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Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make every

Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make everything look like putty. Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. And yes — my TV is fully calibrated, and I’m paying for the highest-bandwidth streaming tier. Not my tv, but a visual example: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fwhat-is-causing-this-effect-and-is-there-a-way-to-fix-it-v0-r3f37nsyc3dc1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcfbe08390ef6d224a1338323d4279aa8394b10c9 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

RamRodification 1y ago
It's a little surprising to me that there generally aren't more subscription tiers where you can pay more for higher quality. Seems like free money, from people like you (maybe) and me.
- Avamander 1y ago
  You can already pay for 4K or "enhanced bitrate" but it's still relatively low bitrate and what's worse, this service quality is not guaranteed. I've had Apple TV+ downgrade to 1080p and lower on a wired gigabit connection so many times.
  - Neywiny 1y ago
    And on top of that a lot of streaming services don't go above 1080p on desktop, and even getting them to that point is a mess of DRM. I sometimes wonder if this is the YouTube powerhouse casting a bad shadow. As LTT says, don't try to compete with YouTube. They serve so much video bandwidth it's impossible to attempt. So all these kinda startup streaming services can't do 4k. Too much bandwidth.
- mdasen 1y ago
  I'm not surprised they don't offer an even higher tier. When you're pricing things, you often need to use proxies - like 1080p and 4K. It'd be hard to offer 3 pricing tiers: 1080p, 4K, 4K but actually good 4K that we don't compress to hell. That third tier makes it seem like you're being a bit fraudulent with the second tier. You're essentially admitting that you've created a fake-4K tier to take people's money without delivering them the product they think they're buying. At some point, a class-action lawsuit would use that as a sort of admission that you knew you weren't giving customers what they were paying for and that it was being done intentionally, both of which matter a lot. Right now, Netflix can say stuff like "we think the 4K video we're serving is just as good." If they offer a real-4K tier, it's hard to make that argument.
  - redox99 1y ago
    YouTube does 1080p premium without much problem.
Boss0565 1y ago
Seems like piracy is the way for you
- nani8ot 1y ago
  Sadly many shows aren't released on BluRay anymore, so even piracy won't deliver better quality.
  - rokweom 1y ago
    Piracy enables you to do things like debanding on playback, or more advanced video filtering to remove other compression issues.
  - ValentineC 1y ago
    I believe many sites still prefer Amazon webrips because their content is encoded at a higher bitrate than Netflix.
  - goeiedaggoeie 1y ago
    darn pirates should run the content through a super resolution model!
andrepd 1y ago
Ironically, piracy gives you yet again a better service. Thanks QxR.
nickthegreek 1y ago
for the super affluent, https://www.kaleidescape.com/compare/ https://www.kaleidescape.com/compare/
- muststopmyths 1y ago
  Fascinating. Pricing, if I am reading the site correctly: $7k-ish for a server (+$ for local disks, one assumes), $2-5k per client. So you download the movie locally to your server and play it on clients scattered throughout your mansion/property. Not out of the world for people who drop 10s of thousands on home theater. I wonder if that's what the Elysium types use in their NZ bunkers. No true self-respecting, self-described techie (Scotsman) would use it instead of building their own of course.
- rokweom 1y ago
  Funny that they're marketing the supposed advantages of higher bitrates using pictures with altered contrast and saturation lol. I would expect the target audience to be somewhat affluent in the actual benefits? Then again, I wouldn't expect somebody like Scorsese to be a video compression nerd. Also the whole "you can hear more with lossless audio" is just straight up a lie.
- dogma1138 1y ago
  This has been more or less proven to be a complete scam, the quality isn’t any better than Blu-ray and in many cases worse. The “best” quality of streaming you have is Sony Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Core but it has a rather limited library.
  - mkozlows 1y ago
    "Not any better than Blu-ray" is the same as saying "much better than streaming."
  - kodt 1y ago
    I think there are a few examples where the bitrate is higher than a native rip however.
cogman10 1y ago
