Decreasing the gamut before encoding is not my definition of "advanced video encoding". I"d like to call it "ghetto video encoding" instead.
What bothers me most about it, is that many people are slowly getting used to it. It also makes me feel sorry for the people who worked hard on the production. Very few people will ever see the true quality of their work.
To be fair, the new test footage that Netflix released (into creative commons even) explicitly tries to protect against that to some degree. Some shots in the new footage use HDR to crank brightness up to a requested 4000 nits on the subject, while still having a mathematical-black background. (You can even compare the raw *.mxf to say, YouTube's 1080p version of it, and see the difference.
It's pretty clever, many of the shots seem clearly designed to stress-test common encoder issues and failures -- they put thought and care into it, and it shows.
Maybe Netflix will lower its standards for production as well. Right now if you want to create content for Netflix you need to buy like a $30,000 camera .
What's the point of all that, if I can shoot 4K on a $2,000 camera and it's going to get compressed heavily anyway.
I actually think streaming would be best for lower budget productions, I'm not fully engaged when I watch something on Netflix anyway. It's kind of strange to see them spend $200 million or so on a movie knowing that I'm doing a million other things while it's on.
Good catch, you're probably still out closer to 3 or 4k with a lens, but it's definitely obtainable.
I'm more disappointed my cheaper Canon isn't eligible. When I think about it, there's no reason every single streaming movie even needs to be in 4K. It's going to be compressed heavily anyway .
> When I think about it, there's no reason every single streaming movie even needs to be in 4K.
I agree. I'd rather have better audio and actors not whisper their lines, forcing you to either turn on CC or turn up the volume. I wouldn't want to purposefully stream in 4k anyway - I don't really have a reason.
The content I watch on YT is, IMO, much more interesting than the netflix shows anyway, and recorded with much less expensive gear.
Partly future-proofing, partly you want to have the best possible input data so that your output data, even when heavily compressed, can be the best it can be.
But, for the future internet and compression compute 8-15 years later, the existing content will be streamed better. It's probably not too much to ask for if the cameras are available today for it.
Netflix standards are so dumb. They asked for a 4K camera before Alexa had widely available 4K outside of the huge Alexa 65, and they got a bunch of shows that look terrible for it since the whole industry had standardized around Alexa pipes and people were forced to use other cameras.
I wonder if these giant companies constantly trying to squeeze extra microcents out of everything is why pretty much all online video now looks horrible, despite us having the sharpest displays, fastest processors and fastest Internet in the history of mankind..
Yes, yes it is. I personally have just started to torrent stuff even if it is on the streaming services I am a subscriber to because the quality is just so much better even though both are called 1080p.
No, because as others said, there are a bunch of checks that Netflix does to check whether your internet is fast enough etc. even if you get 1080p you will likely get a fairly compressed image. It’s possible that Netflix over filters for internet speed leaving you with inferior quality.
Or you could use a 4K stream from Netflix (only available to premium premium subs) and encode it down to HD and likely get a better image.
> It’s possible that Netflix over filters for internet speed leaving you with inferior quality.
This is absolutely true for all the streaming platforms. My Jellyfin/Plex servers with pirated content are set up in a fairly ridiculous way: I use sshfs across multiple seed boxes located on different continents to "merge" the filesystems in a way that is transparent-enough to Jellyfin that one server will serve up all the content.
Even with this somewhat-absurd daisy-chaining, I can serve much higher bitrates to my home than Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Hulu, etc. The encoding quality is much better and even completely video-naive guests who know nothing about technology notice the difference and comment "Wow, the picture quality is so good!", especially with anything like Dune 2 or Planet Earth. Even when the video gets transcoded on the fly for device-compatibility, while it's degraded, it ends up still being better visual quality than the major streaming services.
The streaming platforms are definitely optimizing for minimizing their costs rather than serving decent bitrates that the user-agent can handle.
If you really care about visual quality, I do reccomend trying to get a membership to PassThePopcorn, or rip content from BluRays yourself, which you can rent from libraries. Ripping is really not much effort once you learn enough to do it once or twice.
I'll start using the major streaming services again when I can actually receive not-mangled visual quality from them.
Likewise, for shows that are on more than one service, or available on e.g. Paramount+ on Prime in addition to just on Paramount+, torrenting groups pick the highest bitrate/quality sources.
Yes, it's crazy to me that Netflix puts so much effort into improving encode quality, and then they don't let most people see that version -- almost no one gets to see the "good" versions of their encodes.
Whether it's because Netflix locks the good high-bitrate encodes to the most expensive subscription plans many people aren't on, or because their "Roku 4K" or "Fire TV 4K" or whatever is actually negotiating the 1080p-H.264-low-bitrate stream, or because their internet connection latency was auto-detected too low, or their device doesn't have enough memory to buffer nicely or whatever.
I bet Netflix is absolutely capable of delivering something really nice. But in my experience, Netflix quality as delivered looks about on-par with "YouTube free 1080p" -- so much so, that even plugging in a 1080p-only-Blu-Ray, is a huge improvement even non-techie folks can notice.
1080p blu ray’s 50 Mbps vs Netflix 4K 15 Mbps [1]. Hell yea blu ray is so great to watch. Plus, no random drops in quality and dts audio basically guaranteed.
I found out the other day that many android set top boxes (and I'd assume smart TVs) aren't Netflix certified and don't get to run a native app but rather the packaged form of their web app.
I think it varies and depends a lot on your connection speed and latency from the nearest source. There's a lot of effort to give a "good enough" quality at different screen sizes, throughput and devices.
Even if you look at torrent content, you can find a given movie anywhere from a few gb (1080p) to a few dozen gb in size at 4k with higher relative throughput and quality. Not to mention the encoder settings.
Personally, I don't go for the highest quality encodes because I don't see the difference well enough. I tend to favor x265 over x264 only because the blur degredation is less annoying than blotchiness imo.
When you are streaming, the level of encoding will swap out, even at the same resolution a number of times depending on what you're getting. You may well do better with a 1080p stream over a 4k stream depending on your screen and device's upscaling behavior. 4k takes at least 4x the bandwidth, and has tighter latency needs. There are others that can go over this and explain it much better than I can, but it's not malicious, it's partly cost sure, but it's also a matter of what your connection can handle.
Netflix, Disney+, and others don’t allow better quality than 1080p on laptops. I think Disney+ doesn’t even allow more than 720p. So they are never 4K. It’s quite annoying and obvious on large monitors.
> Reed Hastings announced that the company was expanding into almost every country around the world — including markets with subpar broadband infrastructure and consumers who primarily accessed the internet from their mobile phone.
The optimistic take here is that the purpose of this encoding work is to make Netflix accessible consumers in ALL countries- not consumers with beefy internet.
IMO the realistic take is that Netflix knows it can do this while saving $$$ serving lower quality video to consumers who cant tell the difference.
