8 ms·

Most likely you're watching in 720p. In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. To get 1080p you need to be watching in Internet Explorer, Safari o

by c2h5oh 8y ago

Most likely you're watching in 720p. In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. To get 1080p you need to be watching in Internet Explorer, Safari or on a Chromebook. To get 4k you need to be watching in Edge and have a 7xxx or 8xxx Intel CPU and HDCP 2.2 enabled display. Source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

shawn 8y ago
If that’s true, that’s pretty unfortunate. YouTube does 1440p@60fps now.
- CyberDildonics 8y ago
  You can actually watch 8k video off of youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn24cQLqAE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn24cQLqAE4
  - shawn 8y ago
    Wow! Even at my monitor's 1024x768, the 8k video looks amazing! So much better than 1080p! Something something nyquist something
    - jakobegger 8y ago
      There is already an 8k display on the market.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        SMPTE recommend a viewing angle of 30 degrees, which matches THX (26-36). Assuming you have 20/20 vision, You won't be able to tell the distance between 4K and higher unless your screen fills more than about 40 degrees, in which case you are losing detail at the edges. An 8K monitor on your desk may make sense -- if you're say 3' away from it and it's say 60", you'll start noticing a difference between 4k and 8k, however you will be focused on one area of the screen, rather than the entire screen. Even with 4K, for most people watching television/films the main (only) benefits are HDR and increased temporal resolution (60p vs 60i/30p) All the 8K stuff I've seen comes with 22.2 sound to help direct your vision to the area of the screen wanted. It certainly has applications in room sized screens where there are multiple events going on, and you can choose what to focus on (sport for example). If you were to buy a 32" 8K screen - say the UP3218K, about 28" wide, to get the benefit of going above 4K you would need to be sat within about 30 inches. At 30" you would have the screen filling about 50 degrees of vision. Even an immersive film should only be 40 degrees.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - wilun 8y ago
      I'm not 100% sure if you tried to be ironic or if you really reported that the video was better in 8k than FHD. Because actually, it can be. Although 8k is overkill, 4k will be enough, and 1440p nearly ok on your old 1024x768 monitor. Typically video encoding does some subsampling on some color components. If you play 4k content on a FHD screen, the quality can be better because you will have no subsampling on your FHD screen, compared to mere FHD encoding (in most cases).
      - shawn 8y ago
        It was a stab at irony. True, but the video is already subsampled. That's how it was able to be uploaded at 1080p at all, since the source video is 8k. So 8k vs 1080p shouldn't make any difference on monitors less than M-by-1080 resolution.
        wilun 8y ago
        The video is typically subsampled at encoding at capture resolution, but it is also subsampled at other encoding resolutions. Because the whole point of subsampling is to be taken into account during encoding, and encoding itself needs not to vary depending on whether the source was downscaled or not. So video codecs most of the time work with some subsampled chroma components. So your encoded 1080p might be able to render after decoding only e.g. 540 lines of those components, while with the 4k stream it might be: 2160/2 => back to 1080. Edit: but to be clear, I'm not advocating for people to choose 2x stream and start watching 4k on FHD screens in general, that would be insane. Chroma subsampling is used because the eye is less sensitive to those colors.
        shawn 8y ago