> You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. That's not a correctly calibrated TV. The contrast is tuned WAY up. People do that to see what's going on in the dark, but you aren't meant to really be able to see those colors. That's why it's a big dark blob. It's supposed to be barely visible on a well calibrated display. A lot of video codecs will erase details in dark scenes because those details aren't supposed to be visible. Now, I will say that streaming services are tuning that too aggressively. But I'll also say that a lot of people have miscalibrated displays. People simply like to be able to make out every detail in the dark. Those two things come in conflict with one another causing the effect you see above.
- amiga386 1y ago
  > but you aren't meant to really be able to see those colors Someone needs to tell filmmakers. They shoot dark scenes because they can - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4 - and it ends up looking like shit after compression that assumes normal lighting levels.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    As I said, I think the streamer services have too aggressive settings there. But that doesn't change the fact that the a lot of people have their contrast settings over tuned. It should be noted, as well, that this generally isn't a "not enough bits" problem. There are literally codec settings to tune which decide when to start smearing the darkness. On a few codecs (such as VP1) those values are pretty badly set by default. I suspect streaming services aren't far off from those defaults. The codec settings are instead prioritizing putting bits into the lit parts of a scene rather than sparing a few for the darkness like you might like.
  - toofy 1y ago
    > Someone needs to tell filmmakers. They shoot dark scenes because they can… i disagree completely. i watch a movie for the filmmakers story, i don’t watch movies to marvel at compression algorithms. it would be ridiculous to watch movies shot with only bright scenes because streaming service accountants won’t stop abusing compression to save some pennies. > …ends up looking like shit after compression that assumes normal lighting levels. it’s entirely normal to have dark scenes in movies. streaming services are failing if they’re using compression algorithms untuned to do dark scenes when soooo many movies and series are absolutely full of night shots.
TheJoeMan 1y ago
I’m still so surprised Disney+ degrades their content/streaming service so much. Of all the main services I’ve tried (Netflix, Prime, Hulu, HBO) Disney+ has some of the worst over-compression, lip-sync, and remembering-which-episode-is-next issues for me. Takes away from the “magic”.
- ksec 1y ago
  This is interesting because Disney+ when they started out were using much higher bitrate, 2nd only to Apple+.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  Netflix now this on their lowest paid tier as well. I had to upgrade to the 4K tier just to get somewhat-ok 1080p playback...
- thevagrant 1y ago
  Check your settings. I experienced the same until I altered Apple TV settings that fixed Disney+. If I recall, the setting was Match content or Match dynamic range (not near tv right now to confirm exact name)
tliltocatl 1y ago
Economically speaking, it doesn't make any sense for them to spend more on bandwidth and storage if they can get away with not spending more.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
thunderfork 1y ago
[dead]
strogonoff 1y ago
Content delivery costs a lot for streaming services. After content is produced, this is basically the only remaining cost. It’s not surprising that they would go to extreme measures in reducing bitrate. That’s why, presumably, Netflix came up with the algorithm for removing camera grain and adding synthetically generated noise on the client[0], and why YouTube shorts were recently in the news for using extreme denoising[1]. Noise is random and therefore difficult to compress while preserving its pleasing appearance, so they really like the idea of serving everything denoised as much as possible. (The catch, of course, is that removing noise from live camera footage generally implies compromising the very fine details captured by the camera as a side effect.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456779 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022184
- abound 1y ago
  This isn't strictly Netflix per se, it's part of the AV1 codec itself, e.g. https://github.com/BlueSwordM/SVT-AV1/blob/master/Docs/Appendix-Film-Grain-Synthesis.md https://github.com/BlueSwordM/SVT-AV1/blob/master/Docs/Appen...
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    Yes, I was not strictly correct, it is a feature of AV1, but Netflix played an active role in its development, in rolling out the first implementation, and in AV1 codec development overall.