This is some really glorified PR that's either dumbed down or extremely excessive in attributing basic insights and algorithms to Netflix itself
I got into programming/software by encoding my cough well-sourced cough movies/TV shows to MP4 for my iPod video.
Far be it from me, maybe it's insufferably geeky detail, but the slow decade-long march described as "gee each movie is different" and "gee each scene is different" followed by Herculean work of FAANGers insufficiently appreciated by creative types was solved by VBR years upon years earlier. (VBR = variable bit rate)
Once you're getting to "we'll use ML as a VBR algorithm!", that's original, but the problems described and solution was understandable and solvable by a 18 year old non-programmer in 2007 with free software.
VBR wasn't some niche thing either, it's a very very obvious optimization I've never seen a codec miss, from MP3 audio to MP4 video. There's no caveats here or haughtiness or flippant "Dropbox is rsync + my weekend" dismissiveness on my part. It wasn't news to _anyone_, it's a very obvious optimization that was applied by everyone
I'd be veeeeery curious if there was much contribution here beyond using x264, occasionally with patches, and then engineering a pipeline around it
I detest Netflix and other streamers recent fashion for using letterbox format - completely wasting a significant chunk of my precious screen real estate.
Why do idiot directors think this is a good thing? These will never be shown in cinemas and even there the best format is Imax which has even more vertical space than 16:9 TVs
As a professional industry, Hollywood is probably the worst offender when it comes to being so obsessed with itself that it genuinely can’t tell when it’s doing something in service of pandering to and perpetuating its own weird culture.
I kind of look at this in the same way as the fact that so many movies or TV shows can’t help but eventually have a plot where someone makes a movie or a TV show, maybe at a stretch a stage production. And, somehow, all the characters know a whole lot about stage productions.
eventually, i hope the entire wall can be a high resolution screen so that whatever aspect the artist chose, can be represented in sufficient size, we shouldn't have to care about "wasted screen real estate", creators should be free to record their work in whatever aspect they feel conveys their idea the best.
Then it gets fun. "It'll be even more fun when we can afford to have the fourth wall installed. How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in? It's only two thousand dollars."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
Funny how they care about encoding quality only by sponsoring such articles, but not by really improving the encoding quality <3
Dark scenes are just awful, rest gets awful only in 4k. In 1080p it’s just bad.
Even better they „researched” better metrics like pVMAF so they can again show how good they are, in theory.
Maybe it’s just me, but I would much rather watch a higher bitrate 1080p copy of a movie than a horribly encoded 4k copy. I also wish that we had made 1080p60 commonplace for sports before trying to make the jump to 4k. Seems like the industry has just focused on “big number better” instead of making a product that actually looks better.
Yeah, the industry focused on 4k (and soon to be 8k) for some reason. I guess the same reason there's a decrease in good acting and an increase in special effects.
Per-shot encoding sounds like something that should be handled by multipass encoding. Presumably it isn't - so I'm wondering what is failing in those encoders to make it necessary to tweak settings that much.
Or are they just aggressively searching for corners to cut to save bits?
You're 100% right, the first instinct a programmer would have as a codec dev is "gee we def don't need that many bits to encode pure black frames"
I can't wrap my mind around this article and exactly what's going on because AFAIK VBR has been default ~forever. You don't even need multipass for that because you just have to look ahead N frames, it was received wisdom, statistically backed, as far back as 2007 that multipass was a waste of time because it was extremely marginally, like .0001%, better than just doing VBR, and using CBR was really dumb and wrong unless you had very specific edge case technical needs. I can't even remember what, maybe poorly designed initial H.264 decoders or people feeding into legacy broadcast system
I'm a little surprised that we haven't seen something more AI driven yet. (yes yes buzzword I know)
i.e. slice it not just into scenes but also into objects and do bitrate on that level. i.e. Face and objects in foreground get more. It seems we now have pretty small models that can do that sort of stuff (see Apple & MS ones recently) so should be feasible at scale.
I'd imagine you can also train an LLM on patterns that encoders choke on...chequered patterns etc.
Encoders have been doing that for decades at this point.
AI-related models are actively being researched for multiple applications in video encoding. From generating predicted frames, to generating fine details, choosing tools and parameters for each frame, narrowing the search space, etc.
We've experimented with that at SVT (Sweden's public service broadcaster). Or rather, the video team has, I'm just a web dev, so I don't know the details other than what's in this blog post:
After he got kicked out of MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione opened his own standards organization[0] called MPAI, which is focused primarily on... standardizing machine learning techniques for video coding tools.
I'm not sure if they've actually shipped anything yet, though.
You mean transformer/diffuser based when you are talking about AI in this context? Because there are a lot of ml papers out there for encoding video. Stadia (RIP), Parsecs, Epic (Unreal Pixel streaming), META, Apple and Nvidia doing amazing stuff for their streaming services/VR/AR plays.
If the model can figure out the key objects in the scene on a bit more deeper level then that can drive what parts the encoder needs to spend more bits on
Then we can have many 6-fingered characters and other hallucinations. It's all fiction anyways so what's one for a other? I hope it either gets great fast or phases out as a fad.
That makes sense and shouldn't have been that difficult anyway. For the barbie glitter scene there's obviously more chroma 'texture' to apply variable bitrates. Flat colored scenes could continue using lower bitrates. Where more complex models could be useful is avoiding entropy coding of useless details etc (e.g. if those details were artifacts of processing in the first place).
This is the main reason why I don't use Netflix or other services. It sucks when I'm in the middle of watching a movie and the quality drops significantly. Maybe things have changed, but I really wished there was an option to control buffering and force certain resolutions. I'm willing to wait longer for a movie to start playing if that means higher quality. The fact they remove that choice is why I prefer to obtain media by other means.
I don't really know what people "generally" think of Netflix encoding, but my experience is that it's Very Bad. It's a combination of factors:
- Netflix will only send you "high quality" (over 720p) streams on certain browsers (IE on windows, Safari on OSX, ???? on Linux) that support Encrypted Media Extensions.
- Netflix also auto-scales the quality they are sending based on their understanding of your connection.
- Also apparently they do per-title re-encoding passes.
This all combines, in my experience, to on average the worst streaming quality overall and also the most opaque. There are debug modes you can enable to see some of this, but generally it's very hard to tell what quality you are looking at and what is preventing you from getting a nicer quality. I also find that Netflix's "low profile" content (i.e. not max quality) looks bad - i.e. the 720p stream looks quite bad in addition to being low resolution.
> Netflix will only send you "high quality" streams on certain browsers [...] that support Encrypted Media Extensions.
They won't send you anything at all unless you have EME, coupled to a supported DRM engine. Getting >1080p requires a "more secure" DRM engine (e.g. Widevine L1, PlayReady SL3000)
> - Netflix will only send you "high quality" (over 720p) streams on certain browsers (IE on windows, Safari on OSX, ???? on Linux) that support Encrypted Media Extensions.
