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It never occurred to me to wonder what streaming services use for their sources. Do they send an intern over to Best Buy to pick up a Blu-Ray?
by quercusa 5y ago
It never occurred to me to wonder what streaming services use for their sources. Do they send an intern over to Best Buy to pick up a Blu-Ray?
- pavlov 5y agoJudging by the picture quality on many of the older shows and movies, an intern at the studio digitized a big stack of dusty NTSC Betacam tapes into MPEG-2 files with all encoder settings left at default low-bitrate CBR, then uploaded it to Amazon and everywhere else where it got further mangled by re-encoding at various H.264 levels.
- deergomoo 5y agoEven newer shows often have appalling picture quality on streaming services. Dark scenes especially—I watched Mr Robot on Prime Video a few months ago and the blocking and compression artefacts in dark scenes (which, if you’ve never seen the show, is a lot of them) were unbelievable. I’ve seen 700MB DVD rips with better handling.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mikeryan 5y agoNo there's a whole industry, with MPA driven security standards around getting digital source files from the studios to the streamers (or usually actually directly to the streamers DRM system) That being said there are likely multiple "masters" of a film that are available to the streaming service to choose from however. If you're interested details of the MPA Content Security Standards can be viewed here (PDF) https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/MPA-Best-Practices-Common-Guidelines-V4.09-FINAL.pdf https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/MP...
- quercusa 5y agoThanks!