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Amazing to read about the continued re-invention of this part of Netflix's internal systems. I worked with this team (and its predecessors) during my time at N
by trunnell 3y ago
Amazing to read about the continued re-invention of this part of Netflix's internal systems.
I worked with this team (and its predecessors) during my time at Netflix. They achieved several "holy grails" of video encoding: a perceptual quality metric (VMAF), optimal bitrate selection per 2 second video chunk, and then optimal video chunking to be scene based rather than a fixed 2 seconds. Doing any of that in a research lab would be a challenge, but pulling it off at Netflix's scale is epic.
You might need some background on how adaptive video streaming works to fully grok this article.
But this is also just a story about a massive refactoring of a large, critical system. How many companies have you worked for that aggressively pursued refactoring/re-engineering their central systems? At most other places, I've seen risk aversion, fear, and mismanagement conspire to kill innovation. Not so at Netflix.
- entropicdrifter 3y agoThat sounds like an epic series of projects to have gotten to work on.
- devindotcom 3y agoI'm curious about grain encoding - did you work on that at all? My friend heard they were doing a grain extraction layer that was re-added client side. Feel free to contact devin@techcrunch if you have any interesting insight.
- mochomocha 3y agoYes, that's part of the AV1 specs actually. See https://norkin.org/pdf/DCC_2018_AV1_film_grain.pdf https://norkin.org/pdf/DCC_2018_AV1_film_grain.pdf Andrey (who works for Netflix) drove the effort. Chatted with him about it.
- aidenn0 3y agoI used to do a poor-mans version of that with low-bitrate mpeg4 (ASF or divX) movie downloads back in the day; the resolution would be low, and the MS MP4 codec tended to blur as well (plus noise killed the quality so much that there was often a denoiser in the encode pipeline), so adding any noise to the playback significantly improved the look of the movie.
- ksec 3y agoRemoving Grain and then re-adding it after encoding isn't specific to Netflix or even AV1 as some have suggested. I believe a recent part of H.265 HEVC, or H.266 VVC or MPEG-5 has something similar.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoPornhub serves more diverse data across the world with a much simpler pipeline. They are the ones who should be emulated. Netflix needs a bit of housecleaning to get rid of this faction in the company.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoAdult website stacks are underrated. They manage to be scrappy and yet deliver a lot. I've seen streaming services serving half a million HD video users a day running on 7 servers, 2 of them being cheap vps.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoYeah, funny what a requirement for sustainable business models + no glut of resume-driven development will do. Almost like the good old days.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoAlso an open mind in hiring. Nobody will reject you because you look weird or are awkward.
- martindbp 3y agoAs a customer I can't really say that I can tell any difference between all the streaming services, so presumably this type of optimization helps Netflix's bottom line somehow?
- manmal 3y agoI‘m not impressed by the quality Netflix gives me when on my phone, all while paying for a 4K plan. Streaming a locally hosted 4K file looks just way better. Apple TV+ is approaching that level of quality, so it’s definitely doable.
- ksec 3y agoThat has more to do with Bitrate. Giving enough bitrate your video will be great even with older Codec such as baseline H.264. AppleTV+ uses anywhere from double to quadruple the bitrate. So it is much more about cost of business rather than technology barrier.
- manmal 3y agoAnd it’s acceptable to bill me €16 every month and then only stream full res when I happen to be on a big screen device?
- ksec 3y ago>They achieved several "holy grails" of video encoding: a perceptual quality metric (VMAF), optimal bitrate selection per 2 second video chunk, and then optimal video chunking to be scene based rather than a fixed 2 seconds. Both being extremely hard problem but I wouldn't say they are "holy grails" level. The latter part is currently being offered by other encoding services. While the first one, VMAF, is much better than all other metric we were previously using, still has many short comings. I was actually hoping all the AI / LLM model we could have something better than VMAF by now.
- n4r9 3y agoAre there other examples of LLMs discovering novel high-performing algorithms, models or metrics? I didn't think they were close to that yet.