It's not only netflix that does this, all of the streaming services do (though some of them limit to 1080p instead of 720p).
Such an utterly pointless anti-piracy measure... every show ends up on torrents in 4k regardless, only serves to punish those actually paying for the service.
I believe it's rooted in agreements that content producers (including Netflix I am sure) insist on for distributing media. My impression is that all anti-piracy measures are intended to "just" extend the exclusivity period for official sources for that media. So almost anything you can do to delay high quality rips appearing will be worthwhile for the company financially.
It's similar with YouTube's premium content, i.e. DRM-protected films or series available for rent or purchase on YouTube. It plays at a maximum of 480P on most desktop browsers, including Google's own Chrome for Windows. (Disclaimer: I haven't checked this recently, I'm assuming the situation hasn't improved.)
I thought the same, but it turns out I have quite a number of friends (especially younger, who are sharing apartments with flatmates etc.) who don't have a TV or tablet, and who will just sit on their bed or couch with a laptop for netflix and such. This is totally anecdotal of course, but I do feel like it might be the device stats are quite different from what we might expect.
They are, but only in that you would be surprised at how tiny the PC usage is to most online video streamers, it's even smaller than anyone would expect.
Because of this quality issue, I always wondered how people who rip Netflix content handle this, since they often offer 2160p Dolby Atmos versions of movies or even TV show episodes for download.
How do they maintain the quality long enough to rip the content? When I used Netflix years ago, I could barely keep a constant 1080p stream at times.
I suspect that what you receive is determined client-side in software, and with some reverse engineering, you could force it to send you whatever quality you want (as long as your subscription allows for that quality level).
Source? It's hard to see how they actually did it when all you have is a .mkv file, but in rare cases I've noticed ui elements/quality drops that was indicative of being ripped via capture cards. Of course, that doesn't mean all rips are done this way, but it's pretty hard to tell the difference between a rip done via capture card done perfectly, and a rip where the underlying stream was decrypted.
I have read a few people commenting that that's how it is done. I read a very good comment once here on hn that described extracting keys from insecure devices (might have been TVs, or possibly an older Android device?), although I can't find the comment now.
Also they often contain every subtitle and audio track (often 40 subtitle tracks!), which would be either a lot of work or not possible at all if they couldn't extract the stream properly. I suppose they might be able to get those from the low quality unencrypted streams but it just seems implausible.
They release shows pretty much immediately as soon as they are on netflix, don't they?
It seems improbable to me that they are systematically recording and reencoding every show manually, although I guess it could be possible in theory.
A friend of a friend tells me that they've never seen UI elements or quality drops on any scene rips.
All signs seem to point to the encryption being broken in my opinion.
>Also they often contain every subtitle and audio track (often 40 subtitle tracks!), which would be either a lot of work or not possible at all if they couldn't extract the stream properly.
Are subtitle tracks even encrypted? Unlike video, there's no secure path (eg. HDCP) for subtitle (or even audio) tracks, so they're presumably trivial to rip.
If you were ripping via HDMI you'd still need to sync them up though. Not very difficult but tedious. I still believe they're using leaked or hacked keys.
There are devices out there with vulnerable TEEs (trusted execution environments), where DRM operations commonly happen. You can then extract L1 keys from those environments - for example with the Nexus 6[0] NVIDIA Shield[1].
If they know what they're doing, they don't "rip", they use their own client to download the highest quality available directly from the CDN, then strip the DRM.
> Netflix also auto-scales the quality they are sending based on their understanding of your connection.
Netflix dropping to potato quality after a few minutes is infuriating. Refresh the browser and quality goes back up for a few minutes before it drops again. My wife often doesn’t notice it; it drives me nuts. My theory is that they try to save bandwidth by dropping quality after some time and hoping you don’t notice.
For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never had any problem with it.
I’ve got a bookshelf computer hooked up to a 52” 1080p screen in my living room, nothing fancy, and I’ve never noticed any issues at all with quality, or buffering times. I just open the video through the website in chrome, and play it, and it’s fine.
I have a friend who genuinely thinks Dolby Digital Plus ripped from streaming services is higher quality than lossy DTS ripped from a DVD or Blu-ray. Insanity.
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a big increase in the number of encoding artifacts recently?
Rapidly oscillating patches, blurry smears, it’s only Netflix (other video streaming services are fine) its getting quite annoying, a few times it’s been so severe I thought it was a problem with my projector
Definitely noticeable on Netflix, but I also have some specific issues with Amazon Prime, where certain scenes have these weird, thin horizontal artifacts.
I wonder if the issue is the fact that these artifacts are layered on top of processing artifacts from TVs, receivers, streaming devices, and all of that. Does Netflix test their encoding in isolation or in these real life setups?
Seeing how pirate groups have to steal materials from before the pipeline - I think it’s not related to TV or other devices. They just went full „we know better” approach and made just awful bad encoders.
I haven’t watched them in many years but my experience was that compression sucked on dark scenes even in 1080p. On the other hand, you were able to watch on a 3G connection without any buffering bumps
Not just 4K- all resolutions and it's getting worse with plenty of comparisons available online for those who care to look. Streaming video quality has generally declined across all platforms in the last few years with the exception of Apple TV+ and contrary to this puff piece it's to the point it's very noticeable to the discerning end user.
I recall several streaming services reducing their bitrates during the pandemic, ostensibly to offset the increased network load from everyone watching more while stuck at home, did those reductions ever actually get walked back or did they just become the new default?
And I'm sure the content itself is far better too. I hate to admit it since normally I trash Apple, but they've been making some really great shows lately: Silo, Foundation, etc. What has Netflix produced? The Ark? (If you haven't seen it yet, spare yourself lifelong mental scarring and don't. It's hands-down the absolute worst sci-fi I've ever seen in my life, and that includes all the terrible stuff from the 70s I've seen.)
Enshittification makes it sound like it's a natural expected process, for companies to buy their way into dominance the market, destroy competition, then deceive and underserve customers while raking in undeserved profits.
It also fails to lay the blame on Congress and the Administration's doorsteps, where it belongs.
I support your general thrust in spirit, but I think "monopoly" isn't a helpful frame here. Consumers have a glut of options in streaming services: Prime, Max, AppleTV, Hulu, even YouTube (contrast with one of the classic monopolies, AT&T, which for many was the only game in town, unless you consider "write a letter to your friend instead" to be a valid substitution good).
I feel the correct frame is the general category of "market power" (including, but not limited to, the "anti-competitive practices" that forms the basis of current regulatory policy).
In the case of streaming, the closest analogue to monopolization is vertical integration: the custom-produced content which is only accessible on a particular streaming platform (sometimes including no releases on physical media).
On the one hand, Netflix could be considered to have a monopoly over the distribution of "Squid Game" (and Prime over "The Boys", Apple over "Silo", etc), meaning they can raise prices, not for the product itself, but for the "club goods" distribution platform, which the consumer may not be interested in otherwise.
