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Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

348 points by mmcclure 6y ago

gen3 6y ago
Wow! Those optimized encodings look really good.
HenryKissinger 6y ago
ELI5? Edit: Why the downvotes?
- 2bitencryption 6y ago
  Instead of one optimization profile for a whole movie, Netflix is detecting when the shot of a movie changes (the camera "cuts" from one shot to another) and beginning a new optimization profile specifically for the content of that shot. At least, that is my understanding.
  - purerandomness 6y ago
    That sounds so intuitive that I want to follow up with the question: Why isn't this the default? Is detecting a cut particularly difficult?
    - dexterdog 6y ago
      Even if you have to pay somebody to tag the scene changes manually that cost would be pretty insignificant to Netflix.
      - MrMorden 6y ago
        Netflix should be able to get the EDL, which would probably take care of most of the work.
    - Groxx 6y ago
      Coarsely detecting cuts is relatively simple - look for large frame-to-frame differences (e.g. encode however -> find large frames surrounded by smaller ones -> done, it's as accurate as your perceptual compression is). There are a number of ffmpeg-using tools out there doing this and other "cut to / from black" detection and it's pretty good. Not good enough for a human to say "yeah, these are all scenes", but probably good enough for picking things to re-encode like this. The harder part is the significantly increased compute use due to re-encoding things multiple times, to detect these cuts and to try to find the best encoding. Heuristics there can be arbitrarily complex and re-calculate any number of times. I imagine it hasn't been done earlier just due to cost, though maybe they've recently achieved a better heuristic. edit: ah, great, they link to a "dynamic optimizer" post that goes into this in some detail: https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual-video-encoding-optimization-framework-e19f1e3a277f https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual-v...
      - myself248 6y ago
        Seems to me that if the frame-to-frame difference isn't big enough to detect that way, it's not likely to benefit from a new I-frame, yeah?
        Groxx 6y ago
        That's the basic idea, yeah. It falls apart in a couple places, e.g. when the cut or fast-fade goes to a very cheap frame like a mostly solid color, and it may not detect stuff like whip-cuts (since a whole chunk of frames are expensive), but so many scenes in so much of media has single-frame cuts that it's well within that "good enough" range. And for dynamic encoding like this: when it's wrong, it's not visually worse in that scene than choosing that sub-par encoding for the entire movie, which has the same "choose the best encoding" problem as individual chunks have. I assume it'd be relatively rare for it to result in anything worse than a one-shot strategy. --- ffmpeg will let you easily do frame-to-frame-diff logic that lets you chop videos into scenes, for example: https://video.stackexchange.com/a/30701 https://video.stackexchange.com/a/30701 I'm not sure how much it handles compressed-frame differences, but it shouldn't be too hard to build around it. Just might be a bit beyond bash-friendly.
    - iwasakabukiman 6y ago
      Traditionally, you just encode the video with a new frame every X frames, regardless of shots. It might sound trivial, but it is still extra computational work to figure out when the shot changes.
    - duhi88 6y ago
      "Variable bitrate" encoding is a thing, which allows chunks of a file to be encoded at a higher or lower bitrate depending on how much is happening. I don't know exactly how it happens, but I assume that each chunk is determined by duration or size, while Netflix's new method determines each chunk by the content. In order for this to be the default, you'd need either humans, or pattern recognition algorithms to identify the chunks. You also need to quantify how by how much each chunk needs its encoding parameters tweaked. Monetary costs aside, that's increasing complexity of your pipeline with relatively small gains. I'd bet that more companies will start looking at similar approaches now that 4K HDR (and 8K) are becoming more common. Probably not worth the R&D for 1080p, but we'll see tricks like this start to trickle down, I'm sure. It's highly unlikely we'll see anything similar in FOSS tools in the near future.
      - ehsankia 6y ago
        Right, these gains are mostly relevant when you have a relatively small library compared to how many views each item gets. For example this would probably not be worth it for Youtube, expect maybe on individual hyper popular videos. Every kb that Netflix can shave off of a popular movie means terabytes of bandwidth saved.
- sreekotay 6y ago
  isnt this.... Vbr?
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    maybe VBR just works on constant sized chunks, whereas this works on chunks that are computed to be optimal.
    - sreekotay 6y ago
      I mean --- not really - adaptive scene detection for Vbr is a long standing thing.
- hinkley 6y ago
  You expect a video to play at exactly 1 second per second. But compression or network bandwidth can screw that up. What do you do? Ages ago they solved this by making some frames more important than others. Key frames being the top priority. If you are falling behind you can drop everything you are working on and skip to the next key frame. Then they added other priority levels so you can dump part of the work instead of all of it when things are only a little choppy. With a zip file if you don’t have the middle of the file you can’t figure out the end. So clearly video is doing something different if they can remove chunks and still work. Many of our compression techniques for video “hang” off the key frames. All the pictures around them are described as a set of changes to the key frame. Much smaller, but also why your screen occasionally looks like a horror show. Something went wrong and the changes were shown using the wrong starting point. If the key frame is right before the scene changes completely, then you will struggle to compress the transition. There’s not enough space to describe all the changes. But if you have a program look for the transitions, you can delay or advance the key frame a bit so it lands exactly on the camera change. Bang. New picture. Then everything looks right. Today it’s gone a lot farther. There are hints and patterns that span a whole movie or a chunk of it that for instance clues in that the whole movie is shot in sepia tone or a dark cave so you can guess the next scene will be sepia too. They’re talking about lining those attributes up with big shifts in the camera work, like someone coming out of a cave into bright light.
charrondev 6y ago
That seems like a pretty impressive achievement! Question for anyone here: What do you use to play 4K/HDR? I have an Apple TV 4K, which can do 4K Dolby Vision playback and looks ok, but the Apple TV tends to have some jittering when streaming certain shows (very noticeable in panning shots of animation). The sound quality is also noticeably worse on my set with it (it doesn’t seem to be able to do direct pass through to my AV unit, always PCM/decoded on the Apple TV). On the other hand I have a a Shield TV that does direct pass through of audio and sounds much better, and also seems to do video playback without that occasional jittering. It does not seem to support Dolby Vision though. Additionally the UI is very, very, very laggy after recent updates. Does anyone use anything that doesn’t have either of these issues?