    - astrange 1y ago
      Prior codecs all had film grain synthesis too (at least back to H264), but nobody used it. Partly because it was obviously artificial and partly because it was too expensive to render, since you had to copy each frame to apply effects to it.
      - tverbeure 1y ago
        AFAIK, FGS support is the exception instead of the rule. h.264 only had FGS as an afterthought, introduced years after the spec was ratified. No wonder it wasn’t widely adopted. VP9, h.265 and h.266 don’t have FGS.
ksec 1y ago
>Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? Before COVID Netflix were at least using 8Mbps for 1080P content. With x264 / beamr it is pretty good, and even better on HEVC. Then COVID hit, every streaming service not just Netflix have excuses to lower their quality due to increased demand with limited bandwidth. Everything went down hill since then. Customer got used to lower quality I dont believe they ever bring it back up. Now it is only something like 3-5Mbps according to previous test posted on HN. And while it is easy for HEVC / AV1 / AV2 to have 50%+ bitrate real world savings compared to H.264 saving at 0.5 - 4Mbps range, once you go pass that the savings begin to shrink rapidly to the point good old x264 encoder may perform better at much higher bitrate.
- ls612 1y ago
  Most 1080p WEB-DLs are in the 6-8 Mbps range still, based on a quick glance.
  - ksec 1y ago
    Nice. There was a previous post on HN with showing the 5 to 6 samples he had were from 3 - 5Mbps.
    - ls612 1y ago
      Some lower bitrate shows are animated cartoons where far less bitrate is really needed. I’m sure you could find some awful compression botches if you really looked on a public tracker though.
- goeiedaggoeie 1y ago
  Netflix also has a huge incentive to not use h265 and h264, licensing cost.
andsoitis 1y ago
> Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. That I find super hard to believe!
- axiolite 1y ago
  Why? ATSC is 19Mbps. A single 1080i video using that whole bitrate will look quite good.
  - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
    that's 19mbps including error correction. only 10 after, and that's using mpeg2 which is probably roughly equivalent to 6-7mbps av1
    - axiolite 1y ago
      "A terrestrial (over-the-air) transmission carries 19.39 megabits of data per second (a fluctuating bandwidth of about 18.3 Mbit/s left after overhead such as error correction, program guide, closed captioning, etc.)," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards#MPEG-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards#MPEG-2
      - ValdikSS 1y ago
        But that's the whole multiplex, right? It could be a single channel, but usually you have many in the multiplex. I don't know how it works in the US, but for DVB-T(2) that's how it is.
        axiolite 1y ago
        Circa 2009 when analog TV was first shut-off in the US, each DTV station usually only had one channel, or perhaps a second basic one like a static weather radar on-screen. Some did have 3 or 4 sub-channels early on, but it was uncommon. Circa 2019, after the FCC "repack" / "incentive auction" (to free-up TV channels for cellular LTE use) it became very common for each RF channel to carry 4+ channels. But to be fair, many broadcasters did purchase new, improved MPEG-2 encoders at that time, which do perform better with a lower bit-rate, so quality didn't degrade by a lot.
yalogin 1y ago
I don't quite follow why compression would cause this. Feels more like a side effect of adaptive HTTPS streaming protocol where it would automatically adjust based on your connection speed, and so aligns with any jitter on the wire. It could also be an issue with the software implementation because they need to constantly switch between streams based on bandwidth.
- pkulak 1y ago
  > side effect of adaptive HTTPS streaming Adaptive streaming isn't really adaptive anymore. If you have any kind of modern broadband, the most adaptive it will be is starting off in one of the lower bitrates for the first 6 seconds before jumping to the top, where it will stay for the duration of the stream. A lot of clients don't even bother with that anymore; they look at the manifest, find the highest stream, and just start there.
mouthwooed 1y ago
[dead]
pkulak 1y ago
Are you sure about the black-areas-blocking? I remember a long time ago, when I was younger and had time for this kind of tomfoolery, I noticed this exact issue in my BlueRay backups. I figured I needed to up the bitrate, so I started testing, upping the bitrate over and over. Finally, I played the BlueRay and it was still there. This was an old-school, dual-layer, 100GB disc of one of the Harry Potter movies. Still saw the blocking in very dark gradients.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  the downside of 8 bits per channel is you really don't have enough to get a smooth gradient over dark colors.