On the other hand, entertainment/culture are not the same kind of "inelastic demand" necessity as telephone service in the past, or internet service now. And when we look at actual outcomes, I'd say quality for vertically-integrated productions are better on average than older business models; and while prices are going up, I wouldn't call them ridiculous price-gouging either (in addition to competing with each other, the streaming services are also competing with piracy and password-sharing).
Anyway, I think it's absolutely the case that enshittification isn't inevitable, and we should be wary of succumbing to learned helplessness in the face of capital consolidation. I would claim it's a "natural expected process" of the shareholder corporation, and the perverse incentives of short-term profits and stock prices, even when it comes at the expense of long-term brand equity. But solving that general problem is probably out of scope for "the bitrate is too damn low and the subscription fees are too damn high".
I'd love to see more regulation in the space, but realistically it'd be tricky (I don't expect any Doctorow-approved abolition of DRM, or mandatory interoperability, anytime soon). One could perhaps establish streaming-quality standards, where a company couldn't advertise "4K" unless it hit some threshold. But when it comes to the issue of streaming quality in particular, I suspect the tragic reality is that the majority of users simply won't notice or care.
I wonder how Anne Aaron came to be the leader for this aspect of the business. Netflix is really only doing re-encoding, which is essentially what all first-tier media pirate groups specialize in. It's interesting the pirate groups deliver much higher quality releases in very bandwidth efficient
formats (x265 is incredible), yet Netflix still consistently looks blocky on my 4k LG with 1Gbit Internet. Also, every dark scene looks doubly atrocious.
You'd think netflix could do better than the ad-hoc groups of individuals who do it for free in their spare time.
What I observed is pirate groups either rip BD, or WEB-DL from Amazon Prime video, unless it is some Netflix / Hulu original content they don't pirate from Netflix due to poor quality.
Netflix is not focusing on quality but saving their delivery cost on bandwidth, which may hurt them later surprisingly.
absolutely crazy how people are trying to convince us that Netflix is doing incredible feats of engineering when the bottom line is to make their streams as cheap as feasibly possible
we've already crossed the line where it creates a garbage viewing experience for the end users, with pixel porridge everywhere and absolutely horrendous visuals in the darks and shadows for every movie and series
netflix engineers are failing (on purpose) to create a decent viewing experience for their users
Netflix's video encoding is really bad, and the showrunners don't seem to know.
Every Netflix show I've seen in the past year (n=3) has had these crazy panning drone shots of forests in winter, with really high f#'s, graphics of a million particles exploding, shots of ocean waves at dusk... basically, they are shooting video encoding stress tests and then encoding them very poorly. The result looks like dogshit.
The people making content generally have no idea about video compression. Or they only understand it at a cursory level. It's a safe bet that set designers and decorators have no idea about video compression. Early productions seemed to understand that aspect but that was mostly in the days of 56K modems and ISDN lines. It was a small enough niche that only technical minded people were doing it.
I have the HD plan, and generally watch upscaled on an ATV 4k. Haven't noticed anything with their encoding at all.
When people say "refreshing their browser" it sounds like they're watching on a PC. That's probably the worst platform to watch on these days, from a market share point of view. Just saying.
Decreasing the gamut before encoding is not my definition of "advanced video encoding". I"d like to call it "ghetto video encoding" instead. What bothers me most about it, is that many people are slowly getting used to it. It also makes me feel sorry for the people who worked hard on the production. Very few people will ever see the true quality of their work.
To be fair, the new test footage that Netflix released (into creative commons even) explicitly tries to protect against that to some degree. Some shots in the new footage use HDR to crank brightness up to a requested 4000 nits on the subject, while still having a mathematical-black background. (You can even compare the raw *.mxf to say, YouTube's 1080p version of it, and see the difference.
Variety's writeup has a bit more technical detail on it - https://variety.com/2016/digital/news/netflix-meridian-imf-t... .
It's pretty clever, many of the shots seem clearly designed to stress-test common encoder issues and failures -- they put thought and care into it, and it shows.
Maybe Netflix will lower its standards for production as well. Right now if you want to create content for Netflix you need to buy like a $30,000 camera .
What's the point of all that, if I can shoot 4K on a $2,000 camera and it's going to get compressed heavily anyway.
I actually think streaming would be best for lower budget productions, I'm not fully engaged when I watch something on Netflix anyway. It's kind of strange to see them spend $200 million or so on a movie knowing that I'm doing a million other things while it's on.
> Right now if you want to create content for Netflix you need to buy like a $30,000 camera .
Just noting that the official guide[0] lists a number of cheaper cameras, including one that retails for $2k (the Panasonic BGH1).
0: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...
Good catch, you're probably still out closer to 3 or 4k with a lens, but it's definitely obtainable.
I'm more disappointed my cheaper Canon isn't eligible. When I think about it, there's no reason every single streaming movie even needs to be in 4K. It's going to be compressed heavily anyway .
> When I think about it, there's no reason every single streaming movie even needs to be in 4K.
I agree. I'd rather have better audio and actors not whisper their lines, forcing you to either turn on CC or turn up the volume. I wouldn't want to purposefully stream in 4k anyway - I don't really have a reason.
The content I watch on YT is, IMO, much more interesting than the netflix shows anyway, and recorded with much less expensive gear.
Partly future-proofing, partly you want to have the best possible input data so that your output data, even when heavily compressed, can be the best it can be.
But, for the future internet and compression compute 8-15 years later, the existing content will be streamed better. It's probably not too much to ask for if the cameras are available today for it.
Netflix standards are so dumb. They asked for a 4K camera before Alexa had widely available 4K outside of the huge Alexa 65, and they got a bunch of shows that look terrible for it since the whole industry had standardized around Alexa pipes and people were forced to use other cameras.
Chroma subsampling is a crime and I hate it.
I wonder if these giant companies constantly trying to squeeze extra microcents out of everything is why pretty much all online video now looks horrible, despite us having the sharpest displays, fastest processors and fastest Internet in the history of mankind..
Yes, yes it is. I personally have just started to torrent stuff even if it is on the streaming services I am a subscriber to because the quality is just so much better even though both are called 1080p.
If it’s a TV show - I’d expect it to be the same quality, because most of those are WEB-DL from those same services, no?
No, because as others said, there are a bunch of checks that Netflix does to check whether your internet is fast enough etc. even if you get 1080p you will likely get a fairly compressed image. It’s possible that Netflix over filters for internet speed leaving you with inferior quality.
Or you could use a 4K stream from Netflix (only available to premium premium subs) and encode it down to HD and likely get a better image.
> It’s possible that Netflix over filters for internet speed leaving you with inferior quality.
This is absolutely true for all the streaming platforms. My Jellyfin/Plex servers with pirated content are set up in a fairly ridiculous way: I use sshfs across multiple seed boxes located on different continents to "merge" the filesystems in a way that is transparent-enough to Jellyfin that one server will serve up all the content.