- oneplane 6y ago
  I used to use Linux, but the DRM makes that really hard. I'm restricted to HD from Netflix, so some media I access 'differently' for the media format of my choice.
- teilo 6y ago
  I use the native apps in my Samsung Q70 TV. They are really good, and I rarely find a need to use my 4K Apple TV anymore. Even the Samsung Apple TV apps, and the AirPlay 2 support is excellent. As it is, Apple has screwed up HDR on the 4K so badly that it's very difficult to make it work smoothly without also screwing up HDR on other devices.
  - charrondev 6y ago
    The difficulty for me is that my TV doesn’t have enough HDMI inputs (LG B7). I use 7 through my yahamah receiver, but have struggled to get ARC (audio from the TV through the sound system) to do-exist with also also having everything else go through the receiver.
    - teilo 6y ago
      I have a Yamaha receiver also. Occasionally I need to power-cycle the receiver or the TV to get ARC to work again, but other than that, I've had no problems with it. I run everything through the Yamaha.
paulmendoza 6y ago
Will The Office look better is all that matters
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Never really understood this meme. Imagine liking a show so much that it's one of the only things you care to watch, yet depending on streaming services to watch it.
paulmendoza 6y ago
I wish I knew what any of this meant but it sounds awesome
sbahr001 6y ago
Wow! That is crazy. Love how they use "The Dirt" to show it lol. Guess there are few rockers @ netflix lol.
arendtio 6y ago
Looks amazing and while I would like to enjoy such quality and am willing to pay for the premium plan (in fact I do already), I still can't watch the 4K content even in a world where I accept DRM modules in my browser, because some DRM plugins seem to be more equal than others.
- csdreamer7 6y ago
  Do we still need an Intel Kaby Lake or later CPU for 4K DRM decoding? (And Windows... forgot about that.) If so, Netflix is on the wrong side of the CPU war with AMD ascending.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    The arguments Netflix made for this highly model-specific DRM never made sense to me. There are 4K rips of pretty much every Netflix show available for download on various bays related to piracy. So why bother locking your paying customers out of 4K content? What's the upside? Also: I'm reasonably convinced that NetFlix is violating the law, at least in Australia, by advertising that their content is 4K and then arbitrarily blocking access to the 4K streams. This is called "bait & switch", and the fines are eyewatering, even for large corporations.
    - zucker42 6y ago
      I suspect the arguments are made to make sense to media executives not to the consumer. After all, DRM is an anti-feature for the consumer.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      In a lot of cases the decode is happening on the GPU anyway, so requiring a specific CPU is doubly pointless. I figured it was some backdoor Intel scheme where they paid Netflix to be exclusive.
      - MikusR 6y ago
        No. At the time that cpu family was only one that had a gpu with support for necessary drm schemes and 10bit HEVC decode.
wtallis 6y ago
A lot of those graphs seem to show that video quality at 1920x1080 is going down significantly. Does that mean you now need to be on their most expensive plan and using one of their approved devices/platforms to continue receiving the same video quality, now only obtainable with 2560x1440 and higher resolutions?
- hn_check 6y ago
  The chart does not see to show every bitrate for every target resolution, but rather is show where the 4K stream would have to drop to a lower resolution given insufficient bandwidth.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*c28F7YXjNo-GpmB9bBmbrA.png https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*c28F7YXjNo-GpmB9bBmbrA.pn... This chart clearly shows multiple data points per resolution under the old fixed-ladder scheme, and under the new scheme the new data point for 1080p is lower on the video quality scale than any of the old 720p encodes. That's a pretty significant difference, and my question about where these new encodes fit into their existing price structure remains valid.
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      The article addresses this point: > As a side note, we do have some additional points, not shown in the plots, that are used in resolution limited scenarios — such as a streaming session limited to 720p or 1080p highest encoding resolution. Such points lie under (or to the right of) the convex hull main ladder curve but allow quality to ramp up in resolution limited scenarios.
      - wtallis 6y ago
        Thanks for pointing that bit out. It would still be useful to see where those other points lie. It seems counter-intuitive that they would need a higher bitrate for 1080p than 1440p when both are encoded to the same quality. Maybe their quality metric is slightly biased in favor of having more pixels and is more concerned with accurate reproduction of high-frequency components of the image than having an artifact-free low noise reproduction at a lower resolution? Edit: Looking at their animated GIF comparisons, the newer encodes definitely give a much sharper image, but also have a lot more in the way of ugly artifacts: On the left, under the tree branch: https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*SQQkYltbVC-HT-l8GpN-7Q.gif https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*SQQkYltbVC-HT-l8GpN-7Q.gi... The right side of the frame: https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*A37BBzK4Ap8JPhmiUiFKcw.gif https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*A37BBzK4Ap8JPhmiUiFKcw.gi... Many of the areas that should be fairly flat looking: https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*qI3EY7HDp3p0gwK9YGqchQ.gif https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*qI3EY7HDp3p0gwK9YGqchQ.gi... There's definitely a lot more ringing and similar artifacts in the newer, lower-bitrate samples despite their overall increase in effective resolution.
radley 6y ago
> Sometimes we ingest a title that would need more bits at the highest end of the quality spectrum — even higher than the 16 Mbps limit of the fixed-bitrate ladder. From just a cursory inspection using my Apple TV 4K, 12 Mbps is their target bitrate but their ceiling was ~16 Mbps. That's still only a third of what AppleTV+ offers (36/48) and only 2/3 of Disney+ (18/24). Netflix is still higher than Prime Video (10/14). HBO Max was the lowest quality, allowing only 8/10 Mbps for their HD streams (which generously doubled HBO Now's infamously low 4/5 Mbps bitrate).
- fock 6y ago
  I just stopped caring, bought a Blu-Ray drive, which works fine under Linux nowadays and can enjoy 30Mbps FHD-encodings where I can just hit pause and have a photo-like still (everything sharp, no blocky shadows). Oh and yes, I also can buy 2 discs/per month of actual good movies I really want to watch (who has time for more than that anyway?) for what Netflix would like to charge me...
  - notJim 6y ago
    You can also get Blu-rays from Netflix if you watch more. The real costly thing for this approach is tv though, isn't it?
    - fock 6y ago
      I'm in Europe, so I can get blu-rays from some alternative source, but not from Netflix.
  - RandallBrown 6y ago