        I would be interested in a double blind experiment confirming that their specific implementation of chroma subsampling is even detectable. The eye is much less sensitive to colors than intensity, as you point out. If it were perceptible, I think the codec designers wouldn't feel it was an acceptable tradeoff. So your encoded 1080p might be able to render after decoding only e.g. 540 lines of those components, while with the 4k stream it might be: 2160/2 => back to 1080. I'm not sure that's accurate -- whatever downscaling process was used to convert from 8k to 1080p on Google's servers is probably the same process to convert from 8k to 1080p in the youtube player, isn't it? At least perceptually. I would agree that if they convert from 8k (compressed) to 4k (compressed), then 4k to 1080p (compressed), then that would introduce perceptible differences. But in general reencoding video multiple times is fail, so that would be a bug in the encoding process server side. They should be going from the source material directly to 1080p, which would give the encoder a chance to employ precisely the situation you mention. Either way, you should totes email me or shoot me a keybase message. It's not every day that I find someone to debate human perceptual differences caused by esoteric encoding minutiae.
    - brigade 8y ago
      Even ignoring chroma, video compressed at streaming bitrates is nowhere near the nyquist limit for a given resolution. In addition, YouTube generally encodes 4k at like 5-6x the bitrate of their 1080p encodes (codec for codec), rather than merely 3-4x higher which would be closer to the same quality per pixel. So yeah, YouTube's 4k is better on a 1080p screen than their 1080p stream.
- izacus 8y ago
  Yep, but YouTube doesn't require full DRM support.
  - cc-d 8y ago
    Requiring protocol level DRM to be included in video/music streaming technologies has always baffled me. What's the point? Even with theoretically perfect protocol level DRM, the consumer eventually has to be able to see/hear the protected content. If the frames of the video are displayed on screen, and the audio played through the speakers, the output can be recorded and preserved, period. Do the people in charge of making these decisions not realize that whatever convoluted DRM technologies they pay to be developed and implemented will always be defeated by a $30 camcorder from the 90s?
    - TylerE 8y ago
      They don't care because once the signal hits analog the quality will be much lower.
    - izacus 8y ago
      After working in the broadcasting industry for a few years... the answer is that the management of companies in the chain simply doesn't care. DRM absolves them of any kind of piracy blame and they happily pile blame around on people who push back on DRM. That's about it to the story - actual results never come into the reasoning.
      - cc-d 8y ago
        I had always considered this the most likely explanation. The tendency for humans to implement elaborate but ineffective security theaters in an attempt to convince people they're protected from fundamentally unprotectable threats is as old as society itself. As a consequence, chrome can't watch netflix videos at full quality, anybody who flys in the US has to remove their shoes, and my child has to wear a clear backpack to school. I wish we'd stop playing these silly games of pretend which degrade the quality of life of everyone.
    - 8y ago
nine_k 8y ago
Do they offer any reasons to these limitations? In particular, is it due to DRM requirements, or pure performance? I suspect it's the former.
- Daiz 8y ago
  It's 100% a DRM thing. Desktops are pretty much the most powerful platform to watch Netflix on yet the most restricted in terms of available video quality due to their open nature. For example, my desktop with an i7-2600k (that's a Sandy Bridge CPU from 2011) has zero issues playing 4K60 VP9 footage on YouTube in Chrome with CPU decoding, yet on Netflix with the same Chrome I'm arbitrarily restricted to 720p H.264 video.
- kec 8y ago