Even with this somewhat-absurd daisy-chaining, I can serve much higher bitrates to my home than Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Hulu, etc. The encoding quality is much better and even completely video-naive guests who know nothing about technology notice the difference and comment "Wow, the picture quality is so good!", especially with anything like Dune 2 or Planet Earth. Even when the video gets transcoded on the fly for device-compatibility, while it's degraded, it ends up still being better visual quality than the major streaming services.
The streaming platforms are definitely optimizing for minimizing their costs rather than serving decent bitrates that the user-agent can handle.
If you really care about visual quality, I do reccomend trying to get a membership to PassThePopcorn, or rip content from BluRays yourself, which you can rent from libraries. Ripping is really not much effort once you learn enough to do it once or twice.
I'll start using the major streaming services again when I can actually receive not-mangled visual quality from them.
Streaming isn't a particularly profitable business, if you aim to run a sustainable business then you need to optimise.
Added to that, you can comfortably overload an ISP's peering and send infrastructure costs rocketing.
Practicalities, things might work on an individual scale, but when you have millions upon millions of users, it creates problems.
Likewise, for shows that are on more than one service, or available on e.g. Paramount+ on Prime in addition to just on Paramount+, torrenting groups pick the highest bitrate/quality sources.
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Yes, it's crazy to me that Netflix puts so much effort into improving encode quality, and then they don't let most people see that version -- almost no one gets to see the "good" versions of their encodes.
Whether it's because Netflix locks the good high-bitrate encodes to the most expensive subscription plans many people aren't on, or because their "Roku 4K" or "Fire TV 4K" or whatever is actually negotiating the 1080p-H.264-low-bitrate stream, or because their internet connection latency was auto-detected too low, or their device doesn't have enough memory to buffer nicely or whatever.
I bet Netflix is absolutely capable of delivering something really nice. But in my experience, Netflix quality as delivered looks about on-par with "YouTube free 1080p" -- so much so, that even plugging in a 1080p-only-Blu-Ray, is a huge improvement even non-techie folks can notice.
1080p Blu-ray vs Netflix 2160p Dolby Vision?
I‘d choose the blu-ray any day.
1080p blu ray’s 50 Mbps vs Netflix 4K 15 Mbps [1]. Hell yea blu ray is so great to watch. Plus, no random drops in quality and dts audio basically guaranteed.
[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
I found out the other day that many android set top boxes (and I'd assume smart TVs) aren't Netflix certified and don't get to run a native app but rather the packaged form of their web app.
Yes, and even being Widevine L1 certificated isn't enough, Netflix runs their own licensing program.
I think it varies and depends a lot on your connection speed and latency from the nearest source. There's a lot of effort to give a "good enough" quality at different screen sizes, throughput and devices.
Even if you look at torrent content, you can find a given movie anywhere from a few gb (1080p) to a few dozen gb in size at 4k with higher relative throughput and quality. Not to mention the encoder settings.
Personally, I don't go for the highest quality encodes because I don't see the difference well enough. I tend to favor x265 over x264 only because the blur degredation is less annoying than blotchiness imo.
When you are streaming, the level of encoding will swap out, even at the same resolution a number of times depending on what you're getting. You may well do better with a 1080p stream over a 4k stream depending on your screen and device's upscaling behavior. 4k takes at least 4x the bandwidth, and has tighter latency needs. There are others that can go over this and explain it much better than I can, but it's not malicious, it's partly cost sure, but it's also a matter of what your connection can handle.
Netflix, Disney+, and others don’t allow better quality than 1080p on laptops. I think Disney+ doesn’t even allow more than 720p. So they are never 4K. It’s quite annoying and obvious on large monitors.
Edit: Netflix changed this sometime in the past half years: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081
I usually think in terms of streaming devices vs. laptop/desktop use. I think the artificial limitations are mostly BS.
> Reed Hastings announced that the company was expanding into almost every country around the world — including markets with subpar broadband infrastructure and consumers who primarily accessed the internet from their mobile phone.
The optimistic take here is that the purpose of this encoding work is to make Netflix accessible consumers in ALL countries- not consumers with beefy internet.
IMO the realistic take is that Netflix knows it can do this while saving $$$ serving lower quality video to consumers who cant tell the difference.
I’d imagine a substantial amount of Netflix’s operating costs are in bandwidth. I bet a little bit of optimization goes a long way.
someone's gotta pay for it, i guess. unfortunately, in this case, it's us and our eyeballs
4k resolution at a VHS bitrate.
Yeah everything online looks so terrible
This is some really glorified PR that's either dumbed down or extremely excessive in attributing basic insights and algorithms to Netflix itself
I got into programming/software by encoding my cough well-sourced cough movies/TV shows to MP4 for my iPod video.
Far be it from me, maybe it's insufferably geeky detail, but the slow decade-long march described as "gee each movie is different" and "gee each scene is different" followed by Herculean work of FAANGers insufficiently appreciated by creative types was solved by VBR years upon years earlier. (VBR = variable bit rate)
Once you're getting to "we'll use ML as a VBR algorithm!", that's original, but the problems described and solution was understandable and solvable by a 18 year old non-programmer in 2007 with free software.
VBR wasn't some niche thing either, it's a very very obvious optimization I've never seen a codec miss, from MP3 audio to MP4 video. There's no caveats here or haughtiness or flippant "Dropbox is rsync + my weekend" dismissiveness on my part. It wasn't news to _anyone_, it's a very obvious optimization that was applied by everyone
I'd be veeeeery curious if there was much contribution here beyond using x264, occasionally with patches, and then engineering a pipeline around it
I detest Netflix and other streamers recent fashion for using letterbox format - completely wasting a significant chunk of my precious screen real estate. Why do idiot directors think this is a good thing? These will never be shown in cinemas and even there the best format is Imax which has even more vertical space than 16:9 TVs
As a professional industry, Hollywood is probably the worst offender when it comes to being so obsessed with itself that it genuinely can’t tell when it’s doing something in service of pandering to and perpetuating its own weird culture.
I kind of look at this in the same way as the fact that so many movies or TV shows can’t help but eventually have a plot where someone makes a movie or a TV show, maybe at a stretch a stage production. And, somehow, all the characters know a whole lot about stage productions.
Idiot directors? I was going to rebut your comment but on second read I’d rather just point out how dismissive and inflammatory your comment is.
As long as it’s not too aggressive (Scope) I don’t mind it. The aspect ratio can have a feel to it.
4:3 > *.
Nah, 3:2 > 16:10 > 4:3 > 16:9
eventually, i hope the entire wall can be a high resolution screen so that whatever aspect the artist chose, can be represented in sufficient size, we shouldn't have to care about "wasted screen real estate", creators should be free to record their work in whatever aspect they feel conveys their idea the best.