    I personally have way more than ~4 hours of movie watching time per month. I usually spend about an hour (often more) per day watching movies and TV shows on Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc. I've never cared too much about the quality though. The old school dvd rips that were compressed to 700mb to fit on a CD were usually fine by me.
    - 6y ago
matthewhartmans 6y ago
This is incredible! also, what is the movie or show sampled in that blog?
mappu 6y ago
What exactly is shot-based encoding doing here? Even old XviD would reliably always insert a new I-frame / start a new GOP on a scenecut, and perform global rate optimization based on scene complexity within the target ABR parameters.
- emerged 6y ago
  It sounds like the link between GOP and "shot" (single camera shot, presumably) is being done explicitly. I would've expected this to happen automatically through their production pipeline but I guess it wasn't.
- zerocrates 6y ago
  Their older articles talk more about shot-based encoding specifically (and before that, per-title encoding) as they applied it to their non-4K content: https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual-video-encoding-optimization-framework-e19f1e3a277f https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual-v... https://netflixtechblog.com/per-title-encode-optimization-7e99442b62a2 https://netflixtechblog.com/per-title-encode-optimization-7e... A few relevant points: - Their previous systems used fixed keyframes, so wouldn't be using scene-change detection at all (I presume this was to allow predictable chunking across different codecs) - Since reliable streaming performance is a pretty big deal for Netflix, they probably have quite tight restrictions on VBR modes, which make them not work as effectively since they have less "room" to work with
munificent 6y ago
If only they would spend this much effort optimizing the quality of their screenwriting.
- riyadparvez 6y ago
  Are snarky comments like this really necessary or relevant to what's being discussed here?
  - munificent 6y ago
    No, they aren't. I usually resist the urge, but it's been a long week.
Wistar 6y ago
Maybe I missed something but, scene-by-scene encoding--a model similar to scene-by-scene color correction--for feature films destined for digital release has been a thing since DVDs first arrived in the late 90s.
superkuh 6y ago
Uhh, so we're supposed to be happy about a variable bitrate and quality because it saves them some bandwidth? This isn't a feature for users it's a spin on a feature for the corporation.
- chii 6y ago
  > so we're supposed to be happy about a variable bitrate and quality because it saves them some bandwidth? yes, because it saves you money - netflix could be increasing its subscription cost, or it could keep it down as the subscriber base grows, by using technique like this. As long as you don't notice the difference, what's wrong with them saving some bandwidth?
  - Lammy 6y ago
    Why is raising their subscription price the alternative? Wouldn't Netflix's capability to negotiate peering/transit deals grow along with their subscriber base?
    - chii 6y ago
      as bandwidth grows, people's choice is to keep upping their fidelity. If the subscriber base was OK with a 480p video, they would've seen it. And negotiating peering/transit deals are fickle and isn't guaranteed to work as cable companies may be playing politics/business games to squeeze netflix. Therefore, a technical solution is the next best option.
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  I'd guess it means that the average user gets to watch a higher quality video with less buffering. If you also watch netflix on your phone or any data plan, you save money.
- kakali 6y ago
  Also helps the consumer. My ISP doesn't offer unlimited bandwidth. Covid-19 has me hitting caps from being home so much.
- 6y ago
uladzislau 6y ago
How many titles on Netflix are available in 4K? I did a quick search and it’s either incorrect or there’s not that many, mostly original Netflix content.
tpmx 6y ago
Still getting crappy 2.5 MBit/s visuals on an "HD" plan on a gigabit connection in Sweden. Not impressed with their real-world image quality. I don't think you should need to buy a 4k plan to get proper 1080p with a decent bitrate/image quality.
bscphil 6y ago
It's really too bad that they haven't rolled this out for 1080p too. Their 1080p video quality is god-awful compared to Amazon. They may even have made it worse: from the "ladder" comparisons, it looks like they jump to higher resolutions at lower average bitrates now, so if you're stuck at 1080p you're going to be getting worse quality after these changes than before. Also, something that's kind of weird about all this is that encoders (x264, x265, etc) already have their own rate control algorithms that decide on a frame or scene basis how many bits to use. Netflix taking an approach like this is equivalent to claiming that they're capable of doing a better job than these codecs in an automated way - so why not just contribute the code needed to achieve these improvements back to the projects they're using? Last, it's very weird to select individual frames from an encode and not a selection of frames. The comparisons purport to show that the lower bitrate encode is better than the higher bitrate encode, but in fact (if I understand how they're using rate control correctly) what they are showing is a single frame in the lower bitrate encode that uses more bits than the same frame in the higher bitrate encode. So it's arguably not a fair comparison. And even with that, depending on how sensitive you are to artifacts, some of the "optimized ladder" encodes still look worse. Edit: here is an example of what I mean when I said that they may have made the quality at 1080p worse. If what you end up watching is the highest bitrate 1080p available, you would get higher quality on the old latter than on the newer one. https://i.imgur.com/rzPR7Sh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rzPR7Sh.jpg Actually, on some of the examples, even 720p on the older ladder is better than 1080p on the newer one!
- crazygringo 6y ago
  > It's really too bad that they haven't rolled this out for 1080p too Maybe they will? But it matters most for 4K performance, so that's where they started? > encoders (x264, x265, etc) already have their own rate control algorithms But they simply operate on a stream without taking future frames into account. This does a first entire pass on the film holistically to determine where keyframes should go and settings per-shot. It can't be backported to codecs because they work linearly. > And even with that, depending on how sensitive you are to artifacts, some of the "optimized ladder" encodes still look worse. The artifacts look worse only because it's zoomed in so crazy far. On a cinema screen, the additional sharpness will be clear, the artifacts not so much.
FullyFunctional 6y ago
That’s great. I’d love to see how they fare on this glitter which seems to destroy all compressors: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=MG_Lyg74UlU&t=130 https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=MG_Lyg74UlU&t... (I saw a similar problem with a famous monarch butterfly footage that I don’t have time to chase down)
- joshschreuder 6y ago
  Wow, that really was awful. Does this sort of thing require kind of like a specific optimisation to fix, or is there a general technique that would fix this and other stuff?
  - bscphil 6y ago
