6 ms·

Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

76 points by singhkays 1y ago

CharlesW 1y ago
Fascinating, thank you for this analysis! Currently pining for release of an updated Apple TV, which will have an SoC capable of hardware AV1 decode. It'd be great to hear from someone at Netflix about the unexpected Bojack Horseman results. I'd bet that Netflix just isn't yet taking advantage of AV1 features designed especially for this kind of animation and synthetic content.
- alfalfasprout 1y ago
  What benefit would a new appleTV have other than reduced bandwidth usage?
  - adzm 1y ago
    The Bojack example shows that it's not just reduced bandwidth; in some cases you can get higher quality with their AV1 encodes. Additionally if you are thinking of average bitrate, that's ignoring variable bitrates (and the extension, the per-shot encoding params that Netflix utilizes.) That is to say, high complexity scenes get more bitrate than low complexity, so very noisy scenes can look way better using AV1 even while still using lower bitrates, but notably some peaks have similar max bitrates.
  - toast0 1y ago
    The promise of new codecs is reduced bandwidth and higher quality. Probably a new device also has a faster processor and/or more ram in general, which helps with incidental jank. Apple TVs are well regarded and maybe have less jank than other products (I don't have personal experience, I'm interested, but my Apple computer is a IIe so I expect account management issues), but it's nice to get a new Roku every once in a while as bloat/jank seems to creep up on them.
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    The credible rumors beyond AV1 decode include: Wi-Fi 7 via Apple's home-grown N1 chip, a CPU fast enough to support the next-gen Siri release on-device, a RAM bump, improved pass-through for high-end audio formats, potentially a camera (the new square selfie sensor would be perfect for this) for easier group/family FaceTiming, and more aggressive pricing.
    - isatty 1y ago
      The appletv is such a good device that I’m paying it whatever the price may be. TVs have horrible UIs and are generally ad ridden garbage. Not using anything android based because of the same reason and slow.
      - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
        Google TV UI is fine, only one I accept other than Apple TV
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    I wouldn't mind if they enabled the 120 Hz support with the new chipset. I like my TV but the framerate matching feature causes a few seconds of black screen each time I switch between and also drops the UI to 24 FPS. Would be nice if everything just ran at 120 FPS all the time, and since 24/30/60 are perfect frame multiples that's nice to. NTSTC content at 23.976 I'd hope the player would just speed up at that point, but even if not... judder at 120 Hz is better than at 60 Hz. Also 6 GHz Wi-Fi would be nice. I had to run a cable to my 2 because the 5 GHz airspace where I am is too crowded to stream high quality movies via Infuse without occasional hitching. Same with the seek speed. Meanwhile my iPhone gets 2.9 Gbps of goodput at solid jitter on 6 GHz Wi-Fi. There's probably some updates to the HDR standards. For me at least though the current one already supports what my TV does. Also apps seem to assume "because hardware decode isn't available don't serve AV1" sometimes. As silly as that is with the CPU power in the AppleTV, at least that problem would go away with hardware support and they'd stop trying to serve a "compatible" SDR h.264 stream. Despite internet pessimism, sometimes the quality is also raised with more efficient codecs rather than just "the same quality at less bandwidth".
    - CharlesW 1y ago
      > Also apps seem to assume "because hardware decode isn't available don't serve AV1" sometimes. This isn't a completely unreasonable decision, since the current 2022 model's software AV1 decode apparently can only sustain 4K AV1 decode (although it handled 1080p content fine in my test) for as little as 45 minutes before thermal throttling kicks in.
    - pkroll 1y ago
      "NTSTC content at 23.976 I'd hope the player would just speed up at that point, but even if not... judder at 120 Hz is better than at 60 Hz." I'd bet money when TVs are advertised at 120 FPS, they're really 119.88 FPS, so no judder showing 23.976 FPS and the other NTSC-off display rates.
      - zamadatix 1y ago
        Some content is truly exactly 24 FPS or 30 FPS though, so whichever path the TV goes (i.e. NTSC rate or integer rate) the same problem will exist. I suppose some TVs might have extremely fancy film mode detection which catches the occasional frame difference, but I doubt mine does :D
  - mdasen 1y ago
    As someone who tried Roku, Android TV, and Fire TV before switching, better hardware offers a vastly better experience. The Apple TV's hardware is fast. The UI doesn't lag. Things feel smooth as butter. Yes, maybe the Apple TV doesn't need more, but more can be helpful. In terms of AV1 support, YouTube often only does 4K with AV1 so that's an issue for people. Personally, I'd love to see an Apple TV that was great for gaming. New Apple processors have hardware ray tracing and decent gaming performance. I think it's also likely that Apple will try and make an Apple TV that will support next-gen Siri and on-device AI stuff. Yes, you can complain about Apple's AI delays, but Apple's probably looking toward an Apple TV that can support their AI models. In some ways, "what benefit would a new <insert-thing> have?" Sometimes we don't know until we have it and people start using it.
