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For once I wish services like Netflix and YouTube would announce that "we've improved streaming video quality at the same data usage" as opposed to "we've impro

For once I wish services like Netflix and YouTube would announce that "we've improved streaming video quality at the same data usage" as opposed to "we've improved data usage at the same quality". YouTube's compression is _horrid_, and Netflix's isn't much better. The quality between a 1080p BluRay versus Netflix's 4K stream is quite noticeable, especially in darker scenes.

batmansmk 7y ago
I agree that quality is not satisfactory, Im not convinced that it is the top problem to solve either. Let me explain: I read that video streaming was 50% of Internet's bandwidth, itself was about 3% of worldwide CO2 emissions. It's quite significant, and I would love quite the opposite of your reasoning: a lesser quality to leave us, engineers, time to find a sustainable way of watching videos online.
- codys 7y ago
  It feels a bit irresponsible to through around unsourced numbers like that. Makes responding responsibly difficult.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  Why don’t you go beat up on useless technology which provably pisses away energy (by design!) like the blockchain before you claiming consuming video content on the internet is killing the planet.
  - Dontrememberit 7y ago
    There's no need to get defensive over this. One can do both.
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    Useless to you does not mean useless to other people and unless you somehow are the person who has an ultimate mandate over valuing things throughout the universe, then it's just your opinion. If you for some reason have that mandate, you might as well look at other "useless" industries such as christmas lights, mechanical watch production (very demanding and "useless", right? since quartz watches are much cheaper and more accurate anyway?), vinyl records (think of all that plastic!!!), road lighting during the night (most roads don't have any visitors for hours!), jewelry, public webcams (all that energy and data transfer!). How about heating in far up north? How much energy is "wasted" there, "why don't all those people just move"? Or expensive motherboards which have thousands of components, of which only a small part will realistically be used by the owner... Or gaming consoles which can in fact be used for other calculations, but damn uselessly stuck there to just produce some 3d simulations... Or gaming in general, how much does that "waste"? Basically what I'm trying to say is that your line of reasoning is extremely selfish and short-sighted, and there are people who would very much like to have some blockchains working, and they will keep doing so, just like they will keep setting up and powering christmas lights and paying for their gaming rigs and buying expensive watches that take a fortune to manufacture.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Should we guess whether you've done any air travel in the past couple of years? (I have too, I'm a hypocrite as well.) I have no idea the source of your number. I see half a percent here[1]. That is also possibly inaccurate, because at least one major internet company offsets all their carbon emissions with things like farm animal feces digestors and methane recapture covers for mines. Even if it is three percent, it's not clear that a given amount of bandwidth is responsible for the same fraction of emissions. Also, perhaps the more people watch movies, the less they drive around and do fun things outside the house. So it may be that for each % you increase internet emissions you decrease other emissions by %*2. Who knows? [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-footprint-internet https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-f...
  - donkeydouglas 7y ago
    That's not really relevant, though. The point is not "Video produces significant emissions, therefore it is bad." The point is "Video produces significant emissions, therefore making it more efficient would be good." The fact that video is not as bad as something else has no bearing on whether video could be made even better. It's worth bringing up because in a decision between x% better image quality or x% lower emissions, the total amount of those emissions is the key piece of information.
- SailingSperm 7y ago
  For anyone interested in some more novel ways of reducing video bandwidth with neural networks using foveated rendering to 'recreate/generate' the high res frames client side. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTUmmW4ispA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTUmmW4ispA
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Sending data through the internet contributes to 3% of worldwide CO2 emissions? Finding a 'sustainable way to watch videos online'? I think you have your numbers mixed up. Maybe you are confusing the amount of electricity all computers use with the internet and CO2 emissions.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Computers use electricity. Find a way to generate electricity without CO2. If people can't watch videos of foreign places then they will have to travel to foreign countries which will cause more CO2.
Waterluvian 7y ago
I'm going to bet the overwhelming majority of users don't care about either. This is Netflix cutting costs by requiring less data to serve their content at the quality that's good enough to make most people happy. Any time I talk to anyone outside our nerd bubble I'm reminded and humbled by what simply doesn't register as relevant to them.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Conscious and subconscious awareness are different things. The mythical "most person" can't describe the difference between a blocky artifacted video and a clean high-bitrate video, but they will prefer the clean over the blocky and enjoy it more.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    I think that's probably true if they got to A B test the options.
    - jakear 7y ago
      Further, they aren’t going to cancel their subscription because it’s blocky. What would they do instead, go out and buy The Office box set, and a optical drive to play it with?
      - Dontrememberit 7y ago
        No, but they might pirate (but I bet yify is even worse)
        monkpit 7y ago
        What makes you think it’s worse exactly?
        jakear 7y ago
        This is much harder than simply opening the netflix app built into your TV. I'm bothered by the netflix quality every time I use it, but the hassle to download the movie before hand, connect my laptop to the HDMI, need to get up to control it, need to get up to move the mouse to make it disappear, etc. makes it a non-option. Sure there are solutions to those problems, but they're also work.
dabei 7y ago
Quality doesn't really matter for the general audience, beyond some reasonable threshold. https://mux.com/blog/youtube-viewers-dont-care-about-video-quality/ https://mux.com/blog/youtube-viewers-dont-care-about-video-q...
- magila 7y ago
  Engagement seems a pretty blunt metric for this. Especially since Youtube has a near monopoly on user generated video content. A user would have to be mightily perturbed to abandon their favorite content altogether over poor video quality. I bet most of those 90% of people who stuck with 480p don't even know they can manually set the resolution.
threwr3423 7y ago
+1 H.264 on Youtube is often comparable to files compressed at crf of ~30+, and while VP9 is more efficient, it also comes with weird encoding artifacts.
sjwright 7y ago
The sad thing is, they could offer two levels of peak quality, one less than today’s and the other more than today’s—and their overall data usage rate would probably go down not up... especially if the lower bitrate was marketed as “faster starts, less buffering” etc.
steve1977 7y ago
Just recently I was watching a Blu-Ray, while I'm mostly watching Netflix these days. There was a nice gray to dark gradient in in the intro and I noticed I was expecting some posterization artifacts and... there were none. ;) Kind of sad that I'm already used to them it seems.
sammorrowdrums 7y ago
Compressed blacks / greys, they work until they don't. Especially for drama and horror where dark scenes and night scenes are frequent!
nicoburns 7y ago
Don't these services adapt the quality based on the quality of your network connection? In which case, it might be the same thing.
willis936 7y ago
Does 4K Netflix target 50 Mbps? Blu-ray does. While lossy compression performance is a deep and incomplete field, more bits always helps. That requires more storage on servers and more throughput. There needs to be a “good enough” point and the hosts will glue themselves to it. If it moves up over time then they will have to update their library where high quality sources are available.
- protanopia 7y ago
  Netflix recomends a 25 Mbps download speed to watch UHD but according to some redditor it is actually at 15.6[1]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/5lc2nl/what_bitrate_does_neflix_4k_actually_stream_at_all/ https://old.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/5lc2nl/what_bitrat...
ThrowItAway2Day 7y ago
Yeah the image quality is poor, and it's especially frustrating for ad-based video streaming sites like Hulu or Tubi. The movie struggles to get 720p, buffering a few times, then the ad comes loud and bright at 1080p instantly.
microcolonel 7y ago
Honestly, I find the quality decent. I watch so much content on YouTube; making the encoding artifacts imperceptible would mean I need more mobile data. Here in Canada, mobile data is more expensive than anywhere else in the world, so it can make a difference of about $500 CAD a year, the cost of a new mid-market smartphone.