Then it gets fun. "It'll be even more fun when we can afford to have the fourth wall installed. How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in? It's only two thousand dollars." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
Honestly, on a 65" screen at around 10' away I rarely notice the black bars for letterbox or even 4:3 content.
personally, on my 16:9 55" at home, I don't care about the bars either, not for 4:3, for 21:9 it's still a bit annoying .
Meanwhile, gen Z is watching things vertically on Tiktok.
Funny how they care about encoding quality only by sponsoring such articles, but not by really improving the encoding quality <3 Dark scenes are just awful, rest gets awful only in 4k. In 1080p it’s just bad.
Even better they „researched” better metrics like pVMAF so they can again show how good they are, in theory.
Maybe it’s just me, but I would much rather watch a higher bitrate 1080p copy of a movie than a horribly encoded 4k copy. I also wish that we had made 1080p60 commonplace for sports before trying to make the jump to 4k. Seems like the industry has just focused on “big number better” instead of making a product that actually looks better.
Yeah, the industry focused on 4k (and soon to be 8k) for some reason. I guess the same reason there's a decrease in good acting and an increase in special effects.
Per-shot encoding sounds like something that should be handled by multipass encoding. Presumably it isn't - so I'm wondering what is failing in those encoders to make it necessary to tweak settings that much.
Or are they just aggressively searching for corners to cut to save bits?
You're 100% right, the first instinct a programmer would have as a codec dev is "gee we def don't need that many bits to encode pure black frames"
I can't wrap my mind around this article and exactly what's going on because AFAIK VBR has been default ~forever. You don't even need multipass for that because you just have to look ahead N frames, it was received wisdom, statistically backed, as far back as 2007 that multipass was a waste of time because it was extremely marginally, like .0001%, better than just doing VBR, and using CBR was really dumb and wrong unless you had very specific edge case technical needs. I can't even remember what, maybe poorly designed initial H.264 decoders or people feeding into legacy broadcast system
Little more context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40770734
I'm a little surprised that we haven't seen something more AI driven yet. (yes yes buzzword I know)
i.e. slice it not just into scenes but also into objects and do bitrate on that level. i.e. Face and objects in foreground get more. It seems we now have pretty small models that can do that sort of stuff (see Apple & MS ones recently) so should be feasible at scale.
I'd imagine you can also train an LLM on patterns that encoders choke on...chequered patterns etc.
> i.e. Face and objects in foreground get more.
Encoders have been doing that for decades at this point.
AI-related models are actively being researched for multiple applications in video encoding. From generating predicted frames, to generating fine details, choosing tools and parameters for each frame, narrowing the search space, etc.
I know they do all sorts of clever predictive sorcery but I meant specifically what this image shows:
https://deeplobe.ai/exploring-object-detection-applications-...
Literally getting closer to understanding the context of the scene and what matters to a human rather than understanding the pixels
We've experimented with that at SVT (Sweden's public service broadcaster). Or rather, the video team has, I'm just a web dev, so I don't know the details other than what's in this blog post:
From the eyes of the viewer: Attention-aware video compression for improved low bitrate video https://medium.com/the-svt-tech-blog/from-the-eyes-of-the-vi...
Had to create an account just to ask more about this! Interesting approach, but the link is from last year and only talks about a research project.
Did you ever test this on a larger scale? And do you know if it is only applicable to one encoder?
After he got kicked out of MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione opened his own standards organization[0] called MPAI, which is focused primarily on... standardizing machine learning techniques for video coding tools.
I'm not sure if they've actually shipped anything yet, though.
[0] With blackjack, and hookers: https://blog.chiariglione.org/the-mpai-framework-licence-app...
You mean transformer/diffuser based when you are talking about AI in this context? Because there are a lot of ml papers out there for encoding video. Stadia (RIP), Parsecs, Epic (Unreal Pixel streaming), META, Apple and Nvidia doing amazing stuff for their streaming services/VR/AR plays.
Yeah. This essentially
https://deeplobe.ai/exploring-object-detection-applications-...
If the model can figure out the key objects in the scene on a bit more deeper level then that can drive what parts the encoder needs to spend more bits on
The algorithms exists, but it requires way too much processing power and you also need to have a model already downloaded.
Then we can have many 6-fingered characters and other hallucinations. It's all fiction anyways so what's one for a other? I hope it either gets great fast or phases out as a fad.
No not model to generate it. Model to steer the encoder and tell it what parts to invest more Bitrate into
That makes sense and shouldn't have been that difficult anyway. For the barbie glitter scene there's obviously more chroma 'texture' to apply variable bitrates. Flat colored scenes could continue using lower bitrates. Where more complex models could be useful is avoiding entropy coding of useless details etc (e.g. if those details were artifacts of processing in the first place).
This is supremely easy to avoid. I'm not even sure how you arrived at thinking this will be a concern.
I didn't mean this one thing specifically. I was thinking more along the lines of Xerox copiers 'hallucinating' (randomly altering) digits in reports.
This is the main reason why I don't use Netflix or other services. It sucks when I'm in the middle of watching a movie and the quality drops significantly. Maybe things have changed, but I really wished there was an option to control buffering and force certain resolutions. I'm willing to wait longer for a movie to start playing if that means higher quality. The fact they remove that choice is why I prefer to obtain media by other means.
Wonder how much has Netflix payed for this article to the Verge.
*paid
*paided
I don't really know what people "generally" think of Netflix encoding, but my experience is that it's Very Bad. It's a combination of factors:
- Netflix will only send you "high quality" (over 720p) streams on certain browsers (IE on windows, Safari on OSX, ???? on Linux) that support Encrypted Media Extensions.
- Netflix also auto-scales the quality they are sending based on their understanding of your connection.
- Also apparently they do per-title re-encoding passes.
This all combines, in my experience, to on average the worst streaming quality overall and also the most opaque. There are debug modes you can enable to see some of this, but generally it's very hard to tell what quality you are looking at and what is preventing you from getting a nicer quality. I also find that Netflix's "low profile" content (i.e. not max quality) looks bad - i.e. the 720p stream looks quite bad in addition to being low resolution.
> Netflix will only send you "high quality" streams on certain browsers [...] that support Encrypted Media Extensions.
They won't send you anything at all unless you have EME, coupled to a supported DRM engine. Getting >1080p requires a "more secure" DRM engine (e.g. Widevine L1, PlayReady SL3000)
> - Netflix will only send you "high quality" (over 720p) streams on certain browsers (IE on windows, Safari on OSX, ???? on Linux) that support Encrypted Media Extensions.
It's not only netflix that does this, all of the streaming services do (though some of them limit to 1080p instead of 720p).
Such an utterly pointless anti-piracy measure... every show ends up on torrents in 4k regardless, only serves to punish those actually paying for the service.
I believe it's rooted in agreements that content producers (including Netflix I am sure) insist on for distributing media. My impression is that all anti-piracy measures are intended to "just" extend the exclusivity period for official sources for that media. So almost anything you can do to delay high quality rips appearing will be worthwhile for the company financially.