    Codecs with better understanding of what a complex scene looks like (and allocates more bitrate accordingly) will do better, and codecs that are better are blurring away details instead of blocking will do better as well. Keep in mind this is on Youtube and uploaded by some shitty clip site, so it's a very biased example. In this case there are four lossy encode steps involved: master -> bluray -> clipsite's master -> Youtube encode. Youtube in particular has absolutely horrific, just inexcusably bad bitrate even at the highest quality they'll give you. I'd have to see what the original Bluray looks like in this case to see if there's really a problem worth worrying about here.
    - FullyFunctional 6y ago
      Actually I first saw it on a plane and wondered how we have gotten to this stage where obviously garbled video is ok to give to paying customers. Yes, more bits will solve this, bit it’s still a great example that breaks encoding assumptions.
  - jeffffff 6y ago
    there isn't necessarily a fix. all compression algorithms expand the size of the data on most inputs in order to make certain inputs with sufficiently regular patterns a lot smaller. it just so happens that most of the images/video/audio/text/etc people are interested in is fairly regular. with a lossy compression algorithm that is required to hit a certain compression ratio to keep the bitrate under some threshold, the only way to be able to guarantee that it is hit on uncompressible input is to introduce regularity/remove randomness, and in the case of video the easiest and least visually distorting way to do so is to pixelate it. this particular video is basically random noise which is incompressible by definition, which is why the result is so bad. if it was 1080p going in and the output size is required to be reduced by 16x, reducing the resolution to 480x270 is about as good you can do.
pedrocr 6y ago
And if they would start providing 4K or at least 1080p to Linux users I might consider subscribing again. Streaming services are popping up left and right while at the same time turning into their own specific guettos of supported platforms and features. Makes you almost value the role of the traditional network aggregator. Maybe the market will eventually consolidate or organize itself so you can buy a full service from a single provider that knows what it's doing technically.
ponker 6y ago
Any idea why none of these services supports queueing some movies you’d like to watch, downloading them in the middle of the night in astounding bitrates, and allowing you to watch on your TV? As far as I can tell only the mobile apps support this, not the “streaming boxes.”
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Take a wild guess. (it's digital rights management and "Woo, PCs are scary!")
- wmf 6y ago
  The streaming boxes probably don't have enough storage to hold much. There's Kaleidescape but it's very expensive.
  - ponker 6y ago
    Why not give them enough storage? 32 GB of flash is more than enough and now you get to sell a whole new generation of boxes.
lvs 6y ago
Not supported in Linux, presumably, since you can't even get anything higher than 540p or 720p in Linux due to Widevine DRM restrictions.
- Filligree 6y ago
  Well, you can. Just not from Netflix.
WalterBright 6y ago
Since the credits can run for 5 minutes or more these days, those can be optimized by converting to a font rather than a bitmap of the screen. Transmit the font, then transmit the text. Should be able to get gigantic compression this way!
hinkley 6y ago
The best (worst?) example I know of this going horribly wrong is the title sequence for the Big Bang Theory, which speeds up as it goes along and then cuts to the cast. Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery <as the pixels start to unravel>, it all started with a Big Bang. BANG (Bang, your Screen is a riot of random pixels. Oh wait, here’s the cast instead!) Then I caught an episode on another service, maybe Netflix? The transition wasn’t awesome, but it wasn’t awful either. It only glitched for a frame or two instead of a few seconds. Clearly better heuristics were in play.
eisa01 6y ago
Now they only need to offer the 4K streams on an affordable plan for single household customers. It’s unfair to pay for the 4-stream family plan to get 4K for double the price of the single stream plan!
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  That's not going to happen, Netflix need to push their ARPU up quite significantly in the next few years given how much cash they're burning (and they explicitly promised shareholders they would stop doing last year).
ComodoHacker 6y ago
TL;DR: More 4K adoption lead to higher traffic costs for us, so we have to optimize that.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
It sounds like Netflix might not be doing the horrible thing YouTube and Twitter do where they treat low-resolution (e.g. standard definition) content as being less deserving of bitrate with only higher resolutions allowed to climb the bitrate ladder? For those sites I have to upscale SD content to HD resolutions when uploading just for it to be allowed a less paltry bitrate. I fear people who grow up in the age of streaming might not realise that DVDs had good video quality because streaming services seem to hate SD content. > As a side note, we do have some additional points, not shown in the plots, that are used in resolution limited scenarios — such as a streaming session limited to 720p or 1080p highest encoding resolution. Such points lie under (or to the right of) the convex hull main ladder curve but allow quality to ramp up in resolution limited scenarios.
httpsterio 6y ago
Without understanding all of the technical details, am I the only one who finds Netflix's quality on Android insufferable? Technically, I guess it's Full HD but the packing is so aggressive that any scenes with just a bit darker sections will instantly be blocky and pixellated. Is there any way around it? Honestly it's not worth paying for as it's almost unwatchable.
jjj123 6y ago
Do other people have the same issues I have with streaming dark content? I watch a lot of horror, and the compression on Netflix and Shudder (and probably HBO + Hulu) causes really horrible banding in dark scenes. Literally if they could just fix this I would have no problems with streaming quality.
heroprotagonist 6y ago
Yet they still can't properly render 21:9 content on a 21:9 display. You get a shrunk picture with black bars on all sides. Even their "Originals" or N-Series or whatever they call it now have this problem. Here's hoping someone from Netflix is in the comments and can act on it, because their support system hasn't done anything in the 2 years since I brought it to their attention. edit: Actually, I tried to track down the film used in the new encoding (I think it's The Dirt from the signs and dates seen in the frame captures) so I could screenshot for comparison. It actually worked in 21:9 fullscreen. Was it the new encoding? I saw this problem up until this past week, most recently on Maniac but I checked that show and it's no longer an issue. From the post I suspect it was this adding in extra blacks at top and bottom on 21:9 content in the old method: > with fixed 4K resolution bitrates — 8, 10, 12 and 16 Mbps — regardless of content characteristics But I truly don't know what it was. I just know that video no longer ignores 40% of my screen real estate by watching on a 21:9 monitor since sometime last week. THANK YOU! That has been annoying me for years. But Please add 3440x1440 to your testing. It's not shown in those charts.
PostThisTooFast 6y ago
"For members with high-bandwidth connections we deliver the same great quality at half the bitrate on average." So in no scenario do they mention actually IMPROVING quality for high-speed connections. Sad.