  - pkulak 1y ago
    Yup. I think that’s exactly it.
axiolite 1y ago
> You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. That can happen at even the highest bitrates if "HDR" is not enabled in the video codec. Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9j89L8eQQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9j89L8eQQk
- scns 1y ago
  Whoa. That is the best thing i watched on YouTube in a long time. Thank you.
michaelsshaw 1y ago
As a little experiment, I'd like you to set up your own little streaming service on a server and see how much bandwidth it uses, even for just a few users. It adds up extremely quickly, with the actual using being quite surprising. At the higher prices, I'd have to agree with you. If you pay for the best you should get the best.
fuzzfactor 1y ago
>the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. The biggest jump in quality was when everything was still analog over the air, but getting ready for the digital transition. Then digital over the air bumped it up a notch. You could really see this happen on a big CRT monitor with the "All-in-Wonder" television receiver PCI graphics adapter card. You plugged in your outdoor antenna or indoor rabbit ears to the back of the PC, then tuned in the channels using software. These were made by ATI before being acquired by AMD, the TV tuner was in a faraday cage right on the same PCB as the early GPU. The raw analog signal was upscaled to your adapter's resolution setting before going to the CRT so you had pseudo better resolution than a good TV like a Trinitron. You really could see more details and the CRT was smooth as butter. As the TV broadcaster's entire equipment chain was replaced, like camera lenses, digital sensors and signal processing they eventually had everything in place and working. You could notice these incremental upgrades until a complete digital chain was established as designed. It was really jaw-dropping. This was well in advance of the deadline for digital deployment, so the signal over-the-air was still coming in analog the same old way. Eventually the broadcast signal switched to digital and the analog lights went out, plus the All-in-Wonder was not ideal with a cheap converter like analog TV's could get by with. But it was still better than most digital TVs for a few years, then it took years more before you could see the ball in live sports as well as on a CRT anyway. Now that's about all you've got for full digital resolution, live broadcasts from your local stations, especially live sports from a strong interference-free station over an antenna. You can switch between the antenna and cable and tell the difference when they're both not overly compressed. The only thing was, digital engineers "forgot" that TV was based on radio (who knew?) so for the vast majority of "listeners" on the fringe reception areas who could get clear audio but usually not a clear picture if any, too bad for you. You're gonna need a bigger antenna, good enough to have gotten you a clear picture during the analog days. Otherwise your "clean" digital audio may silently appear on the screen as video, "hidden" within the sparse blocks of scattered random digital noise. When anything does appear at all.
stavros 1y ago
Well, you'll be happy to learn that AV2 delivers 30% better quality for the same bitrate!
GeekyBear 1y ago
Not all video streaming services choose to use the same extremely low average video bit rate used by Netflix on some of their 4k shows. Kate - Netflix - 11.15 Mbps Andor - Disney - 15.03 Mbps Jack Ryan - Amazon - 15.02 Mbps The Last of Us - Max - 19.96 Mbps For All Mankind - Apple - 25.12 Mbps https://hd-report.com/streaming-bitrates-of-popular-movies-shows/ https://hd-report.com/streaming-bitrates-of-popular-movies-s...
- leakycap 1y ago
  Netflix has shown they're the mattress-company equivalent of streaming services. You will be made to feel the springs on the cheapest plan/mattress, and it's on purpose so you'll pay them more for something that costs them almost nothing.
tuna74 1y ago
Isn't Sony Bravia Core supposed to be UHD Blu-ray quality?
cypherg 1y ago
and this is why I don't look down on those who choose to pirate bluray/4k content
pwarner 1y ago
4K Blu-ray is the top quality.
nerdsniper 1y ago
I pirate blu-ray rips. Pirates are very fastidious about maintaining visual quality in their encodings. I often see them arguing over artifacts that I absolutely cannot see with my eyes.