Torrents for popular movies and tv shows tend to appear within hours (in good quality even) so not sure how successful that attempt at delaying is
Netflix 4k titles certainly don't. It's often weeks at this point for web-dls.
It's similar with YouTube's premium content, i.e. DRM-protected films or series available for rent or purchase on YouTube. It plays at a maximum of 480P on most desktop browsers, including Google's own Chrome for Windows. (Disclaimer: I haven't checked this recently, I'm assuming the situation hasn't improved.)
* https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3306741
* https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/89050028/my-movie-...
You are talking about PC browsers, but I do not think they are the main target of Netflix nowadays.
They would be much more concerned about the quality on their app on smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.
I thought the same, but it turns out I have quite a number of friends (especially younger, who are sharing apartments with flatmates etc.) who don't have a TV or tablet, and who will just sit on their bed or couch with a laptop for netflix and such. This is totally anecdotal of course, but I do feel like it might be the device stats are quite different from what we might expect.
They are, but only in that you would be surprised at how tiny the PC usage is to most online video streamers, it's even smaller than anyone would expect.
Because of this quality issue, I always wondered how people who rip Netflix content handle this, since they often offer 2160p Dolby Atmos versions of movies or even TV show episodes for download.
How do they maintain the quality long enough to rip the content? When I used Netflix years ago, I could barely keep a constant 1080p stream at times.
I suspect that what you receive is determined client-side in software, and with some reverse engineering, you could force it to send you whatever quality you want (as long as your subscription allows for that quality level).
They use HDCP strippers, devices which can strip protections from the hdmi signal, at which point they can feed it into an capture card to reencode.
I don't think they reencode it. They've found a way to download it directly. I think they have found a way to extract the keys.
Source? It's hard to see how they actually did it when all you have is a .mkv file, but in rare cases I've noticed ui elements/quality drops that was indicative of being ripped via capture cards. Of course, that doesn't mean all rips are done this way, but it's pretty hard to tell the difference between a rip done via capture card done perfectly, and a rip where the underlying stream was decrypted.
I have read a few people commenting that that's how it is done. I read a very good comment once here on hn that described extracting keys from insecure devices (might have been TVs, or possibly an older Android device?), although I can't find the comment now.
Also they often contain every subtitle and audio track (often 40 subtitle tracks!), which would be either a lot of work or not possible at all if they couldn't extract the stream properly. I suppose they might be able to get those from the low quality unencrypted streams but it just seems implausible.
They release shows pretty much immediately as soon as they are on netflix, don't they?
It seems improbable to me that they are systematically recording and reencoding every show manually, although I guess it could be possible in theory.
A friend of a friend tells me that they've never seen UI elements or quality drops on any scene rips.
All signs seem to point to the encryption being broken in my opinion.
>Also they often contain every subtitle and audio track (often 40 subtitle tracks!), which would be either a lot of work or not possible at all if they couldn't extract the stream properly.
Are subtitle tracks even encrypted? Unlike video, there's no secure path (eg. HDCP) for subtitle (or even audio) tracks, so they're presumably trivial to rip.
If you were ripping via HDMI you'd still need to sync them up though. Not very difficult but tedious. I still believe they're using leaked or hacked keys.
e.g. https://github.com/medvm/widevine_keys
I believe this specific method is outdated, but my understanding is that current methods also bypass drm instead of using screen capture.
That gets you L3 keys, which only provide sub-hd resolutions.
There are devices out there with vulnerable TEEs (trusted execution environments), where DRM operations commonly happen. You can then extract L1 keys from those environments - for example with the Nexus 6[0] NVIDIA Shield[1].
[0] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/07/trust-issues-...
[1] https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4682/~/s...
Those keys were downgraded to Level 3 many years ago.
I think the OP's question was maintaining the higher quality stream, not the act of ripping.
That doesn't seem hard to pull off. Just record the stream multiple times and splice/replace the low quality bits.
The FTP topsite scene is extremely competitive and anyone doing multiple rips to splice together would lose the race to leak the show.
The best WEB-DL groups are internal P2P - FLUX (HDB) and NTb (BTN).
They both (afaik) do hybrid releases by taking e.g. audio or DV metadata from one service and merging it with another source.
Funnily enough, even for UHD remuxes, P2P groups are top-tier (like Wildcat and Framestor).
Doesn’t work for Dolby content, unless there exists such specialty devices that can decode Dolby.
If they know what they're doing, they don't "rip", they use their own client to download the highest quality available directly from the CDN, then strip the DRM.
> Netflix also auto-scales the quality they are sending based on their understanding of your connection.
Netflix dropping to potato quality after a few minutes is infuriating. Refresh the browser and quality goes back up for a few minutes before it drops again. My wife often doesn’t notice it; it drives me nuts. My theory is that they try to save bandwidth by dropping quality after some time and hoping you don’t notice.
Probably because there's a significant number of people who just stream stuff constantly as background noise. The tyranny of the minority.
They should just have a setting the user can set to decide how much buffering vs quality they’re willing to tolerate
For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never had any problem with it.
I’ve got a bookshelf computer hooked up to a 52” 1080p screen in my living room, nothing fancy, and I’ve never noticed any issues at all with quality, or buffering times. I just open the video through the website in chrome, and play it, and it’s fine.
I think you will probably see a noticeable increase in quality if you install one of the "netflix 1080p" extensions[1].
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/netflix%20higher%20...
> Netflix also auto-scales the quality they are sending based on their understanding of your connection.
This is the future. You can multiply a pixel as many times as you want.
They really managed to squeeze the sound quality to a minimum.
I have a friend who genuinely thinks Dolby Digital Plus ripped from streaming services is higher quality than lossy DTS ripped from a DVD or Blu-ray. Insanity.
100% agree with all of your points
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a big increase in the number of encoding artifacts recently?
Rapidly oscillating patches, blurry smears, it’s only Netflix (other video streaming services are fine) its getting quite annoying, a few times it’s been so severe I thought it was a problem with my projector
Definitely noticeable on Netflix, but I also have some specific issues with Amazon Prime, where certain scenes have these weird, thin horizontal artifacts.
Rarrr, no issues here
I wonder if the issue is the fact that these artifacts are layered on top of processing artifacts from TVs, receivers, streaming devices, and all of that. Does Netflix test their encoding in isolation or in these real life setups?
Seeing how pirate groups have to steal materials from before the pipeline - I think it’s not related to TV or other devices. They just went full „we know better” approach and made just awful bad encoders.
Wait, doesn't Netflix have a reputation for terrible encoding quality at 4K? (I don't recall being impressed when I last tried it)
I think flying close to the sun is precisely aim of the game here. So anyone sensitive to it is likely to conclude it is terrible.
I haven’t watched them in many years but my experience was that compression sucked on dark scenes even in 1080p. On the other hand, you were able to watch on a 3G connection without any buffering bumps
… and one of these things hurts engagement.