    - pnw 1y ago
      Apple just hasn't been able to get traction with gaming on Apple TV. Gaming on Apple TV is so small I couldn't even find an analyst report breaking down the market size. I don't think new graphics hardware solves the problem. Beyond the friction of the unit not shipping with a controller, tvOS lacks good discovery for games and there is no ad infrastructure comparable to mobile. Most game developers aren't looking to invest in small, closed platforms with bad discovery. It's hard enough to make money on Apple's mobile platforms.
- adzm 1y ago
  > the unexpected Bojack Horseman results. I'd bet that Netflix just isn't yet taking advantage of AV1 features designed especially for this kind of animation and synthetic content. While the percentages look scary, it's only a slight difference (60kbps!) and still around 1mbps average, but with a significant quality boost (very crisp lines and near perfect quality). I bet Netflix could encode at nearly half that bitrate and stay similar to HEVC in quality, but I'm pleased they seem to have made a good tradeoff here. It's actually quite amazing the quality that AV1 delivers at such low bitrates across the board. I've said it before, but AV1 is almost magical. Which I think is behind the lack of enthusiasm for VVC/h266; is anyone even using that? I've yet to actually see it in the wild.
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    Ditto. Between AV1's momentum and the imminent release of AV2, it sure feels like VVC will find limited adoption outside of broadcast applications. https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/AOMedia-Announces-Year-End-Launch-of-Next-Generation-Video-Codec-AV2-on-10th-Anniversary/ https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/AOMedia-Announces-Year-...
  - bcraven 1y ago
    Some of the torrent releases out of MVGroup are done as h266. I think as technical tests as much as anything, but they're interesting to see.
jpalawaga 1y ago
I feel like this was copy edited by ChatGPT and it really grates me. I couldn’t help but lose focus after I started seeing telltale signs of AI. While the topic matter is interesting, I feel like obviously synthetic content falls into the “that which was not worth writing, is not worth reading either” trap. If the authors tone is extremely ChatGPT-esque, I apologize in advance.
- landl0rd 1y ago
  > article about compression > uses slopbot 9000 to explode his point into ten times the "prose" > mfw
  - delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
    I laughed. Now only if this was a real greentext.
- janice1999 1y ago
  It's the emoji bullet points and headers that makes me instantly close a page.
  - hnuser123456 1y ago
    "It's not just X, it's Y!"
    - __float 1y ago
      Heh, didn't have to go far in this article to find this exact construction: > The data shows it’s not just an incremental improvement; it’s a demolition. Complete with extra bold to emphasize the second half, sigh.
- bashtoni 1y ago
  Came to say pretty much the same thing. This slop is unreadable for me at this point. I keep getting a paragraph or two into something, read one of the terrible "It's not just word - it's massive hyperbole!" sentences, see that there are several more in subsequent paragraphs and can't continue. However bad the author's original writing that generate this output was, it can't be as awful as this.
adadtttt 1y ago
The adverts on this website are very annoying
- Spare_account 1y ago
  Why don't you use an adblocker?
keane 1y ago
Was once out in a remote area on an 800 kbps DSL connection. YouTube couldn't stream, Prime Video couldn't stream. Netflix worked fine. Years later, I remain impressed at their uniqueness.
newman314 1y ago
Does anyone know what was used to produce the graphs?
- nirewen 1y ago
  Inspecting the page, I can see some classes "dw-chart" so I looked it up and got to this: https://www.datawrapper.de/charts https://www.datawrapper.de/charts. Looks a bit different on the page, but I think that's it.
- input_sh 1y ago
  Do you mean charts? If so, it's Datawrapper: https://www.datawrapper.de/charts https://www.datawrapper.de/charts One of the quite expensive paid plans, as the free one has to have "Created with Datawrapper" attribution at the bottom. I would guess they've vibe-coded their way to a premium version without paying, as the alternative is definitely outside individual people's budgets (>$500/month).
- singhkays 1y ago
  it is indeed Datawrapper like other posters have said. It works well for interactivity on a static blog like Hugo.
encom 1y ago
Okay, so AV1 has lower bitrate. I can encode any video format at arbitrary bitrates, but that metric is not useful on its own. An article about how AV1 requires less bits for the same or improved perceptual quality would have been far more interesting.
- mijkal 1y ago
  This article is a good primer on how AV1 works (and compares with VP8 and VP9): https://www.red5.net/blog/av1-vs-vp9-vs-vp8-comparison-for-live-streaming/ https://www.red5.net/blog/av1-vs-vp9-vs-vp8-comparison-for-l...
