3 ms·

> The supposedly 4K remaster available on Amazon Prime Video is criminally badly encoded. During the raid on the castle, you literally can't see the smoke becau

> The supposedly 4K remaster available on Amazon Prime Video is criminally badly encoded. During the raid on the castle, you literally can't see the smoke because macroblocks are popping so hard on every keyframe This is such a widespread issue, especially in dark scenes. Netflix is bad, but Prime Video seems by far the worst. I watched Mr Robot through a few months ago, and at times it was like watching 2009-era YouTube, despite being 4K on paper. I'll take a 1080p Blu-Ray over a 4K stream any day. UHD Blu-Ray is nice, but it's a shame it's still 1.5-2x the price of regular BD. Then again you can still buy DVDs for some reason, so I guess high quality physical media is starting to be considered an enthusiast option..

srvmshr 5y ago
This is just my observation & I don't know if others might have noticed: Netflix streams sharp pixels towards the center of the screen, and the backgrounds are always bit worse due to the bandwidth constraints perhaps. It perhaps works on the assumption that our focus is on the foreground mostly, and not the background. This is all good until the scenes are darker shades and you could notice the choppiness due to the network constraints.
- kasabali 5y ago
  That's one of the "psychovisual enhancements" employed by modern codecs. Here [0] is a nice explanation I could among in top search results: "... x264’s psychovisual enhancements do a pretty good job of keeping detail where you’d notice it (the face), at the expense of the stuff you normally wouldn’t notice while watching (like those background areas)." [0] https://mattgadient.com/comparing-x264-rf-settings-in-handbrake-examples/ https://mattgadient.com/comparing-x264-rf-settings-in-handbr...