Not just 4K- all resolutions and it's getting worse with plenty of comparisons available online for those who care to look. Streaming video quality has generally declined across all platforms in the last few years with the exception of Apple TV+ and contrary to this puff piece it's to the point it's very noticeable to the discerning end user.
Enshittification continues relentlessly.
I recall several streaming services reducing their bitrates during the pandemic, ostensibly to offset the increased network load from everyone watching more while stuck at home, did those reductions ever actually get walked back or did they just become the new default?
Ah, one of those "temporary" measures.
What do you think?
Agreed, the data volume for Apple TV+ 4k is about 5x Netflix per my router and looks way better.
And I'm sure the content itself is far better too. I hate to admit it since normally I trash Apple, but they've been making some really great shows lately: Silo, Foundation, etc. What has Netflix produced? The Ark? (If you haven't seen it yet, spare yourself lifelong mental scarring and don't. It's hands-down the absolute worst sci-fi I've ever seen in my life, and that includes all the terrible stuff from the 70s I've seen.)
Baby Reindeer is the outstanding NF show this season. But yeah, ATV+ has much better SciFi repertoire.
Movies Anywhere is consistently great quality.
It better be. I bought those movies.
are torrents no longer available in a high bitrate capacity?
> Enshittification continues relentlessly.
It's just rampant monopolization.
Enshittification makes it sound like it's a natural expected process, for companies to buy their way into dominance the market, destroy competition, then deceive and underserve customers while raking in undeserved profits.
It also fails to lay the blame on Congress and the Administration's doorsteps, where it belongs.
I support your general thrust in spirit, but I think "monopoly" isn't a helpful frame here. Consumers have a glut of options in streaming services: Prime, Max, AppleTV, Hulu, even YouTube (contrast with one of the classic monopolies, AT&T, which for many was the only game in town, unless you consider "write a letter to your friend instead" to be a valid substitution good).
I feel the correct frame is the general category of "market power" (including, but not limited to, the "anti-competitive practices" that forms the basis of current regulatory policy).
In the case of streaming, the closest analogue to monopolization is vertical integration: the custom-produced content which is only accessible on a particular streaming platform (sometimes including no releases on physical media).
On the one hand, Netflix could be considered to have a monopoly over the distribution of "Squid Game" (and Prime over "The Boys", Apple over "Silo", etc), meaning they can raise prices, not for the product itself, but for the "club goods" distribution platform, which the consumer may not be interested in otherwise.
On the other hand, entertainment/culture are not the same kind of "inelastic demand" necessity as telephone service in the past, or internet service now. And when we look at actual outcomes, I'd say quality for vertically-integrated productions are better on average than older business models; and while prices are going up, I wouldn't call them ridiculous price-gouging either (in addition to competing with each other, the streaming services are also competing with piracy and password-sharing).
Anyway, I think it's absolutely the case that enshittification isn't inevitable, and we should be wary of succumbing to learned helplessness in the face of capital consolidation. I would claim it's a "natural expected process" of the shareholder corporation, and the perverse incentives of short-term profits and stock prices, even when it comes at the expense of long-term brand equity. But solving that general problem is probably out of scope for "the bitrate is too damn low and the subscription fees are too damn high".
I'd love to see more regulation in the space, but realistically it'd be tricky (I don't expect any Doctorow-approved abolition of DRM, or mandatory interoperability, anytime soon). One could perhaps establish streaming-quality standards, where a company couldn't advertise "4K" unless it hit some threshold. But when it comes to the issue of streaming quality in particular, I suspect the tragic reality is that the majority of users simply won't notice or care.
You mean, dinging them for false advertising? Or creating a standard?
New 18Mb/s transfers are better than their back stock.
Related?
German Court Fines Netflix €7.05 Million for Continued Infringement of Broadcom HEVC Patent (2023)
https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/product-releases/61711
> ... German court ...
Are we surprised?
Netflix video quality is decreasing. I don't know what they are doing, but it is not working.
I wonder how Anne Aaron came to be the leader for this aspect of the business. Netflix is really only doing re-encoding, which is essentially what all first-tier media pirate groups specialize in. It's interesting the pirate groups deliver much higher quality releases in very bandwidth efficient formats (x265 is incredible), yet Netflix still consistently looks blocky on my 4k LG with 1Gbit Internet. Also, every dark scene looks doubly atrocious.
You'd think netflix could do better than the ad-hoc groups of individuals who do it for free in their spare time.
What I observed is pirate groups either rip BD, or WEB-DL from Amazon Prime video, unless it is some Netflix / Hulu original content they don't pirate from Netflix due to poor quality.
Netflix is not focusing on quality but saving their delivery cost on bandwidth, which may hurt them later surprisingly.
> You'd think netflix could do better than the ad-hoc groups of individuals who do it for free in their spare time.
Well, that't the problem, isn't it ?
Netflix has to squeeze a (bigger and bigger) profit for every byte transferred over the network.
>You'd think netflix could do better than the ad-hoc groups of individuals who do it for free in their spare time.
In many occasions, Ad-hoc groups of individuals who do it for free in their spare time provide the best service.
It's because their interests align perfectly with individuals, and not corporations looking to enshittify and squeeze every dollar out of people.
Netflix has to support older devices that can only do h264. Pirate groups don't need to.
I would have thought Netflix could add an x265, VP9 or AV1 stream for the best quality streams though, like youtube does.
They do.
Netflix has never streamed 4K content in h264 for example.
I stand corrected.
Then they have no excuse.
Pirate groups normally create both x265 and x264 releases, and in different resolutions (720/1080/4k).
absolutely crazy how people are trying to convince us that Netflix is doing incredible feats of engineering when the bottom line is to make their streams as cheap as feasibly possible
we've already crossed the line where it creates a garbage viewing experience for the end users, with pixel porridge everywhere and absolutely horrendous visuals in the darks and shadows for every movie and series
netflix engineers are failing (on purpose) to create a decent viewing experience for their users
Solving a largely a non-problem. Download the whole video and watch it. Our connections are fast, just not consistent.
Netflix's video encoding is really bad, and the showrunners don't seem to know.
Every Netflix show I've seen in the past year (n=3) has had these crazy panning drone shots of forests in winter, with really high f#'s, graphics of a million particles exploding, shots of ocean waves at dusk... basically, they are shooting video encoding stress tests and then encoding them very poorly. The result looks like dogshit.
The people making content generally have no idea about video compression. Or they only understand it at a cursory level. It's a safe bet that set designers and decorators have no idea about video compression. Early productions seemed to understand that aspect but that was mostly in the days of 56K modems and ISDN lines. It was a small enough niche that only technical minded people were doing it.
I have the HD plan, and generally watch upscaled on an ATV 4k. Haven't noticed anything with their encoding at all.
When people say "refreshing their browser" it sounds like they're watching on a PC. That's probably the worst platform to watch on these days, from a market share point of view. Just saying.
I believe they only provide a low-quality 720p stream to browsers because of DRM.
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