RamRodification 1y ago

It's a little surprising to me that there generally aren't more subscription tiers where you can pay more for higher quality. Seems like free money, from people like you (maybe) and me.

Avamander 1y ago
You can already pay for 4K or "enhanced bitrate" but it's still relatively low bitrate and what's worse, this service quality is not guaranteed. I've had Apple TV+ downgrade to 1080p and lower on a wired gigabit connection so many times.
- Neywiny 1y ago
  And on top of that a lot of streaming services don't go above 1080p on desktop, and even getting them to that point is a mess of DRM. I sometimes wonder if this is the YouTube powerhouse casting a bad shadow. As LTT says, don't try to compete with YouTube. They serve so much video bandwidth it's impossible to attempt. So all these kinda startup streaming services can't do 4k. Too much bandwidth.
mdasen 1y ago
I'm not surprised they don't offer an even higher tier. When you're pricing things, you often need to use proxies - like 1080p and 4K. It'd be hard to offer 3 pricing tiers: 1080p, 4K, 4K but actually good 4K that we don't compress to hell. That third tier makes it seem like you're being a bit fraudulent with the second tier. You're essentially admitting that you've created a fake-4K tier to take people's money without delivering them the product they think they're buying. At some point, a class-action lawsuit would use that as a sort of admission that you knew you weren't giving customers what they were paying for and that it was being done intentionally, both of which matter a lot. Right now, Netflix can say stuff like "we think the 4K video we're serving is just as good." If they offer a real-4K tier, it's hard to make that argument.
- redox99 1y ago
  YouTube does 1080p premium without much problem.

Boss0565 1y ago

Seems like piracy is the way for you

nani8ot 1y ago
Sadly many shows aren't released on BluRay anymore, so even piracy won't deliver better quality.
- rokweom 1y ago
  Piracy enables you to do things like debanding on playback, or more advanced video filtering to remove other compression issues.
- ValentineC 1y ago
  I believe many sites still prefer Amazon webrips because their content is encoded at a higher bitrate than Netflix.
- goeiedaggoeie 1y ago
  darn pirates should run the content through a super resolution model!

andrepd 1y ago

Ironically, piracy gives you yet again a better service. Thanks QxR.

nickthegreek 1y ago

for the super affluent, https://www.kaleidescape.com/compare/ https://www.kaleidescape.com/compare/

muststopmyths 1y ago
Fascinating. Pricing, if I am reading the site correctly: $7k-ish for a server (+$ for local disks, one assumes), $2-5k per client. So you download the movie locally to your server and play it on clients scattered throughout your mansion/property. Not out of the world for people who drop 10s of thousands on home theater. I wonder if that's what the Elysium types use in their NZ bunkers. No true self-respecting, self-described techie (Scotsman) would use it instead of building their own of course.
rokweom 1y ago
Funny that they're marketing the supposed advantages of higher bitrates using pictures with altered contrast and saturation lol. I would expect the target audience to be somewhat affluent in the actual benefits? Then again, I wouldn't expect somebody like Scorsese to be a video compression nerd. Also the whole "you can hear more with lossless audio" is just straight up a lie.
dogma1138 1y ago
This has been more or less proven to be a complete scam, the quality isn’t any better than Blu-ray and in many cases worse. The “best” quality of streaming you have is Sony Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Core but it has a rather limited library.
- mkozlows 1y ago
  "Not any better than Blu-ray" is the same as saying "much better than streaming."
- kodt 1y ago
  I think there are a few examples where the bitrate is higher than a native rip however.

