The End of Video Coding? • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#11

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

SirHound wrote: post #8

dingo_bat wrote: post #4

It seems to me that despite the tech, Netflix video quality is really horrible. Youtube is consistently much higher quality, even though Netflix's own "fast.com" tells me my connection is capable of 75Mbps downstream. Which should be enough for crisp 1080p. Multiple times I've been so frustrated with Netflix's quality that I've started a movie, stopped it because it looked like something out of a VCR, torrented the t…

Could it be your ISP is targeting and throttling Netflix? There's probably a way to verify this. I tend to find the quality of HD Netflix streams pretty great over my PS4. Certainly never a cause to download a torrent instead.

[deleted]

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#12

Post by cjensen » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #7

A post about innovation and moving beyond block-based encoding and no mention of Daala's idea of lapped transforms?

There is no shortage of new ideas for video encoding. The post is welcoming both new ideas and encouraging more new ideas rather than being any kind of summary of current tech.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#13

Post by haikuginger » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #5

carbonatedmilk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes entire sense to me: When you're going to stream the episode of Stranger things to 15million people, who really cares what the one-time cost to encode is? Surely you'd take algorithmic complexity that was 100x or even 1000x the baseline if it provided you with even a few kB of bandwidth savings?

Netflix is probably at the extreme end. Remember: the same codecs are used to compress the videos your cell phone takes.

Hardware implementations of codecs can be made that perform encode at low power if a certain level of quality/efficiency can be given up.

This is already the case for AVC/HEVC on mobile devices where storage and power considerations overwhelm the possible quality and coding efficiency advances that could be available from a highly-intensive, highly-tunable CPU-based encode.

In comparison, if you look at digital cinema, video is dumped as raw, unencoded pixels onto high-speed, high-power SSDs without any compression; this way, the original image can be manipulated losslessly before going through an intensive encode process for an optimal quality/space balance for end-user media delivery.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#14

Post by gempir » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:20 PM UTC

dingo_bat wrote: post #4

It seems to me that despite the tech, Netflix video quality is really horrible. Youtube is consistently much higher quality, even though Netflix's own "fast.com" tells me my connection is capable of 75Mbps downstream. Which should be enough for crisp 1080p. Multiple times I've been so frustrated with Netflix's quality that I've started a movie, stopped it because it looked like something out of a VCR, torrented the t…

Could it be you are using an incompatible Browser? E.g. Chrome on Windows works not very good the native Netflix windows app delivers a way better quality

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#15

Post by shmerl » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

cjensen wrote: post #12

shmerl wrote: post #7

A post about innovation and moving beyond block-based encoding and no mention of Daala's idea of lapped transforms?

There is no shortage of new ideas for video encoding. The post is welcoming both new ideas and encouraging more new ideas rather than being any kind of summary of current tech.

I guess there might be no shortage in general, but there are few which are publicly developed with the aim to make free codecs. Which other efforts are there besides Daala?

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#16

Post by rayiner » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

haikuginger wrote: post #13

rayiner wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix is probably at the extreme end. Remember: the same codecs are used to compress the videos your cell phone takes.

Hardware implementations of codecs can be made that perform encode at low power if a certain level of quality/efficiency can be given up. This is already the case for AVC/HEVC on mobile devices where storage and power considerations overwhelm the possible quality and coding efficiency advances that could be available from a highly-intensive, highly-tunable CPU-based encode. In comparison, if you look at digital cinem…

Right, but designing a codec that is scalable in complexity to accommodate real-time hardware encoding on one end, and 100x Netflix encoding on the other end probably isn't easy.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#17

Post by simonbh » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:26 PM UTC

zellyn wrote: post #10

I see this: In the ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG standardization world, the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) was formed in October 2017 to develop a new video standard that has capabilities beyond HEVC. The recently-concluded Call for Proposals attracted an impressive number of 32 institutions from industry and academia, with a combined 22 submissions. The new standard, which will be called Versatile Video Coding (VVC),…

At the bottom of page 3, Patent and Copyright is covered. I am not a lawyer and it is not clear to me how this mixing of code from different groups will work from a licensing standpoint. https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/studygroups/2017-2020/16/Docume...

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#18

Post by lightbyte » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

gempir wrote: post #14

dingo_bat wrote: post #4

It seems to me that despite the tech, Netflix video quality is really horrible. Youtube is consistently much higher quality, even though Netflix's own "fast.com" tells me my connection is capable of 75Mbps downstream. Which should be enough for crisp 1080p. Multiple times I've been so frustrated with Netflix's quality that I've started a movie, stopped it because it looked like something out of a VCR, torrented the t…

Could it be you are using an incompatible Browser? E.g. Chrome on Windows works not very good the native Netflix windows app delivers a way better quality

Isn't that because Chrome refuses to add the DRM netflix needs for 1080p content? (I believe it was silverlight)

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#19

Post by wink » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

gempir wrote: post #14

dingo_bat wrote: post #4

It seems to me that despite the tech, Netflix video quality is really horrible. Youtube is consistently much higher quality, even though Netflix's own "fast.com" tells me my connection is capable of 75Mbps downstream. Which should be enough for crisp 1080p. Multiple times I've been so frustrated with Netflix's quality that I've started a movie, stopped it because it looked like something out of a VCR, torrented the t…

Could it be you are using an incompatible Browser? E.g. Chrome on Windows works not very good the native Netflix windows app delivers a way better quality

TIL there's a Windows app, I'll try that out as well, thank you. FWIW I haven't noticed huge differences on Chrome and Firefox on Win10, I usually blamed the wifi for bad quality though.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#20

Post by Twirrim » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:45 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #16

haikuginger wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware implementations of codecs can be made that perform encode at low power if a certain level of quality/efficiency can be given up. This is already the case for AVC/HEVC on mobile devices where storage and power considerations overwhelm the possible quality and coding efficiency advances that could be available from a highly-intensive, highly-tunable CPU-based encode. In comparison, if you look at digital cinem…

Right, but designing a codec that is scalable in complexity to accommodate real-time hardware encoding on one end, and 100x Netflix encoding on the other end probably isn't easy.

Why does it have to be the same codec?

Use the right tool for the job.