348 points by mmcclure 6y ago

gen3 6y ago

Wow! Those optimized encodings look really good.

HenryKissinger 6y ago

ELI5? Edit: Why the downvotes?

2bitencryption 6y ago
Instead of one optimization profile for a whole movie, Netflix is detecting when the shot of a movie changes (the camera "cuts" from one shot to another) and beginning a new optimization profile specifically for the content of that shot. At least, that is my understanding.
- purerandomness 6y ago
  That sounds so intuitive that I want to follow up with the question: Why isn't this the default? Is detecting a cut particularly difficult?
  - dexterdog 6y ago
    Even if you have to pay somebody to tag the scene changes manually that cost would be pretty insignificant to Netflix.
    - MrMorden 6y ago
      Netflix should be able to get the EDL, which would probably take care of most of the work.
  - Groxx 6y ago
    Coarsely detecting cuts is relatively simple - look for large frame-to-frame differences (e.g. encode however -> find large frames surrounded by smaller ones -> done, it's as accurate as your perceptual compression is). There are a number of ffmpeg-using tools out there doing this and other "cut to / from black" detection and it's pretty good. Not good enough for a human to say "yeah, these are all scenes", but probably good enough for picking things to re-encode like this. The harder part is the significantly increased compute use due to re-encoding things multiple times, to detect these cuts and to try to find the best encoding. Heuristics there can be arbitrarily complex and re-calculate any number of times. I imagine it hasn't been done earlier just due to cost, though maybe they've recently achieved a better heuristic. edit: ah, great, they link to a "dynamic optimizer" post that goes into this in some detail: https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual-video-encoding-optimization-framework-e19f1e3a277f https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual-v...
    - myself248 6y ago
      Seems to me that if the frame-to-frame difference isn't big enough to detect that way, it's not likely to benefit from a new I-frame, yeah?
      - Groxx 6y ago
        That's the basic idea, yeah. It falls apart in a couple places, e.g. when the cut or fast-fade goes to a very cheap frame like a mostly solid color, and it may not detect stuff like whip-cuts (since a whole chunk of frames are expensive), but so many scenes in so much of media has single-frame cuts that it's well within that "good enough" range. And for dynamic encoding like this: when it's wrong, it's not visually worse in that scene than choosing that sub-par encoding for the entire movie, which has the same "choose the best encoding" problem as individual chunks have. I assume it'd be relatively rare for it to result in anything worse than a one-shot strategy. --- ffmpeg will let you easily do frame-to-frame-diff logic that lets you chop videos into scenes, for example: https://video.stackexchange.com/a/30701 https://video.stackexchange.com/a/30701 I'm not sure how much it handles compressed-frame differences, but it shouldn't be too hard to build around it. Just might be a bit beyond bash-friendly.
  - iwasakabukiman 6y ago
    Traditionally, you just encode the video with a new frame every X frames, regardless of shots. It might sound trivial, but it is still extra computational work to figure out when the shot changes.
  - duhi88 6y ago
    "Variable bitrate" encoding is a thing, which allows chunks of a file to be encoded at a higher or lower bitrate depending on how much is happening. I don't know exactly how it happens, but I assume that each chunk is determined by duration or size, while Netflix's new method determines each chunk by the content. In order for this to be the default, you'd need either humans, or pattern recognition algorithms to identify the chunks. You also need to quantify how by how much each chunk needs its encoding parameters tweaked. Monetary costs aside, that's increasing complexity of your pipeline with relatively small gains. I'd bet that more companies will start looking at similar approaches now that 4K HDR (and 8K) are becoming more common. Probably not worth the R&D for 1080p, but we'll see tricks like this start to trickle down, I'm sure. It's highly unlikely we'll see anything similar in FOSS tools in the near future.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      Right, these gains are mostly relevant when you have a relatively small library compared to how many views each item gets. For example this would probably not be worth it for Youtube, expect maybe on individual hyper popular videos. Every kb that Netflix can shave off of a popular movie means terabytes of bandwidth saved.
sreekotay 6y ago
isnt this.... Vbr?
- ehsankia 6y ago
  maybe VBR just works on constant sized chunks, whereas this works on chunks that are computed to be optimal.
  - sreekotay 6y ago
    I mean --- not really - adaptive scene detection for Vbr is a long standing thing.
hinkley 6y ago
You expect a video to play at exactly 1 second per second. But compression or network bandwidth can screw that up. What do you do? Ages ago they solved this by making some frames more important than others. Key frames being the top priority. If you are falling behind you can drop everything you are working on and skip to the next key frame. Then they added other priority levels so you can dump part of the work instead of all of it when things are only a little choppy. With a zip file if you don’t have the middle of the file you can’t figure out the end. So clearly video is doing something different if they can remove chunks and still work. Many of our compression techniques for video “hang” off the key frames. All the pictures around them are described as a set of changes to the key frame. Much smaller, but also why your screen occasionally looks like a horror show. Something went wrong and the changes were shown using the wrong starting point. If the key frame is right before the scene changes completely, then you will struggle to compress the transition. There’s not enough space to describe all the changes. But if you have a program look for the transitions, you can delay or advance the key frame a bit so it lands exactly on the camera change. Bang. New picture. Then everything looks right. Today it’s gone a lot farther. There are hints and patterns that span a whole movie or a chunk of it that for instance clues in that the whole movie is shot in sepia tone or a dark cave so you can guess the next scene will be sepia too. They’re talking about lining those attributes up with big shifts in the camera work, like someone coming out of a cave into bright light.

charrondev 6y ago

That seems like a pretty impressive achievement! Question for anyone here: What do you use to play 4K/HDR? I have an Apple TV 4K, which can do 4K Dolby Vision playback and looks ok, but the Apple TV tends to have some jittering when streaming certain shows (very noticeable in panning shots of animation). The sound quality is also noticeably worse on my set with it (it doesn’t seem to be able to do direct pass through to my AV unit, always PCM/decoded on the Apple TV). On the other hand I have a a Shield TV that does direct pass through of audio and sounds much better, and also seems to do video playback without that occasional jittering. It does not seem to support Dolby Vision though. Additionally the UI is very, very, very laggy after recent updates. Does anyone use anything that doesn’t have either of these issues?

