Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#241

Post by deno » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

DavidVoid wrote: post #229

jandrese wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that if you pirate 1080p or 4k content you'll always get the full resolution you asked for.

Not always at a great bitrate though. I haven't really torrented anything in a while but I doubt there are many 20GB+ Blu-ray quality rips out there that you can download in a reasonable amount of time. EDIT: after reading the replies I stand corrected; it seems like there are some better quality uploads out there than I thought.

Availability aside (bluray rips are a thing), most people can’t tell the difference between FullHD and 4K at all, at least in moving pictures[1]. I doubt bitrate will make much difference on top of that, as long as you start from some reasonable value.

I seriously can’t tell the difference between a very low quality YIFY rip and a proper Bluray. If you freeze frame they both look bad, and when they’re moving they both look great. I’ve done this as an experiment multiple times and it’s like judging wine... There’s a threshold you need to pass but beyond that you quickly run into diminishing returns.

[1] BTW most movies are still mastered or partially mastered (SFX) at 1080p still, and even if they’re true 4K you get high quality downscale to 1080p for free. But really most 4K movies are still upscaled from 1080p.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#242

Post by tyfon » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

myu701 wrote: post #5

Does anyone know of public ISP dashboards that show used/total capacity on their network in terms of customer usage? I'm sure its trivial for an internal employee to pull up solarwinds or whatever, but I'd be curious to see if these ISPs are merely running above normal, running hot, barely hanging on with intermittent "isp brownouts" etc. This is probably a pipe dream but not gonna get any questions answered if I don…

Here is for intra isp connections in Norway [1], but it does not really show "netflix" usage as most isps deliver the videos from a local server.

[1] https://www.nix.no/statistics/

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#243

Post by syntaxing » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

Kind of off topic, but has anyone used Nvidia's Shield TV "AI Upscaling"? Super curious if it would make the viewing experience better for situations like this.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#244

Post by kingo55 » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

DavidVoid wrote: post #229

jandrese wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that if you pirate 1080p or 4k content you'll always get the full resolution you asked for.

Not always at a great bitrate though. I haven't really torrented anything in a while but I doubt there are many 20GB+ Blu-ray quality rips out there that you can download in a reasonable amount of time. EDIT: after reading the replies I stand corrected; it seems like there are some better quality uploads out there than I thought.

Using Sonarr you can specify minimum bitrates to download. It fetches content automatically in the background for you.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#245

Post by sgehly » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

throwaway936482 wrote: post #137

sgehly wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to strawman but are you saying luxury businesses should be able to get away with not delivering on what their customers pay for because we are in an unexpected situation?

Yes because the luxury business customer's wants to have the UHD they paid a small sum for do not trump other people's needs to be able to work from home in order to eat and keep the real economy working because of a pandemic.

I'm not claiming that Netflix and other services shouldn't help out the ISPs, because you're right that WFH > Netflix, but if they can't deliver what their customers paid for, they should be sending partial refunds.

It's really the issue on the part of the ISPs for not being able to provide enough service to support everyone's internet activity.

If Netflix wants to help them out with that issue they also have to bear the cost of helping them out with that issue.

If a university closes because of the pandemic they sure as hell won't charge room/board, and (if they're kind) won't charge as much for online courses.

The price factor is irrelevant ("a small sum"), and if it is, Netflix should have no problem refunding "a small sum".

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#246

Post by rococode » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunately they said they'll be able to fix it within a few weeks by doing a node split. The tech mentioned he'd never heard of capacity issues before in his ~20 years as a tech and that some smaller ISPs have been having issues keeping their internet up and running at all.

I've been tracking the performance with PingPlotter, if you're curious how bad it is right now here's the last 10 minutes: https://i.imgur.com/AnUqv3j.png (red lines are packet loss) Pretty interesting how current circumstances are pushing even tried and tested infrastructure to their limits.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#247

Post by nrp » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #225

rwol wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one? https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netfli...

There's nothing in there about 4K not being 4K, just some griping about low bitrates. On computers you can access some debug stats https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2fkylx/hidden_netf... and Roku also has it https://community.roku.com/t5/Channel-Issues-Questions/Someh...

I think in the end the author's only complaint was that it was difficult to figure out what bitrate the Chromecast was streaming at, is a pretty minor problem. It reads like a complaint post, but that seems to just be the author's writing style.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#248

Post by dabei » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

Are they going to deliver the lower quality videos with AV1?

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#249

Post by MiroF » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

DavidVoid wrote: post #229

jandrese wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that if you pirate 1080p or 4k content you'll always get the full resolution you asked for.

Not always at a great bitrate though. I haven't really torrented anything in a while but I doubt there are many 20GB+ Blu-ray quality rips out there that you can download in a reasonable amount of time. EDIT: after reading the replies I stand corrected; it seems like there are some better quality uploads out there than I thought.

Very common.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#250

Post by mongol » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

karatestomp wrote: post #114

mindslight wrote: post #10

Kodi and mpv continue to work as normal...

Jellyfin is really nice if you have a semi-powerful, wired-network machine to run it on. Former Kodi user, now a convert. Kodi on an Rpi makes a good cast target for it, though.

What is semipowerful, approximately?