shmerl 1y ago
> Device Support: Hardware decoding for AV1 isn’t on every device yet. By now - it should be in most devices that's aren't outdated by even average standards. And it's worth mentioning that for devices that don't have hardware decoding, dav1d does an excellent job of decoding it on the CPU. The problem is more with hardware encoding. That's indeed only present in only recent generations (or a couple) of hardware and even with that, AMD for example have an aspect ratio limitation bug in their AV1 hardware encoder (which requires adding black bands to work around) that's only fixed in RDNA 4 which is not available in their APUs, so it won't be fixed in APUs until their UDNA is used for them (they didn't fix it in RDNA 3.5 chips).
kllrnohj 1y ago
Interesting charts, but this is all completely meaningless without image quality comparisons. I can easily use 50% less bandwidth than Netflix's H264 streams as well, with H264 even, by just cranking up the compression & dropping the bitrate. Presumably nothing jumped out at the author as being worse, but come on how can you have a whole section on why AV1's regression on Bojack is actually a good thing because the quality is way higher, and then not show any quality comparisons?
- galaxy_gas 1y ago
  Taking screenshot of netflix on my device results in black square, I dont know if this applies on lower levels of Widevine but if it doesn't then the quality will be much lower as Netflix do not serve 720+ video unless there is protected DRM path
  - kllrnohj 1y ago
    It'd have to be the good ol' "take a picture of the screen" route without getting into the more gray areas.
    - singhkays 1y ago
      It's what the above comments said. I tried taking screenshot comparison but due to the DRM (I think it's called HDCP?), the netflix content ends up as black screen.
mattkrick 1y ago
The ads made this unreadable. Is this a thing? Get to hackernews front page & then inject your post with as many ads as possible to “cash in”?
- Spare_account 1y ago
  Why aren't you using an adblocker?
- red369 1y ago
  Not doubting your experience, but I can't see a single ad using Safari on iPhone. I was really impressed with my setup, but after disabling content blockers (Firefox Focus), and turning off using Mullvad's free DNS proxy service, still nothing! Perhaps the author turned the ads off since you visited?
- singhkays 1y ago
  Sorry for that. I turned those off while I figure out what's going on.
ElijahLynn 1y ago
Very good read, love some of the humor in this article. It helped me get through to the end!! Also, If anyone was wondering where AV1 stands in comparison to VP8 and VP9... I just looked it up after a few years of not paying attention and I guess Google donated VP8 and VP9 to the alliance for open media foundation (AOMedia) in 2015 and they created AV1 and released it in 2018.
- MrRadar 1y ago
  Yeah, AV1 is primarily based on what Google was working on for their own successor to VP9, what would have been VP10, with technology contributions from Mozilla/Xiph's Daala and Cisco's Thor codecs.
- singhkays 1y ago
  Thank you. Weaving in humor and wit was a conscious choice :) Based on some of the comments above, I might have gone a little overboard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446589
  - ElijahLynn 1y ago
    No, it was perfect!
dilyevsky 1y ago
Looks like latest chatgpt model is not aware of massive battery draining on mobile
- singhkays 1y ago
  This test wasn't done on mobile. For mobile, I don't know who outside of Netflix is delivering AV1. If they are, I expect them to be leveraging the hardware AV1 decoders for battery life instead of employing a software only solution like dav1d. Saying that, I think Netflix was using dav1d solution where it had a benefit (e.g. low quality cellular networks) https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-android-d5264a515202 https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-and...
  - dilyevsky 1y ago
    > For mobile, I don't know who outside of Netflix is delivering AV1. Pretty sure Youtube forces it with dav1d on devices that don’t support hw decoding which is how i became aware of the battery problem
throwawaymaroon 1y ago
[dead]
1oooqooq 1y ago
the worst screen tearing in old analog movies with camera panning.
ksec 1y ago
Why is this now flagged ? Perhaps the most important question which I have yet to see anyone pointing out. Those bit rate numbers are appalling! 2-4Mbps average bitrate? For a services you are paying for? I knew Netflix has gotten bad but this is worse than I thought. Even some high end YouTube Content does better than that. It should be 8Mbps minimum. And at this bitrate the difference between H.264 and AV1 wont be so obvious.
- singhkays 1y ago
  Wondering about the flag myself >Those bit rate numbers are appalling! 2-4Mbps average bitrate? While those may sound low, what I'm thinking is Netflix didn't see any benefit in perceptual quality (or VMAF scores) but sending more bits down the pipe and increasing their bandwidth bill.
  - ksec 1y ago
    That is the problem. The think VMAF as the gospel, and AV1 is extremely well tuned for it. VMAF is better than SSIM PSNR but it is still far from perfect. And it is a reason why most torrent are still using HEVC and AVC.