  I'd wager the 720/1080 split is due to the former being their limit for browsers doing software decode. 4k being restricted to edge sounds like Microsoft is the only one supporting HDCP (drm).
- Crosseye_Jack 8y ago
  It’s DRM. The widevine conf they are using means they are decrypting and decoding in software when you use Chrome or Firefox. When you use Edge you use a different DRM scheme that allows allows decrypting, decoding and rendering in hardware so Netflix offered content upto 4K in Edge with Recent Intel CPU’s. (Last time I checked Ryzen has only just come out with no onboard GPU. But support for recent Nvidia GPU’s was promised, it’s been a while so the landscape may of well changed) If you didn’t have the latest Intel CPU it called back to an older version of PlayReady (sure that’s the brand name of MS’s DRM - on phone and a bit lazy to look it up) that still surported 1080. See in Widevine there are a number of “levels”, the highest being when it can decode, decrypt and push to the frame buffer all in a secure zone. This can not be achieved (atm, well atleast the time of my research into the matter) with widevine on Desktop, so in such a setup widevine will only decrypt upto 720p content. When running on Android and ARM this is possible and you can get 1080p, which is why you can get cheap android based tv sticks (even the old Amazon Fire TV sticks) supported 1080p but your gaming rig and Chrome could not. Don’t work for Widevine, Google, NetFlix or anyone else for that matter. Just a nerd with too much time on my hands so I looking into this stuff. Any corrections welcomed :-D
fabian2k 8y ago
It's even more complicated in my experience. You get up to 1080p in Edge compared to only up to 720p in Chrome or Firefox, but you still don't get 1080p guaranteed. For me it varied depending on the specific movie or TV series, and I often still didn't get 1080p in Edge, and even only 480p sometimes (as confirmed with the debug overlay). Only switching to the Netflix Windows 10 App and later to a Smart TV actually fixed this and gave me consistent 1080p content.
8xde0wcNwpslOw 8y ago
It could also be a lot worse than 720p. At least for me, most bigger (not netflix-original) titles are limited to 480p with maximum bitrates even below 1000 kbps when using a "partially" supported browser like Chrome. But even using Edge is not a silver bullet for all content, as some seems to be limited to that low bitrate 480p on all browsers, even if higher quality is available on a TV app.
- c2h5oh 8y ago
  Control+Alt+Shift+S and override bitrate used.
  - 8xde0wcNwpslOw 8y ago
    Yes, I'm using that to see what bitrates are available. For the mentioned content, they range from very low to low (up to around 1000 kbps).
dingo_bat 8y ago
Even then, 720p from a torrent looks much better that what I get from Netflix. And I've tried Chrome, edge and even the win10 UWP app.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  What source is your torrent from? A WEB-DL is different from a (1080i) HDTV capture is different from a Blu Ray rip. Netflix are optimising for bandwidth over quality - hell, the audio still seems to be 96 kbit AAC.
earenndil 8y ago
Do note that it's possible to watch in 1080p with this addon[1]. 4K it's probably not possible to spoof. 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/force-1080p-netflix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/force-1080p-n...
IshKebab 8y ago
Wow that is ridiculous. I thought Netflix owned most of their content and wouldn't need to kowtow to ridiculous DRM demands like this? Or is this their own doing?
DavidVoid 8y ago
>In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. You can actually get some content in 1080p in Chrome and Firefox with a browser extension. It is somewhat unreliable however and some videos still get capped at 720p. Chrome extension (with explanation of how it works): https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p Firefox extension (unfortunately doesn't seem to work at the moment): https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox

by c2h5oh 8y ago

shawn 8y ago

If that’s true, that’s pretty unfortunate. YouTube does 1440p@60fps now.

CyberDildonics 8y ago
You can actually watch 8k video off of youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn24cQLqAE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn24cQLqAE4
- shawn 8y ago
  Wow! Even at my monitor's 1024x768, the 8k video looks amazing! So much better than 1080p! Something something nyquist something
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    There is already an 8k display on the market.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      SMPTE recommend a viewing angle of 30 degrees, which matches THX (26-36). Assuming you have 20/20 vision, You won't be able to tell the distance between 4K and higher unless your screen fills more than about 40 degrees, in which case you are losing detail at the edges. An 8K monitor on your desk may make sense -- if you're say 3' away from it and it's say 60", you'll start noticing a difference between 4k and 8k, however you will be focused on one area of the screen, rather than the entire screen. Even with 4K, for most people watching television/films the main (only) benefits are HDR and increased temporal resolution (60p vs 60i/30p) All the 8K stuff I've seen comes with 22.2 sound to help direct your vision to the area of the screen wanted. It certainly has applications in room sized screens where there are multiple events going on, and you can choose what to focus on (sport for example). If you were to buy a 32" 8K screen - say the UP3218K, about 28" wide, to get the benefit of going above 4K you would need to be sat within about 30 inches. At 30" you would have the screen filling about 50 degrees of vision. Even an immersive film should only be 40 degrees.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - wilun 8y ago
    I'm not 100% sure if you tried to be ironic or if you really reported that the video was better in 8k than FHD. Because actually, it can be. Although 8k is overkill, 4k will be enough, and 1440p nearly ok on your old 1024x768 monitor. Typically video encoding does some subsampling on some color components. If you play 4k content on a FHD screen, the quality can be better because you will have no subsampling on your FHD screen, compared to mere FHD encoding (in most cases).
    - shawn 8y ago
      It was a stab at irony. True, but the video is already subsampled. That's how it was able to be uploaded at 1080p at all, since the source video is 8k. So 8k vs 1080p shouldn't make any difference on monitors less than M-by-1080 resolution.
      - wilun 8y ago
        The video is typically subsampled at encoding at capture resolution, but it is also subsampled at other encoding resolutions. Because the whole point of subsampling is to be taken into account during encoding, and encoding itself needs not to vary depending on whether the source was downscaled or not. So video codecs most of the time work with some subsampled chroma components. So your encoded 1080p might be able to render after decoding only e.g. 540 lines of those components, while with the 4k stream it might be: 2160/2 => back to 1080. Edit: but to be clear, I'm not advocating for people to choose 2x stream and start watching 4k on FHD screens in general, that would be insane. Chroma subsampling is used because the eye is less sensitive to those colors.
        shawn 8y ago
        I would be interested in a double blind experiment confirming that their specific implementation of chroma subsampling is even detectable. The eye is much less sensitive to colors than intensity, as you point out. If it were perceptible, I think the codec designers wouldn't feel it was an acceptable tradeoff. So your encoded 1080p might be able to render after decoding only e.g. 540 lines of those components, while with the 4k stream it might be: 2160/2 => back to 1080. I'm not sure that's accurate -- whatever downscaling process was used to convert from 8k to 1080p on Google's servers is probably the same process to convert from 8k to 1080p in the youtube player, isn't it? At least perceptually. I would agree that if they convert from 8k (compressed) to 4k (compressed), then 4k to 1080p (compressed), then that would introduce perceptible differences. But in general reencoding video multiple times is fail, so that would be a bug in the encoding process server side. They should be going from the source material directly to 1080p, which would give the encoder a chance to employ precisely the situation you mention. Either way, you should totes email me or shoot me a keybase message. It's not every day that I find someone to debate human perceptual differences caused by esoteric encoding minutiae.
  - brigade 8y ago
    Even ignoring chroma, video compressed at streaming bitrates is nowhere near the nyquist limit for a given resolution. In addition, YouTube generally encodes 4k at like 5-6x the bitrate of their 1080p encodes (codec for codec), rather than merely 3-4x higher which would be closer to the same quality per pixel. So yeah, YouTube's 4k is better on a 1080p screen than their 1080p stream.
izacus 8y ago
Yep, but YouTube doesn't require full DRM support.
- cc-d 8y ago
  Requiring protocol level DRM to be included in video/music streaming technologies has always baffled me. What's the point? Even with theoretically perfect protocol level DRM, the consumer eventually has to be able to see/hear the protected content. If the frames of the video are displayed on screen, and the audio played through the speakers, the output can be recorded and preserved, period. Do the people in charge of making these decisions not realize that whatever convoluted DRM technologies they pay to be developed and implemented will always be defeated by a $30 camcorder from the 90s?
  - TylerE 8y ago
    They don't care because once the signal hits analog the quality will be much lower.
  - izacus 8y ago
    After working in the broadcasting industry for a few years... the answer is that the management of companies in the chain simply doesn't care. DRM absolves them of any kind of piracy blame and they happily pile blame around on people who push back on DRM. That's about it to the story - actual results never come into the reasoning.
    - cc-d 8y ago
      I had always considered this the most likely explanation. The tendency for humans to implement elaborate but ineffective security theaters in an attempt to convince people they're protected from fundamentally unprotectable threats is as old as society itself. As a consequence, chrome can't watch netflix videos at full quality, anybody who flys in the US has to remove their shoes, and my child has to wear a clear backpack to school. I wish we'd stop playing these silly games of pretend which degrade the quality of life of everyone.
  - 8y ago

nine_k 8y ago

Do they offer any reasons to these limitations? In particular, is it due to DRM requirements, or pure performance? I suspect it's the former.