cogman10 1y ago

> You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. That's not a correctly calibrated TV. The contrast is tuned WAY up. People do that to see what's going on in the dark, but you aren't meant to really be able to see those colors. That's why it's a big dark blob. It's supposed to be barely visible on a well calibrated display. A lot of video codecs will erase details in dark scenes because those details aren't supposed to be visible. Now, I will say that streaming services are tuning that too aggressively. But I'll also say that a lot of people have miscalibrated displays. People simply like to be able to make out every detail in the dark. Those two things come in conflict with one another causing the effect you see above.

amiga386 1y ago
> but you aren't meant to really be able to see those colors Someone needs to tell filmmakers. They shoot dark scenes because they can - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4 - and it ends up looking like shit after compression that assumes normal lighting levels.
- cogman10 1y ago
  As I said, I think the streamer services have too aggressive settings there. But that doesn't change the fact that the a lot of people have their contrast settings over tuned. It should be noted, as well, that this generally isn't a "not enough bits" problem. There are literally codec settings to tune which decide when to start smearing the darkness. On a few codecs (such as VP1) those values are pretty badly set by default. I suspect streaming services aren't far off from those defaults. The codec settings are instead prioritizing putting bits into the lit parts of a scene rather than sparing a few for the darkness like you might like.
- toofy 1y ago
  > Someone needs to tell filmmakers. They shoot dark scenes because they can… i disagree completely. i watch a movie for the filmmakers story, i don’t watch movies to marvel at compression algorithms. it would be ridiculous to watch movies shot with only bright scenes because streaming service accountants won’t stop abusing compression to save some pennies. > …ends up looking like shit after compression that assumes normal lighting levels. it’s entirely normal to have dark scenes in movies. streaming services are failing if they’re using compression algorithms untuned to do dark scenes when soooo many movies and series are absolutely full of night shots.

TheJoeMan 1y ago

I’m still so surprised Disney+ degrades their content/streaming service so much. Of all the main services I’ve tried (Netflix, Prime, Hulu, HBO) Disney+ has some of the worst over-compression, lip-sync, and remembering-which-episode-is-next issues for me. Takes away from the “magic”.

ksec 1y ago
This is interesting because Disney+ when they started out were using much higher bitrate, 2nd only to Apple+.
swiftcoder 1y ago
Netflix now this on their lowest paid tier as well. I had to upgrade to the 4K tier just to get somewhat-ok 1080p playback...
thevagrant 1y ago
Check your settings. I experienced the same until I altered Apple TV settings that fixed Disney+. If I recall, the setting was Match content or Match dynamic range (not near tv right now to confirm exact name)

tliltocatl 1y ago

Economically speaking, it doesn't make any sense for them to spend more on bandwidth and storage if they can get away with not spending more.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

thunderfork 1y ago

[dead]

strogonoff 1y ago

Content delivery costs a lot for streaming services. After content is produced, this is basically the only remaining cost. It’s not surprising that they would go to extreme measures in reducing bitrate. That’s why, presumably, Netflix came up with the algorithm for removing camera grain and adding synthetically generated noise on the client[0], and why YouTube shorts were recently in the news for using extreme denoising[1]. Noise is random and therefore difficult to compress while preserving its pleasing appearance, so they really like the idea of serving everything denoised as much as possible. (The catch, of course, is that removing noise from live camera footage generally implies compromising the very fine details captured by the camera as a side effect.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456779 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022184

abound 1y ago
This isn't strictly Netflix per se, it's part of the AV1 codec itself, e.g. https://github.com/BlueSwordM/SVT-AV1/blob/master/Docs/Appendix-Film-Grain-Synthesis.md https://github.com/BlueSwordM/SVT-AV1/blob/master/Docs/Appen...
- strogonoff 1y ago
  Yes, I was not strictly correct, it is a feature of AV1, but Netflix played an active role in its development, in rolling out the first implementation, and in AV1 codec development overall.
  - astrange 1y ago
    Prior codecs all had film grain synthesis too (at least back to H264), but nobody used it. Partly because it was obviously artificial and partly because it was too expensive to render, since you had to copy each frame to apply effects to it.
    - tverbeure 1y ago
      AFAIK, FGS support is the exception instead of the rule. h.264 only had FGS as an afterthought, introduced years after the spec was ratified. No wonder it wasn’t widely adopted. VP9, h.265 and h.266 don’t have FGS.