76 points by singhkays 1y ago

Fascinating, thank you for this analysis! Currently pining for release of an updated Apple TV, which will have an SoC capable of hardware AV1 decode. It'd be great to hear from someone at Netflix about the unexpected Bojack Horseman results. I'd bet that Netflix just isn't yet taking advantage of AV1 features designed especially for this kind of animation and synthetic content.

alfalfasprout 1y ago
What benefit would a new appleTV have other than reduced bandwidth usage?
- adzm 1y ago
  The Bojack example shows that it's not just reduced bandwidth; in some cases you can get higher quality with their AV1 encodes. Additionally if you are thinking of average bitrate, that's ignoring variable bitrates (and the extension, the per-shot encoding params that Netflix utilizes.) That is to say, high complexity scenes get more bitrate than low complexity, so very noisy scenes can look way better using AV1 even while still using lower bitrates, but notably some peaks have similar max bitrates.
- toast0 1y ago
  The promise of new codecs is reduced bandwidth and higher quality. Probably a new device also has a faster processor and/or more ram in general, which helps with incidental jank. Apple TVs are well regarded and maybe have less jank than other products (I don't have personal experience, I'm interested, but my Apple computer is a IIe so I expect account management issues), but it's nice to get a new Roku every once in a while as bloat/jank seems to creep up on them.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  The credible rumors beyond AV1 decode include: Wi-Fi 7 via Apple's home-grown N1 chip, a CPU fast enough to support the next-gen Siri release on-device, a RAM bump, improved pass-through for high-end audio formats, potentially a camera (the new square selfie sensor would be perfect for this) for easier group/family FaceTiming, and more aggressive pricing.
  - isatty 1y ago
    The appletv is such a good device that I’m paying it whatever the price may be. TVs have horrible UIs and are generally ad ridden garbage. Not using anything android based because of the same reason and slow.
    - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
      Google TV UI is fine, only one I accept other than Apple TV
- zamadatix 1y ago
  I wouldn't mind if they enabled the 120 Hz support with the new chipset. I like my TV but the framerate matching feature causes a few seconds of black screen each time I switch between and also drops the UI to 24 FPS. Would be nice if everything just ran at 120 FPS all the time, and since 24/30/60 are perfect frame multiples that's nice to. NTSTC content at 23.976 I'd hope the player would just speed up at that point, but even if not... judder at 120 Hz is better than at 60 Hz. Also 6 GHz Wi-Fi would be nice. I had to run a cable to my 2 because the 5 GHz airspace where I am is too crowded to stream high quality movies via Infuse without occasional hitching. Same with the seek speed. Meanwhile my iPhone gets 2.9 Gbps of goodput at solid jitter on 6 GHz Wi-Fi. There's probably some updates to the HDR standards. For me at least though the current one already supports what my TV does. Also apps seem to assume "because hardware decode isn't available don't serve AV1" sometimes. As silly as that is with the CPU power in the AppleTV, at least that problem would go away with hardware support and they'd stop trying to serve a "compatible" SDR h.264 stream. Despite internet pessimism, sometimes the quality is also raised with more efficient codecs rather than just "the same quality at less bandwidth".