Daiz 8y ago
It's 100% a DRM thing. Desktops are pretty much the most powerful platform to watch Netflix on yet the most restricted in terms of available video quality due to their open nature. For example, my desktop with an i7-2600k (that's a Sandy Bridge CPU from 2011) has zero issues playing 4K60 VP9 footage on YouTube in Chrome with CPU decoding, yet on Netflix with the same Chrome I'm arbitrarily restricted to 720p H.264 video.
kec 8y ago
I'd wager the 720/1080 split is due to the former being their limit for browsers doing software decode. 4k being restricted to edge sounds like Microsoft is the only one supporting HDCP (drm).
Crosseye_Jack 8y ago
It’s DRM. The widevine conf they are using means they are decrypting and decoding in software when you use Chrome or Firefox. When you use Edge you use a different DRM scheme that allows allows decrypting, decoding and rendering in hardware so Netflix offered content upto 4K in Edge with Recent Intel CPU’s. (Last time I checked Ryzen has only just come out with no onboard GPU. But support for recent Nvidia GPU’s was promised, it’s been a while so the landscape may of well changed) If you didn’t have the latest Intel CPU it called back to an older version of PlayReady (sure that’s the brand name of MS’s DRM - on phone and a bit lazy to look it up) that still surported 1080. See in Widevine there are a number of “levels”, the highest being when it can decode, decrypt and push to the frame buffer all in a secure zone. This can not be achieved (atm, well atleast the time of my research into the matter) with widevine on Desktop, so in such a setup widevine will only decrypt upto 720p content. When running on Android and ARM this is possible and you can get 1080p, which is why you can get cheap android based tv sticks (even the old Amazon Fire TV sticks) supported 1080p but your gaming rig and Chrome could not. Don’t work for Widevine, Google, NetFlix or anyone else for that matter. Just a nerd with too much time on my hands so I looking into this stuff. Any corrections welcomed :-D

fabian2k 8y ago

It's even more complicated in my experience. You get up to 1080p in Edge compared to only up to 720p in Chrome or Firefox, but you still don't get 1080p guaranteed. For me it varied depending on the specific movie or TV series, and I often still didn't get 1080p in Edge, and even only 480p sometimes (as confirmed with the debug overlay). Only switching to the Netflix Windows 10 App and later to a Smart TV actually fixed this and gave me consistent 1080p content.

8xde0wcNwpslOw 8y ago

It could also be a lot worse than 720p. At least for me, most bigger (not netflix-original) titles are limited to 480p with maximum bitrates even below 1000 kbps when using a "partially" supported browser like Chrome. But even using Edge is not a silver bullet for all content, as some seems to be limited to that low bitrate 480p on all browsers, even if higher quality is available on a TV app.

c2h5oh 8y ago
Control+Alt+Shift+S and override bitrate used.
- 8xde0wcNwpslOw 8y ago
  Yes, I'm using that to see what bitrates are available. For the mentioned content, they range from very low to low (up to around 1000 kbps).

dingo_bat 8y ago

Even then, 720p from a torrent looks much better that what I get from Netflix. And I've tried Chrome, edge and even the win10 UWP app.

voltagex_ 8y ago
What source is your torrent from? A WEB-DL is different from a (1080i) HDTV capture is different from a Blu Ray rip. Netflix are optimising for bandwidth over quality - hell, the audio still seems to be 96 kbit AAC.

earenndil 8y ago

Do note that it's possible to watch in 1080p with this addon[1]. 4K it's probably not possible to spoof. 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/force-1080p-netflix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/force-1080p-n...

IshKebab 8y ago

Wow that is ridiculous. I thought Netflix owned most of their content and wouldn't need to kowtow to ridiculous DRM demands like this? Or is this their own doing?

DavidVoid 8y ago

>In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. You can actually get some content in 1080p in Chrome and Firefox with a browser extension. It is somewhat unreliable however and some videos still get capped at 720p. Chrome extension (with explanation of how it works): https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p Firefox extension (unfortunately doesn't seem to work at the moment): https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox