The End of Video Coding? • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#31

Post by graedus » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:21 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…

Control+Alt+Shift+D in netflix to see information like the resolution of your video stream, bitrate, etc. As sibling comments mention, the max resolution can depend on your browser.

On youtube, you can right click > stats for nerds for some similar info.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#32

Post by Daiz » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #29

c2h5oh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely you're watching in 720p. In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. To get 1080p you need to be watching in Internet Explorer, Safari or on a Chromebook. To get 4k you need to be watching in Edge and have a 7xxx or 8xxx Intel CPU and HDCP 2.2 enabled display. Source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

Do they offer any reasons to these limitations? In particular, is it due to DRM requirements, or pure performance? I suspect it's the former.

It's 100% a DRM thing. Desktops are pretty much the most powerful platform to watch Netflix on yet the most restricted in terms of available video quality due to their open nature.

For example, my desktop with an i7-2600k (that's a Sandy Bridge CPU from 2011) has zero issues playing 4K60 VP9 footage on YouTube in Chrome with CPU decoding, yet on Netflix with the same Chrome I'm arbitrarily restricted to 720p H.264 video.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#33

Post by kec » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #29

c2h5oh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely you're watching in 720p. In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. To get 1080p you need to be watching in Internet Explorer, Safari or on a Chromebook. To get 4k you need to be watching in Edge and have a 7xxx or 8xxx Intel CPU and HDCP 2.2 enabled display. Source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

Do they offer any reasons to these limitations? In particular, is it due to DRM requirements, or pure performance? I suspect it's the former.

I'd wager the 720/1080 split is due to the former being their limit for browsers doing software decode. 4k being restricted to edge sounds like Microsoft is the only one supporting HDCP (drm).

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#34

Post by CyberDildonics » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

shawn wrote: post #27

c2h5oh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely you're watching in 720p. In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. To get 1080p you need to be watching in Internet Explorer, Safari or on a Chromebook. To get 4k you need to be watching in Edge and have a 7xxx or 8xxx Intel CPU and HDCP 2.2 enabled display. Source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

If that’s true, that’s pretty unfortunate. YouTube does 1440p@60fps now.

You can actually watch 8k video off of youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn24cQLqAE4

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#35

Post by fabian2k » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

c2h5oh wrote: post #21

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…

Most likely you're watching in 720p. In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. To get 1080p you need to be watching in Internet Explorer, Safari or on a Chromebook. To get 4k you need to be watching in Edge and have a 7xxx or 8xxx Intel CPU and HDCP 2.2 enabled display. Source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

It's even more complicated in my experience. You get up to 1080p in Edge compared to only up to 720p in Chrome or Firefox, but you still don't get 1080p guaranteed. For me it varied depending on the specific movie or TV series, and I often still didn't get 1080p in Edge, and even only 480p sometimes (as confirmed with the debug overlay). Only switching to the Netflix Windows 10 App and later to a Smart TV actually fixed this and gave me consistent 1080p content.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#36

Post by admax88q » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

lev99 wrote: post #30

nine_k wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suddenly they're in the same space as 3D-rendered movies: they can spend a lot of time once to make the result good for a million of spectators. It, of course, only works if you render widely replicated material. Even an average Youtube video is likely not like that, to say nothing of the encoding done in a consumer-grade camera / phone.

> encoding done in a consumer-grade camera / phone. Just brainstorming here, but encoding local photos/videos might be an acceptable task for a cellphone to do when it is fully charged and plugged in.

That would severely limit the amount of photos and video you can capture between charging sessions. Most phones don't have a ton of storage, and raw video/photos are huge.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#37

Post by Crosseye_Jack » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #29

c2h5oh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely you're watching in 720p. In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. To get 1080p you need to be watching in Internet Explorer, Safari or on a Chromebook. To get 4k you need to be watching in Edge and have a 7xxx or 8xxx Intel CPU and HDCP 2.2 enabled display. Source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

Do they offer any reasons to these limitations? In particular, is it due to DRM requirements, or pure performance? I suspect it's the former.

It’s DRM. The widevine conf they are using means they are decrypting and decoding in software when you use Chrome or Firefox. When you use Edge you use a different DRM scheme that allows allows decrypting, decoding and rendering in hardware so Netflix offered content upto 4K in Edge with Recent Intel CPU’s. (Last time I checked Ryzen has only just come out with no onboard GPU. But support for recent Nvidia GPU’s was promised, it’s been a while so the landscape may of well changed) If you didn’t have the latest Intel CPU it called back to an older version of PlayReady (sure that’s the brand name of MS’s DRM - on phone and a bit lazy to look it up) that still surported 1080.

See in Widevine there are a number of “levels”, the highest being when it can decode, decrypt and push to the frame buffer all in a secure zone. This can not be achieved (atm, well atleast the time of my research into the matter) with widevine on Desktop, so in such a setup widevine will only decrypt upto 720p content.

When running on Android and ARM this is possible and you can get 1080p, which is why you can get cheap android based tv sticks (even the old Amazon Fire TV sticks) supported 1080p but your gaming rig and Chrome could not.

Don’t work for Widevine, Google, NetFlix or anyone else for that matter. Just a nerd with too much time on my hands so I looking into this stuff. Any corrections welcomed :-D

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#38

Post by shawn » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #34

shawn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s true, that’s pretty unfortunate. YouTube does 1440p@60fps now.

You can actually watch 8k video off of youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn24cQLqAE4

Wow! Even at my monitor's 1024x768, the 8k video looks amazing! So much better than 1080p!

Something something nyquist something

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#39

Post by izacus » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

shawn wrote: post #27

c2h5oh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely you're watching in 720p. In Chrome, Firefox and Opera you're getting 720p max. To get 1080p you need to be watching in Internet Explorer, Safari or on a Chromebook. To get 4k you need to be watching in Edge and have a 7xxx or 8xxx Intel CPU and HDCP 2.2 enabled display. Source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

If that’s true, that’s pretty unfortunate. YouTube does 1440p@60fps now.

Yep, but YouTube doesn't require full DRM support.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#40

Post by bufferoverflow » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

carbonatedmilk wrote: post #3

carbonatedmilk wrote: post #2

Pull quote: We run compute on the cloud and have no real-time requirements. I was asked by the Chair, “How much complexity increase is acceptable?” I was not prepared for the question, so did some quick math in my mind estimating an upper bound and said “At the worst case 100X.” The room of about a hundred video standardization experts burst out laughing. I looked at the Chair perplexed, and he says, “Don’t worry the…

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?

Bandwidth is extremely cheap, so 15 million by a few kB is just 15+ GB, which costs pennies in terms of bandwidth. That doesn't buy you that much encoding compute time.