batmansmk 7y ago

I agree that quality is not satisfactory, Im not convinced that it is the top problem to solve either. Let me explain: I read that video streaming was 50% of Internet's bandwidth, itself was about 3% of worldwide CO2 emissions. It's quite significant, and I would love quite the opposite of your reasoning: a lesser quality to leave us, engineers, time to find a sustainable way of watching videos online.

codys 7y ago
It feels a bit irresponsible to through around unsourced numbers like that. Makes responding responsibly difficult.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
spookthesunset 7y ago
Why don’t you go beat up on useless technology which provably pisses away energy (by design!) like the blockchain before you claiming consuming video content on the internet is killing the planet.
- Dontrememberit 7y ago
  There's no need to get defensive over this. One can do both.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  Useless to you does not mean useless to other people and unless you somehow are the person who has an ultimate mandate over valuing things throughout the universe, then it's just your opinion. If you for some reason have that mandate, you might as well look at other "useless" industries such as christmas lights, mechanical watch production (very demanding and "useless", right? since quartz watches are much cheaper and more accurate anyway?), vinyl records (think of all that plastic!!!), road lighting during the night (most roads don't have any visitors for hours!), jewelry, public webcams (all that energy and data transfer!). How about heating in far up north? How much energy is "wasted" there, "why don't all those people just move"? Or expensive motherboards which have thousands of components, of which only a small part will realistically be used by the owner... Or gaming consoles which can in fact be used for other calculations, but damn uselessly stuck there to just produce some 3d simulations... Or gaming in general, how much does that "waste"? Basically what I'm trying to say is that your line of reasoning is extremely selfish and short-sighted, and there are people who would very much like to have some blockchains working, and they will keep doing so, just like they will keep setting up and powering christmas lights and paying for their gaming rigs and buying expensive watches that take a fortune to manufacture.
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Should we guess whether you've done any air travel in the past couple of years? (I have too, I'm a hypocrite as well.) I have no idea the source of your number. I see half a percent here[1]. That is also possibly inaccurate, because at least one major internet company offsets all their carbon emissions with things like farm animal feces digestors and methane recapture covers for mines. Even if it is three percent, it's not clear that a given amount of bandwidth is responsible for the same fraction of emissions. Also, perhaps the more people watch movies, the less they drive around and do fun things outside the house. So it may be that for each % you increase internet emissions you decrease other emissions by %*2. Who knows? [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-footprint-internet https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-f...
- donkeydouglas 7y ago
  That's not really relevant, though. The point is not "Video produces significant emissions, therefore it is bad." The point is "Video produces significant emissions, therefore making it more efficient would be good." The fact that video is not as bad as something else has no bearing on whether video could be made even better. It's worth bringing up because in a decision between x% better image quality or x% lower emissions, the total amount of those emissions is the key piece of information.
SailingSperm 7y ago
For anyone interested in some more novel ways of reducing video bandwidth with neural networks using foveated rendering to 'recreate/generate' the high res frames client side. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTUmmW4ispA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTUmmW4ispA
BubRoss 7y ago
Sending data through the internet contributes to 3% of worldwide CO2 emissions? Finding a 'sustainable way to watch videos online'? I think you have your numbers mixed up. Maybe you are confusing the amount of electricity all computers use with the internet and CO2 emissions.
imtringued 7y ago
Computers use electricity. Find a way to generate electricity without CO2. If people can't watch videos of foreign places then they will have to travel to foreign countries which will cause more CO2.