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    > Also apps seem to assume "because hardware decode isn't available don't serve AV1" sometimes. This isn't a completely unreasonable decision, since the current 2022 model's software AV1 decode apparently can only sustain 4K AV1 decode (although it handled 1080p content fine in my test) for as little as 45 minutes before thermal throttling kicks in.
  - pkroll 1y ago
    "NTSTC content at 23.976 I'd hope the player would just speed up at that point, but even if not... judder at 120 Hz is better than at 60 Hz." I'd bet money when TVs are advertised at 120 FPS, they're really 119.88 FPS, so no judder showing 23.976 FPS and the other NTSC-off display rates.
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      Some content is truly exactly 24 FPS or 30 FPS though, so whichever path the TV goes (i.e. NTSC rate or integer rate) the same problem will exist. I suppose some TVs might have extremely fancy film mode detection which catches the occasional frame difference, but I doubt mine does :D
- mdasen 1y ago
  As someone who tried Roku, Android TV, and Fire TV before switching, better hardware offers a vastly better experience. The Apple TV's hardware is fast. The UI doesn't lag. Things feel smooth as butter. Yes, maybe the Apple TV doesn't need more, but more can be helpful. In terms of AV1 support, YouTube often only does 4K with AV1 so that's an issue for people. Personally, I'd love to see an Apple TV that was great for gaming. New Apple processors have hardware ray tracing and decent gaming performance. I think it's also likely that Apple will try and make an Apple TV that will support next-gen Siri and on-device AI stuff. Yes, you can complain about Apple's AI delays, but Apple's probably looking toward an Apple TV that can support their AI models. In some ways, "what benefit would a new <insert-thing> have?" Sometimes we don't know until we have it and people start using it.
  - pnw 1y ago
    Apple just hasn't been able to get traction with gaming on Apple TV. Gaming on Apple TV is so small I couldn't even find an analyst report breaking down the market size. I don't think new graphics hardware solves the problem. Beyond the friction of the unit not shipping with a controller, tvOS lacks good discovery for games and there is no ad infrastructure comparable to mobile. Most game developers aren't looking to invest in small, closed platforms with bad discovery. It's hard enough to make money on Apple's mobile platforms.
adzm 1y ago
> the unexpected Bojack Horseman results. I'd bet that Netflix just isn't yet taking advantage of AV1 features designed especially for this kind of animation and synthetic content. While the percentages look scary, it's only a slight difference (60kbps!) and still around 1mbps average, but with a significant quality boost (very crisp lines and near perfect quality). I bet Netflix could encode at nearly half that bitrate and stay similar to HEVC in quality, but I'm pleased they seem to have made a good tradeoff here. It's actually quite amazing the quality that AV1 delivers at such low bitrates across the board. I've said it before, but AV1 is almost magical. Which I think is behind the lack of enthusiasm for VVC/h266; is anyone even using that? I've yet to actually see it in the wild.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Ditto. Between AV1's momentum and the imminent release of AV2, it sure feels like VVC will find limited adoption outside of broadcast applications. https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/AOMedia-Announces-Year-End-Launch-of-Next-Generation-Video-Codec-AV2-on-10th-Anniversary/ https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/AOMedia-Announces-Year-...
- bcraven 1y ago
  Some of the torrent releases out of MVGroup are done as h266. I think as technical tests as much as anything, but they're interesting to see.