oneplane 6y ago
I used to use Linux, but the DRM makes that really hard. I'm restricted to HD from Netflix, so some media I access 'differently' for the media format of my choice.
teilo 6y ago
I use the native apps in my Samsung Q70 TV. They are really good, and I rarely find a need to use my 4K Apple TV anymore. Even the Samsung Apple TV apps, and the AirPlay 2 support is excellent. As it is, Apple has screwed up HDR on the 4K so badly that it's very difficult to make it work smoothly without also screwing up HDR on other devices.
- charrondev 6y ago
  The difficulty for me is that my TV doesn’t have enough HDMI inputs (LG B7). I use 7 through my yahamah receiver, but have struggled to get ARC (audio from the TV through the sound system) to do-exist with also also having everything else go through the receiver.
  - teilo 6y ago
    I have a Yamaha receiver also. Occasionally I need to power-cycle the receiver or the TV to get ARC to work again, but other than that, I've had no problems with it. I run everything through the Yamaha.

paulmendoza 6y ago

Will The Office look better is all that matters

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Never really understood this meme. Imagine liking a show so much that it's one of the only things you care to watch, yet depending on streaming services to watch it.

paulmendoza 6y ago

I wish I knew what any of this meant but it sounds awesome

sbahr001 6y ago

Wow! That is crazy. Love how they use "The Dirt" to show it lol. Guess there are few rockers @ netflix lol.

arendtio 6y ago

Looks amazing and while I would like to enjoy such quality and am willing to pay for the premium plan (in fact I do already), I still can't watch the 4K content even in a world where I accept DRM modules in my browser, because some DRM plugins seem to be more equal than others.

csdreamer7 6y ago
Do we still need an Intel Kaby Lake or later CPU for 4K DRM decoding? (And Windows... forgot about that.) If so, Netflix is on the wrong side of the CPU war with AMD ascending.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  The arguments Netflix made for this highly model-specific DRM never made sense to me. There are 4K rips of pretty much every Netflix show available for download on various bays related to piracy. So why bother locking your paying customers out of 4K content? What's the upside? Also: I'm reasonably convinced that NetFlix is violating the law, at least in Australia, by advertising that their content is 4K and then arbitrarily blocking access to the 4K streams. This is called "bait & switch", and the fines are eyewatering, even for large corporations.
  - zucker42 6y ago
    I suspect the arguments are made to make sense to media executives not to the consumer. After all, DRM is an anti-feature for the consumer.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    In a lot of cases the decode is happening on the GPU anyway, so requiring a specific CPU is doubly pointless. I figured it was some backdoor Intel scheme where they paid Netflix to be exclusive.
    - MikusR 6y ago
      No. At the time that cpu family was only one that had a gpu with support for necessary drm schemes and 10bit HEVC decode.

wtallis 6y ago

A lot of those graphs seem to show that video quality at 1920x1080 is going down significantly. Does that mean you now need to be on their most expensive plan and using one of their approved devices/platforms to continue receiving the same video quality, now only obtainable with 2560x1440 and higher resolutions?

hn_check 6y ago
The chart does not see to show every bitrate for every target resolution, but rather is show where the 4K stream would have to drop to a lower resolution given insufficient bandwidth.
- wtallis 6y ago
  https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*c28F7YXjNo-GpmB9bBmbrA.png https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*c28F7YXjNo-GpmB9bBmbrA.pn... This chart clearly shows multiple data points per resolution under the old fixed-ladder scheme, and under the new scheme the new data point for 1080p is lower on the video quality scale than any of the old 720p encodes. That's a pretty significant difference, and my question about where these new encodes fit into their existing price structure remains valid.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    The article addresses this point: > As a side note, we do have some additional points, not shown in the plots, that are used in resolution limited scenarios — such as a streaming session limited to 720p or 1080p highest encoding resolution. Such points lie under (or to the right of) the convex hull main ladder curve but allow quality to ramp up in resolution limited scenarios.
    - wtallis 6y ago
      Thanks for pointing that bit out. It would still be useful to see where those other points lie. It seems counter-intuitive that they would need a higher bitrate for 1080p than 1440p when both are encoded to the same quality. Maybe their quality metric is slightly biased in favor of having more pixels and is more concerned with accurate reproduction of high-frequency components of the image than having an artifact-free low noise reproduction at a lower resolution? Edit: Looking at their animated GIF comparisons, the newer encodes definitely give a much sharper image, but also have a lot more in the way of ugly artifacts: On the left, under the tree branch: https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*SQQkYltbVC-HT-l8GpN-7Q.gif https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*SQQkYltbVC-HT-l8GpN-7Q.gi... The right side of the frame: https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*A37BBzK4Ap8JPhmiUiFKcw.gif https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*A37BBzK4Ap8JPhmiUiFKcw.gi... Many of the areas that should be fairly flat looking: https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*qI3EY7HDp3p0gwK9YGqchQ.gif https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/1*qI3EY7HDp3p0gwK9YGqchQ.gi... There's definitely a lot more ringing and similar artifacts in the newer, lower-bitrate samples despite their overall increase in effective resolution.

radley 6y ago

> Sometimes we ingest a title that would need more bits at the highest end of the quality spectrum — even higher than the 16 Mbps limit of the fixed-bitrate ladder. From just a cursory inspection using my Apple TV 4K, 12 Mbps is their target bitrate but their ceiling was ~16 Mbps. That's still only a third of what AppleTV+ offers (36/48) and only 2/3 of Disney+ (18/24). Netflix is still higher than Prime Video (10/14). HBO Max was the lowest quality, allowing only 8/10 Mbps for their HD streams (which generously doubled HBO Now's infamously low 4/5 Mbps bitrate).

fock 6y ago
I just stopped caring, bought a Blu-Ray drive, which works fine under Linux nowadays and can enjoy 30Mbps FHD-encodings where I can just hit pause and have a photo-like still (everything sharp, no blocky shadows). Oh and yes, I also can buy 2 discs/per month of actual good movies I really want to watch (who has time for more than that anyway?) for what Netflix would like to charge me...
- notJim 6y ago
  You can also get Blu-rays from Netflix if you watch more. The real costly thing for this approach is tv though, isn't it?
  - fock 6y ago
    I'm in Europe, so I can get blu-rays from some alternative source, but not from Netflix.
- RandallBrown 6y ago
  I personally have way more than ~4 hours of movie watching time per month. I usually spend about an hour (often more) per day watching movies and TV shows on Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc. I've never cared too much about the quality though. The old school dvd rips that were compressed to 700mb to fit on a CD were usually fine by me.
  - 6y ago

matthewhartmans 6y ago

This is incredible! also, what is the movie or show sampled in that blog?