ksec 1y ago

>Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? Before COVID Netflix were at least using 8Mbps for 1080P content. With x264 / beamr it is pretty good, and even better on HEVC. Then COVID hit, every streaming service not just Netflix have excuses to lower their quality due to increased demand with limited bandwidth. Everything went down hill since then. Customer got used to lower quality I dont believe they ever bring it back up. Now it is only something like 3-5Mbps according to previous test posted on HN. And while it is easy for HEVC / AV1 / AV2 to have 50%+ bitrate real world savings compared to H.264 saving at 0.5 - 4Mbps range, once you go pass that the savings begin to shrink rapidly to the point good old x264 encoder may perform better at much higher bitrate.

ls612 1y ago
Most 1080p WEB-DLs are in the 6-8 Mbps range still, based on a quick glance.
- ksec 1y ago
  Nice. There was a previous post on HN with showing the 5 to 6 samples he had were from 3 - 5Mbps.
  - ls612 1y ago
    Some lower bitrate shows are animated cartoons where far less bitrate is really needed. I’m sure you could find some awful compression botches if you really looked on a public tracker though.
goeiedaggoeie 1y ago
Netflix also has a huge incentive to not use h265 and h264, licensing cost.

andsoitis 1y ago

> Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. That I find super hard to believe!

axiolite 1y ago
Why? ATSC is 19Mbps. A single 1080i video using that whole bitrate will look quite good.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  that's 19mbps including error correction. only 10 after, and that's using mpeg2 which is probably roughly equivalent to 6-7mbps av1
  - axiolite 1y ago
    "A terrestrial (over-the-air) transmission carries 19.39 megabits of data per second (a fluctuating bandwidth of about 18.3 Mbit/s left after overhead such as error correction, program guide, closed captioning, etc.)," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards#MPEG-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards#MPEG-2
    - ValdikSS 1y ago
      But that's the whole multiplex, right? It could be a single channel, but usually you have many in the multiplex. I don't know how it works in the US, but for DVB-T(2) that's how it is.
      - axiolite 1y ago
        Circa 2009 when analog TV was first shut-off in the US, each DTV station usually only had one channel, or perhaps a second basic one like a static weather radar on-screen. Some did have 3 or 4 sub-channels early on, but it was uncommon. Circa 2019, after the FCC "repack" / "incentive auction" (to free-up TV channels for cellular LTE use) it became very common for each RF channel to carry 4+ channels. But to be fair, many broadcasters did purchase new, improved MPEG-2 encoders at that time, which do perform better with a lower bit-rate, so quality didn't degrade by a lot.

yalogin 1y ago

I don't quite follow why compression would cause this. Feels more like a side effect of adaptive HTTPS streaming protocol where it would automatically adjust based on your connection speed, and so aligns with any jitter on the wire. It could also be an issue with the software implementation because they need to constantly switch between streams based on bandwidth.

pkulak 1y ago
> side effect of adaptive HTTPS streaming Adaptive streaming isn't really adaptive anymore. If you have any kind of modern broadband, the most adaptive it will be is starting off in one of the lower bitrates for the first 6 seconds before jumping to the top, where it will stay for the duration of the stream. A lot of clients don't even bother with that anymore; they look at the manifest, find the highest stream, and just start there.

mouthwooed 1y ago

[dead]

pkulak 1y ago

Are you sure about the black-areas-blocking? I remember a long time ago, when I was younger and had time for this kind of tomfoolery, I noticed this exact issue in my BlueRay backups. I figured I needed to up the bitrate, so I started testing, upping the bitrate over and over. Finally, I played the BlueRay and it was still there. This was an old-school, dual-layer, 100GB disc of one of the Harry Potter movies. Still saw the blocking in very dark gradients.

adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
the downside of 8 bits per channel is you really don't have enough to get a smooth gradient over dark colors.
- pkulak 1y ago
  Yup. I think that’s exactly it.

axiolite 1y ago

> You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. That can happen at even the highest bitrates if "HDR" is not enabled in the video codec. Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9j89L8eQQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9j89L8eQQk

scns 1y ago
Whoa. That is the best thing i watched on YouTube in a long time. Thank you.

michaelsshaw 1y ago

As a little experiment, I'd like you to set up your own little streaming service on a server and see how much bandwidth it uses, even for just a few users. It adds up extremely quickly, with the actual using being quite surprising. At the higher prices, I'd have to agree with you. If you pay for the best you should get the best.

fuzzfactor 1y ago

>the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. The biggest jump in quality was when everything was still analog over the air, but getting ready for the digital transition. Then digital over the air bumped it up a notch. You could really see this happen on a big CRT monitor with the "All-in-Wonder" television receiver PCI graphics adapter card. You plugged in your outdoor antenna or indoor rabbit ears to the back of the PC, then tuned in the channels using software. These were made by ATI before being acquired by AMD, the TV tuner was in a faraday cage right on the same PCB as the early GPU. The raw analog signal was upscaled to your adapter's resolution setting before going to the CRT so you had pseudo better resolution than a good TV like a Trinitron. You really could see more details and the CRT was smooth as butter. As the TV broadcaster's entire equipment chain was replaced, like camera lenses, digital sensors and signal processing they eventually had everything in place and working. You could notice these incremental upgrades until a complete digital chain was established as designed. It was really jaw-dropping. This was well in advance of the deadline for digital deployment, so the signal over-the-air was still coming in analog the same old way. Eventually the broadcast signal switched to digital and the analog lights went out, plus the All-in-Wonder was not ideal with a cheap converter like analog TV's could get by with. But it was still better than most digital TVs for a few years, then it took years more before you could see the ball in live sports as well as on a CRT anyway. Now that's about all you've got for full digital resolution, live broadcasts from your local stations, especially live sports from a strong interference-free station over an antenna. You can switch between the antenna and cable and tell the difference when they're both not overly compressed. The only thing was, digital engineers "forgot" that TV was based on radio (who knew?) so for the vast majority of "listeners" on the fringe reception areas who could get clear audio but usually not a clear picture if any, too bad for you. You're gonna need a bigger antenna, good enough to have gotten you a clear picture during the analog days. Otherwise your "clean" digital audio may silently appear on the screen as video, "hidden" within the sparse blocks of scattered random digital noise. When anything does appear at all.

stavros 1y ago

Well, you'll be happy to learn that AV2 delivers 30% better quality for the same bitrate!

GeekyBear 1y ago

Not all video streaming services choose to use the same extremely low average video bit rate used by Netflix on some of their 4k shows. Kate - Netflix - 11.15 Mbps Andor - Disney - 15.03 Mbps Jack Ryan - Amazon - 15.02 Mbps The Last of Us - Max - 19.96 Mbps For All Mankind - Apple - 25.12 Mbps https://hd-report.com/streaming-bitrates-of-popular-movies-shows/ https://hd-report.com/streaming-bitrates-of-popular-movies-s...

leakycap 1y ago
Netflix has shown they're the mattress-company equivalent of streaming services. You will be made to feel the springs on the cheapest plan/mattress, and it's on purpose so you'll pay them more for something that costs them almost nothing.

tuna74 1y ago

Isn't Sony Bravia Core supposed to be UHD Blu-ray quality?

cypherg 1y ago

and this is why I don't look down on those who choose to pirate bluray/4k content

pwarner 1y ago

4K Blu-ray is the top quality.

nerdsniper 1y ago

I pirate blu-ray rips. Pirates are very fastidious about maintaining visual quality in their encodings. I often see them arguing over artifacts that I absolutely cannot see with my eyes.