jpalawaga 1y ago

I feel like this was copy edited by ChatGPT and it really grates me. I couldn’t help but lose focus after I started seeing telltale signs of AI. While the topic matter is interesting, I feel like obviously synthetic content falls into the “that which was not worth writing, is not worth reading either” trap. If the authors tone is extremely ChatGPT-esque, I apologize in advance.

landl0rd 1y ago
> article about compression > uses slopbot 9000 to explode his point into ten times the "prose" > mfw
- delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
  I laughed. Now only if this was a real greentext.
janice1999 1y ago
It's the emoji bullet points and headers that makes me instantly close a page.
- hnuser123456 1y ago
  "It's not just X, it's Y!"
  - __float 1y ago
    Heh, didn't have to go far in this article to find this exact construction: > The data shows it’s not just an incremental improvement; it’s a demolition. Complete with extra bold to emphasize the second half, sigh.
bashtoni 1y ago
Came to say pretty much the same thing. This slop is unreadable for me at this point. I keep getting a paragraph or two into something, read one of the terrible "It's not just word - it's massive hyperbole!" sentences, see that there are several more in subsequent paragraphs and can't continue. However bad the author's original writing that generate this output was, it can't be as awful as this.

adadtttt 1y ago

The adverts on this website are very annoying

Spare_account 1y ago
Why don't you use an adblocker?

keane 1y ago

Was once out in a remote area on an 800 kbps DSL connection. YouTube couldn't stream, Prime Video couldn't stream. Netflix worked fine. Years later, I remain impressed at their uniqueness.

newman314 1y ago

Does anyone know what was used to produce the graphs?

nirewen 1y ago
Inspecting the page, I can see some classes "dw-chart" so I looked it up and got to this: https://www.datawrapper.de/charts https://www.datawrapper.de/charts. Looks a bit different on the page, but I think that's it.
input_sh 1y ago
Do you mean charts? If so, it's Datawrapper: https://www.datawrapper.de/charts https://www.datawrapper.de/charts One of the quite expensive paid plans, as the free one has to have "Created with Datawrapper" attribution at the bottom. I would guess they've vibe-coded their way to a premium version without paying, as the alternative is definitely outside individual people's budgets (>$500/month).
singhkays 1y ago
it is indeed Datawrapper like other posters have said. It works well for interactivity on a static blog like Hugo.

encom 1y ago

Okay, so AV1 has lower bitrate. I can encode any video format at arbitrary bitrates, but that metric is not useful on its own. An article about how AV1 requires less bits for the same or improved perceptual quality would have been far more interesting.

mijkal 1y ago
This article is a good primer on how AV1 works (and compares with VP8 and VP9): https://www.red5.net/blog/av1-vs-vp9-vs-vp8-comparison-for-live-streaming/ https://www.red5.net/blog/av1-vs-vp9-vs-vp8-comparison-for-l...

shmerl 1y ago

> Device Support: Hardware decoding for AV1 isn’t on every device yet. By now - it should be in most devices that's aren't outdated by even average standards. And it's worth mentioning that for devices that don't have hardware decoding, dav1d does an excellent job of decoding it on the CPU. The problem is more with hardware encoding. That's indeed only present in only recent generations (or a couple) of hardware and even with that, AMD for example have an aspect ratio limitation bug in their AV1 hardware encoder (which requires adding black bands to work around) that's only fixed in RDNA 4 which is not available in their APUs, so it won't be fixed in APUs until their UDNA is used for them (they didn't fix it in RDNA 3.5 chips).