mappu 6y ago

What exactly is shot-based encoding doing here? Even old XviD would reliably always insert a new I-frame / start a new GOP on a scenecut, and perform global rate optimization based on scene complexity within the target ABR parameters.

emerged 6y ago
It sounds like the link between GOP and "shot" (single camera shot, presumably) is being done explicitly. I would've expected this to happen automatically through their production pipeline but I guess it wasn't.
zerocrates 6y ago
Their older articles talk more about shot-based encoding specifically (and before that, per-title encoding) as they applied it to their non-4K content: https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual-video-encoding-optimization-framework-e19f1e3a277f https://netflixtechblog.com/dynamic-optimizer-a-perceptual-v... https://netflixtechblog.com/per-title-encode-optimization-7e99442b62a2 https://netflixtechblog.com/per-title-encode-optimization-7e... A few relevant points: - Their previous systems used fixed keyframes, so wouldn't be using scene-change detection at all (I presume this was to allow predictable chunking across different codecs) - Since reliable streaming performance is a pretty big deal for Netflix, they probably have quite tight restrictions on VBR modes, which make them not work as effectively since they have less "room" to work with

munificent 6y ago

If only they would spend this much effort optimizing the quality of their screenwriting.

riyadparvez 6y ago
Are snarky comments like this really necessary or relevant to what's being discussed here?
- munificent 6y ago
  No, they aren't. I usually resist the urge, but it's been a long week.

Wistar 6y ago

Maybe I missed something but, scene-by-scene encoding--a model similar to scene-by-scene color correction--for feature films destined for digital release has been a thing since DVDs first arrived in the late 90s.

superkuh 6y ago

Uhh, so we're supposed to be happy about a variable bitrate and quality because it saves them some bandwidth? This isn't a feature for users it's a spin on a feature for the corporation.

chii 6y ago
> so we're supposed to be happy about a variable bitrate and quality because it saves them some bandwidth? yes, because it saves you money - netflix could be increasing its subscription cost, or it could keep it down as the subscriber base grows, by using technique like this. As long as you don't notice the difference, what's wrong with them saving some bandwidth?
- Lammy 6y ago
  Why is raising their subscription price the alternative? Wouldn't Netflix's capability to negotiate peering/transit deals grow along with their subscriber base?
  - chii 6y ago
    as bandwidth grows, people's choice is to keep upping their fidelity. If the subscriber base was OK with a 480p video, they would've seen it. And negotiating peering/transit deals are fickle and isn't guaranteed to work as cable companies may be playing politics/business games to squeeze netflix. Therefore, a technical solution is the next best option.
dumbfoundded 6y ago
I'd guess it means that the average user gets to watch a higher quality video with less buffering. If you also watch netflix on your phone or any data plan, you save money.
kakali 6y ago
Also helps the consumer. My ISP doesn't offer unlimited bandwidth. Covid-19 has me hitting caps from being home so much.
6y ago

uladzislau 6y ago

How many titles on Netflix are available in 4K? I did a quick search and it’s either incorrect or there’s not that many, mostly original Netflix content.

tpmx 6y ago

Still getting crappy 2.5 MBit/s visuals on an "HD" plan on a gigabit connection in Sweden. Not impressed with their real-world image quality. I don't think you should need to buy a 4k plan to get proper 1080p with a decent bitrate/image quality.

bscphil 6y ago

It's really too bad that they haven't rolled this out for 1080p too. Their 1080p video quality is god-awful compared to Amazon. They may even have made it worse: from the "ladder" comparisons, it looks like they jump to higher resolutions at lower average bitrates now, so if you're stuck at 1080p you're going to be getting worse quality after these changes than before. Also, something that's kind of weird about all this is that encoders (x264, x265, etc) already have their own rate control algorithms that decide on a frame or scene basis how many bits to use. Netflix taking an approach like this is equivalent to claiming that they're capable of doing a better job than these codecs in an automated way - so why not just contribute the code needed to achieve these improvements back to the projects they're using? Last, it's very weird to select individual frames from an encode and not a selection of frames. The comparisons purport to show that the lower bitrate encode is better than the higher bitrate encode, but in fact (if I understand how they're using rate control correctly) what they are showing is a single frame in the lower bitrate encode that uses more bits than the same frame in the higher bitrate encode. So it's arguably not a fair comparison. And even with that, depending on how sensitive you are to artifacts, some of the "optimized ladder" encodes still look worse. Edit: here is an example of what I mean when I said that they may have made the quality at 1080p worse. If what you end up watching is the highest bitrate 1080p available, you would get higher quality on the old latter than on the newer one. https://i.imgur.com/rzPR7Sh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rzPR7Sh.jpg Actually, on some of the examples, even 720p on the older ladder is better than 1080p on the newer one!

crazygringo 6y ago
> It's really too bad that they haven't rolled this out for 1080p too Maybe they will? But it matters most for 4K performance, so that's where they started? > encoders (x264, x265, etc) already have their own rate control algorithms But they simply operate on a stream without taking future frames into account. This does a first entire pass on the film holistically to determine where keyframes should go and settings per-shot. It can't be backported to codecs because they work linearly. > And even with that, depending on how sensitive you are to artifacts, some of the "optimized ladder" encodes still look worse. The artifacts look worse only because it's zoomed in so crazy far. On a cinema screen, the additional sharpness will be clear, the artifacts not so much.

