ago
The "Radio" channels that have been curated by an actual human are nice. Also the recommended playlists (built from my likes and listen counts) seem somehow better on Apple Music than on Spotify.

Buge 9y ago

>limited to highly compressed 1080p. It's worse than that. Netflix is limited to 720p in Chrome and Firefox.

mrmondo 9y ago
That can’t be right, I’m fairly certain I tried 4K streams on my work / home iMacs (5K) and on my MBP (3.5K)
- dimillian 9y ago
  I don't want to advance anything (don't have time to find the source), but I think Apple have something special built in Safari/Webkit for Netflix. That relate to decoding, quality and battery combustion while streaming.
  - ascagnel_ 9y ago
    Safari & Edge support a more advanced version of HTTP Live Streaming (it's the same tech Apple uses for their event live-streams) plus the DRM scheme Netflix uses.
- justinclift 9y ago
  Their "System Requirements" doc says 4K is only available on Windows, and only with Edge: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 It is possible that doc isn't kept up to date though. :)
fabian2k 9y ago
The only way I found to actually get 1080p for all content on Netflix on a PC was to use the Windows 10 Netflix app. In any browser, some of the content would be 720p or 480p otherwise. Edge gave 1080p sometimes, but Firefox and Chrome maxed out at 720p in all cases where I looked at it (Ctrl+alt+shift+D to see the actual resolution).
- angus-prune 9y ago

Aloha 9y ago

Consider for a moment that 4k resolution is not easy to obtain from film - you need to shoot the whole thing digitally to really get the right product. I also don't much care for how 4k looks - or the bandwidth needed to transport it around.

chrisseaton 9y ago
> Consider for a moment that 4k resolution is not easy to obtain from film Why's it not easy? You just do a 4k scan of the film don't you?
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Indeed and there's many methods for this that are being used to restore many old films from archive. Modern film cameras used by major networks record at 4K-6K (full open). Beyond that even if the cameras on set are recording at 3.2K or 2K pro-res etc... it doesn't mean that the post-production and up-scaling upon rendering doesn't benefit from a final output of 4K. Finally - we must think to the future and not hold back technology to the lowest common denominator.
  - ancientworldnow 9y ago
    VFX are substantially more expensive to complete at higher resolutions. Even in major films released at 4K, fx are frequently lower resolutions because of time and budget constraints. Going back and rescanning older films that have lots of cgi usually results in very ugly vfx scenes. And again, resolution is just a small component of the final image quality. There is a major 3.2(ish)K camera on the market that has substantially better IQ than 4 and 6K alternatives. And another 6K camera that has substantially better IQ than 8K options. As for upscaling, we're probably better off leaving that for the end user as better upscaling algos are created and deployed all the time and baking it in from the studio locks us into what will soon be old methodology.
gambiting 9y ago
Really? I was under the impression that a good quality 35mm film can resolve to as much as 8K without much trouble. Why would extracting 4K out of it be a problem?

maccard 9y ago

I'd pay more than £40 for it; right now I pay £12/month for a TV licence (basically a BBC subscription fee), £20/month to sky, and £7.50/month to Netflix. I've also paid £7.99/month for Amazon for a few months to try out prime video, but never found it worthwhile. That's just for TV/movie content. I don't want to manage 4/5/6 subscriptions.

askew 9y ago
Doesn't that pretty much become Sky Movies?
- maccard 9y ago
  Not quite. In an ideal world, I want Spotify for movies (every mainstream movie in the last 40 years pretty much on demand in HQ and reliable access) and I'm willing to pay for it, like I do with Spotify. (I'd be willing to pay Spotify lots more but they don't have a bonus plan to pay more).

4ad 9y ago

> I want as much content as possible in 4K/HDR Not just 4K/HDR, but high bitrate as well. It's pretty ridiculous that an 1080p BluRay looks better than ANY 4k stream today (NetFlix, youtube, etc) because it's much less compressed. BluRay's are about 40-50Mbps. I want the same quality for 1080p, and higher for 4k!

jerf 9y ago
Dirty secret of video: The resolution matters a lot less than people tend to claim. Pixels are not created equal. I can easily give you a "24K" video stream with the same bitrate as your current 720p stream. It may choke your video card dealing with it and you may have nothing that can display it, but I can give it to you, easily. It just won't look any better than the 720p stream and will probably look worse (due to the compression algorithm blocks now being too small to work properly). I've seen "1080p" streams that were of lower quality than a DVD release, to say nothing of the BluRay you mention, which are better than DVDs both in encoding quality and bitrate, making them actually quite a bit better than DVD. Bitrate matters a lot more. Only once your bitrate has saturated a given resolution is it really worth moving up to the next resolution. I actually like "4K" streams because to even pretend to be 4K, they have to bump the bitrate up. Prior to me getting a 4K TV, I played some 4K streams to my 1080P display, and they were of a visibly higher quality than the 1080P streams. You're not "supposed" to do that test; it really breaks the 4K illusion. (You can do this with youtube-dl by forcing it to grab the 4K stream and then playing it on something with enough hardware acceleration to still play it at 1080P. You can't just go to YouTube with a 1080P display because it'll feed you the 1080P version of the stream even if the video name has "4K" in it.) (Another place you can see this is cameras, especially cell phone cameras. Take your cell phone outside into broad daylight and take a well-focused photo of pretty much anything. Take the photo in to your computer and zoom in until every pixel of the photo is three or four pixels on your monitor. Can you find sharp color changes between those pixels, or does it look like your camera snuck an impressionist Instragram filter into your picture when you weren't looking? A lot of us have high end phones that may be able to pass this test, though as the megapixel count keeps jumping even that may be dubious, but even mid-range phones can't. That said, they may still be taking very, very good photos, especially considering all the headwinds a phone camera faces optically. It's just that they're very good 4MP photos rather than 12MP photos.) (I'd love some sort of JPEG processor that analyzes a photo for its real information/high-frequency content, and then downsizes the JPG to accurately reflect its real information content. You can get big savings on both digital camera photos and videos by doing this, integer multiples of the file size with no visible differences when examined side-by-side, but it's quite tedious by hand. Perhaps the promise of BIG SAVINGS would encourage a DropBox or some photo startup employee to have a look at this?)

r3bl 9y ago

I'm basically you, but for music. The same way you like your video content to be high quality and have devices that allow you to enjoy such quality, I want to do the same for music. I have a high quality sound system and I want to listen to lossless music. And subscription services are not even an option. Neither are the popular music selling services (iTunes / Google Play Music / Amazon). Luckily, I listen to a lot of electronic music, so I can pay ~$0.5 dollars more per song to get lossless quality on Beatport[0] and Juno[1]. My free estimate is that I was able to chase down ~30% of my music collection in lossless formats[2]. (0) https://www.beatport.com/ https://www.beatport.com/ (1) Warning: website stuck in the 90s, both security-wise and design-wise http://www.junodownload.com/ http://www.junodownload.com/ (2) About a third of those are pirated because I couldn't find a way to purchase lossless versions.