kllrnohj 1y ago

Interesting charts, but this is all completely meaningless without image quality comparisons. I can easily use 50% less bandwidth than Netflix's H264 streams as well, with H264 even, by just cranking up the compression & dropping the bitrate. Presumably nothing jumped out at the author as being worse, but come on how can you have a whole section on why AV1's regression on Bojack is actually a good thing because the quality is way higher, and then not show any quality comparisons?

galaxy_gas 1y ago
Taking screenshot of netflix on my device results in black square, I dont know if this applies on lower levels of Widevine but if it doesn't then the quality will be much lower as Netflix do not serve 720+ video unless there is protected DRM path
- kllrnohj 1y ago
  It'd have to be the good ol' "take a picture of the screen" route without getting into the more gray areas.
  - singhkays 1y ago
    It's what the above comments said. I tried taking screenshot comparison but due to the DRM (I think it's called HDCP?), the netflix content ends up as black screen.

mattkrick 1y ago

The ads made this unreadable. Is this a thing? Get to hackernews front page & then inject your post with as many ads as possible to “cash in”?

Spare_account 1y ago
Why aren't you using an adblocker?
red369 1y ago
Not doubting your experience, but I can't see a single ad using Safari on iPhone. I was really impressed with my setup, but after disabling content blockers (Firefox Focus), and turning off using Mullvad's free DNS proxy service, still nothing! Perhaps the author turned the ads off since you visited?
singhkays 1y ago
Sorry for that. I turned those off while I figure out what's going on.

ElijahLynn 1y ago

Very good read, love some of the humor in this article. It helped me get through to the end!! Also, If anyone was wondering where AV1 stands in comparison to VP8 and VP9... I just looked it up after a few years of not paying attention and I guess Google donated VP8 and VP9 to the alliance for open media foundation (AOMedia) in 2015 and they created AV1 and released it in 2018.

MrRadar 1y ago
Yeah, AV1 is primarily based on what Google was working on for their own successor to VP9, what would have been VP10, with technology contributions from Mozilla/Xiph's Daala and Cisco's Thor codecs.
singhkays 1y ago
Thank you. Weaving in humor and wit was a conscious choice :) Based on some of the comments above, I might have gone a little overboard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446589
- ElijahLynn 1y ago
  No, it was perfect!

dilyevsky 1y ago

Looks like latest chatgpt model is not aware of massive battery draining on mobile

singhkays 1y ago
This test wasn't done on mobile. For mobile, I don't know who outside of Netflix is delivering AV1. If they are, I expect them to be leveraging the hardware AV1 decoders for battery life instead of employing a software only solution like dav1d. Saying that, I think Netflix was using dav1d solution where it had a benefit (e.g. low quality cellular networks) https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-android-d5264a515202 https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-and...
- dilyevsky 1y ago
  > For mobile, I don't know who outside of Netflix is delivering AV1. Pretty sure Youtube forces it with dav1d on devices that don’t support hw decoding which is how i became aware of the battery problem

throwawaymaroon 1y ago

[dead]

1oooqooq 1y ago

the worst screen tearing in old analog movies with camera panning.

ksec 1y ago

Why is this now flagged ? Perhaps the most important question which I have yet to see anyone pointing out. Those bit rate numbers are appalling! 2-4Mbps average bitrate? For a services you are paying for? I knew Netflix has gotten bad but this is worse than I thought. Even some high end YouTube Content does better than that. It should be 8Mbps minimum. And at this bitrate the difference between H.264 and AV1 wont be so obvious.

singhkays 1y ago
Wondering about the flag myself >Those bit rate numbers are appalling! 2-4Mbps average bitrate? While those may sound low, what I'm thinking is Netflix didn't see any benefit in perceptual quality (or VMAF scores) but sending more bits down the pipe and increasing their bandwidth bill.
- ksec 1y ago
  That is the problem. The think VMAF as the gospel, and AV1 is extremely well tuned for it. VMAF is better than SSIM PSNR but it is still far from perfect. And it is a reason why most torrent are still using HEVC and AVC.