FullyFunctional 6y ago

That’s great. I’d love to see how they fare on this glitter which seems to destroy all compressors: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=MG_Lyg74UlU&t=130 https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=MG_Lyg74UlU&t... (I saw a similar problem with a famous monarch butterfly footage that I don’t have time to chase down)

joshschreuder 6y ago
Wow, that really was awful. Does this sort of thing require kind of like a specific optimisation to fix, or is there a general technique that would fix this and other stuff?
- bscphil 6y ago
  Codecs with better understanding of what a complex scene looks like (and allocates more bitrate accordingly) will do better, and codecs that are better are blurring away details instead of blocking will do better as well. Keep in mind this is on Youtube and uploaded by some shitty clip site, so it's a very biased example. In this case there are four lossy encode steps involved: master -> bluray -> clipsite's master -> Youtube encode. Youtube in particular has absolutely horrific, just inexcusably bad bitrate even at the highest quality they'll give you. I'd have to see what the original Bluray looks like in this case to see if there's really a problem worth worrying about here.
  - FullyFunctional 6y ago
    Actually I first saw it on a plane and wondered how we have gotten to this stage where obviously garbled video is ok to give to paying customers. Yes, more bits will solve this, bit it’s still a great example that breaks encoding assumptions.
- jeffffff 6y ago
  there isn't necessarily a fix. all compression algorithms expand the size of the data on most inputs in order to make certain inputs with sufficiently regular patterns a lot smaller. it just so happens that most of the images/video/audio/text/etc people are interested in is fairly regular. with a lossy compression algorithm that is required to hit a certain compression ratio to keep the bitrate under some threshold, the only way to be able to guarantee that it is hit on uncompressible input is to introduce regularity/remove randomness, and in the case of video the easiest and least visually distorting way to do so is to pixelate it. this particular video is basically random noise which is incompressible by definition, which is why the result is so bad. if it was 1080p going in and the output size is required to be reduced by 16x, reducing the resolution to 480x270 is about as good you can do.

pedrocr 6y ago

And if they would start providing 4K or at least 1080p to Linux users I might consider subscribing again. Streaming services are popping up left and right while at the same time turning into their own specific guettos of supported platforms and features. Makes you almost value the role of the traditional network aggregator. Maybe the market will eventually consolidate or organize itself so you can buy a full service from a single provider that knows what it's doing technically.

ponker 6y ago

Any idea why none of these services supports queueing some movies you’d like to watch, downloading them in the middle of the night in astounding bitrates, and allowing you to watch on your TV? As far as I can tell only the mobile apps support this, not the “streaming boxes.”

moron4hire 6y ago
Take a wild guess. (it's digital rights management and "Woo, PCs are scary!")
wmf 6y ago
The streaming boxes probably don't have enough storage to hold much. There's Kaleidescape but it's very expensive.
- ponker 6y ago
  Why not give them enough storage? 32 GB of flash is more than enough and now you get to sell a whole new generation of boxes.

lvs 6y ago

Not supported in Linux, presumably, since you can't even get anything higher than 540p or 720p in Linux due to Widevine DRM restrictions.

Filligree 6y ago
Well, you can. Just not from Netflix.

WalterBright 6y ago

Since the credits can run for 5 minutes or more these days, those can be optimized by converting to a font rather than a bitmap of the screen. Transmit the font, then transmit the text. Should be able to get gigantic compression this way!

hinkley 6y ago

The best (worst?) example I know of this going horribly wrong is the title sequence for the Big Bang Theory, which speeds up as it goes along and then cuts to the cast. Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery <as the pixels start to unravel>, it all started with a Big Bang. BANG (Bang, your Screen is a riot of random pixels. Oh wait, here’s the cast instead!) Then I caught an episode on another service, maybe Netflix? The transition wasn’t awesome, but it wasn’t awful either. It only glitched for a frame or two instead of a few seconds. Clearly better heuristics were in play.

eisa01 6y ago

Now they only need to offer the 4K streams on an affordable plan for single household customers. It’s unfair to pay for the 4-stream family plan to get 4K for double the price of the single stream plan!

Mindwipe 6y ago
That's not going to happen, Netflix need to push their ARPU up quite significantly in the next few years given how much cash they're burning (and they explicitly promised shareholders they would stop doing last year).

ComodoHacker 6y ago

TL;DR: More 4K adoption lead to higher traffic costs for us, so we have to optimize that.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

It sounds like Netflix might not be doing the horrible thing YouTube and Twitter do where they treat low-resolution (e.g. standard definition) content as being less deserving of bitrate with only higher resolutions allowed to climb the bitrate ladder? For those sites I have to upscale SD content to HD resolutions when uploading just for it to be allowed a less paltry bitrate. I fear people who grow up in the age of streaming might not realise that DVDs had good video quality because streaming services seem to hate SD content. > As a side note, we do have some additional points, not shown in the plots, that are used in resolution limited scenarios — such as a streaming session limited to 720p or 1080p highest encoding resolution. Such points lie under (or to the right of) the convex hull main ladder curve but allow quality to ramp up in resolution limited scenarios.

httpsterio 6y ago

Without understanding all of the technical details, am I the only one who finds Netflix's quality on Android insufferable? Technically, I guess it's Full HD but the packing is so aggressive that any scenes with just a bit darker sections will instantly be blocky and pixellated. Is there any way around it? Honestly it's not worth paying for as it's almost unwatchable.

jjj123 6y ago

Do other people have the same issues I have with streaming dark content? I watch a lot of horror, and the compression on Netflix and Shudder (and probably HBO + Hulu) causes really horrible banding in dark scenes. Literally if they could just fix this I would have no problems with streaming quality.

heroprotagonist 6y ago

Yet they still can't properly render 21:9 content on a 21:9 display. You get a shrunk picture with black bars on all sides. Even their "Originals" or N-Series or whatever they call it now have this problem. Here's hoping someone from Netflix is in the comments and can act on it, because their support system hasn't done anything in the 2 years since I brought it to their attention. edit: Actually, I tried to track down the film used in the new encoding (I think it's The Dirt from the signs and dates seen in the frame captures) so I could screenshot for comparison. It actually worked in 21:9 fullscreen. Was it the new encoding? I saw this problem up until this past week, most recently on Maniac but I checked that show and it's no longer an issue. From the post I suspect it was this adding in extra blacks at top and bottom on 21:9 content in the old method: > with fixed 4K resolution bitrates — 8, 10, 12 and 16 Mbps — regardless of content characteristics But I truly don't know what it was. I just know that video no longer ignores 40% of my screen real estate by watching on a 21:9 monitor since sometime last week. THANK YOU! That has been annoying me for years. But Please add 3440x1440 to your testing. It's not shown in those charts.

PostThisTooFast 6y ago

"For members with high-bandwidth connections we deliver the same great quality at half the bitrate on average." So in no scenario do they mention actually IMPROVING quality for high-speed connections. Sad.