Waterluvian 7y ago

I'm going to bet the overwhelming majority of users don't care about either. This is Netflix cutting costs by requiring less data to serve their content at the quality that's good enough to make most people happy. Any time I talk to anyone outside our nerd bubble I'm reminded and humbled by what simply doesn't register as relevant to them.

nitrogen 7y ago
Conscious and subconscious awareness are different things. The mythical "most person" can't describe the difference between a blocky artifacted video and a clean high-bitrate video, but they will prefer the clean over the blocky and enjoy it more.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I think that's probably true if they got to A B test the options.
  - jakear 7y ago
    Further, they aren’t going to cancel their subscription because it’s blocky. What would they do instead, go out and buy The Office box set, and a optical drive to play it with?
    - Dontrememberit 7y ago
      No, but they might pirate (but I bet yify is even worse)
      - monkpit 7y ago
        What makes you think it’s worse exactly?
      - jakear 7y ago
        This is much harder than simply opening the netflix app built into your TV. I'm bothered by the netflix quality every time I use it, but the hassle to download the movie before hand, connect my laptop to the HDMI, need to get up to control it, need to get up to move the mouse to make it disappear, etc. makes it a non-option. Sure there are solutions to those problems, but they're also work.

dabei 7y ago

Quality doesn't really matter for the general audience, beyond some reasonable threshold. https://mux.com/blog/youtube-viewers-dont-care-about-video-quality/ https://mux.com/blog/youtube-viewers-dont-care-about-video-q...

magila 7y ago
Engagement seems a pretty blunt metric for this. Especially since Youtube has a near monopoly on user generated video content. A user would have to be mightily perturbed to abandon their favorite content altogether over poor video quality. I bet most of those 90% of people who stuck with 480p don't even know they can manually set the resolution.

threwr3423 7y ago

+1 H.264 on Youtube is often comparable to files compressed at crf of ~30+, and while VP9 is more efficient, it also comes with weird encoding artifacts.

sjwright 7y ago

The sad thing is, they could offer two levels of peak quality, one less than today’s and the other more than today’s—and their overall data usage rate would probably go down not up... especially if the lower bitrate was marketed as “faster starts, less buffering” etc.

steve1977 7y ago

Just recently I was watching a Blu-Ray, while I'm mostly watching Netflix these days. There was a nice gray to dark gradient in in the intro and I noticed I was expecting some posterization artifacts and... there were none. ;) Kind of sad that I'm already used to them it seems.

sammorrowdrums 7y ago

Compressed blacks / greys, they work until they don't. Especially for drama and horror where dark scenes and night scenes are frequent!

nicoburns 7y ago

Don't these services adapt the quality based on the quality of your network connection? In which case, it might be the same thing.

willis936 7y ago

Does 4K Netflix target 50 Mbps? Blu-ray does. While lossy compression performance is a deep and incomplete field, more bits always helps. That requires more storage on servers and more throughput. There needs to be a “good enough” point and the hosts will glue themselves to it. If it moves up over time then they will have to update their library where high quality sources are available.

protanopia 7y ago
Netflix recomends a 25 Mbps download speed to watch UHD but according to some redditor it is actually at 15.6[1]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/5lc2nl/what_bitrate_does_neflix_4k_actually_stream_at_all/ https://old.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/5lc2nl/what_bitrat...

ThrowItAway2Day 7y ago

Yeah the image quality is poor, and it's especially frustrating for ad-based video streaming sites like Hulu or Tubi. The movie struggles to get 720p, buffering a few times, then the ad comes loud and bright at 1080p instantly.

microcolonel 7y ago

Honestly, I find the quality decent. I watch so much content on YouTube; making the encoding artifacts imperceptible would mean I need more mobile data. Here in Canada, mobile data is more expensive than anywhere else in the world, so it can make a difference of about $500 CAD a year, the cost of a new mid-market smartphone.