401–410 of 435 posts
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Twitch isn't real time.
Yes it is. The delay on a Twitch stream doesn't mean they don't have to deal with encoding and transmitting frames at full speed. If Twitch wasn't real time, you'd only be able to watch live streams slowed down!
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I don't need to get the full benefit to care about the difference. And in my experience there's a lot of screens closer than 10 feet to couches. On mobile, 720p starts to get shoddy once your screen hits 5 inches across. So while 4k is situational, and encoding quality is more important than the extra resolution most of the time, 1080 vs. 720 is pretty clear-cut; 1080 should be considered the minimum for most content…
Note that I was talking about the full benefit of 1080p, not 4k. My points are that 4k is usually pointless, and therefore that 1080p is usually better than just "minimally acceptable", since most of the time we don't even get the full benefit of it. > On mobile, 720p starts to get shoddy once your screen hits 5 inches across. Even assuming you're right abut this, I guess I really just have a hard time caring. Anythi…
There seems to be disconnect about how people are consuming media. For me holding a 2280x1080 6.3" phone ~8" from my eyeballs is a natural viewing distance and I can see the full resolution without difficulty. And at least from my point of view a 65" TV is also a pretty typical size.
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Are there codecs that require high compute (Threadripper) for encode but can be easily decoded on a Snapdragon ?
A lot of video codecs are NP hard to encode optimally, so rely on heuristics. So you could certainly say that some approaches take a lot of compute power to encode, but are much more easily decodable.
Decoders are relatively simple book keepers/transformers. Encoders are complex systems with tons of heuristics.
This is also why hardware decoders tend to be in everything and are relatively cheap with equal quality to software counterparts. On the flip side, hardware encoders are almost always worse than their software counterparts when it comes to the quality of the output (while being significantly faster).
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I don't need to get the full benefit to care about the difference. And in my experience there's a lot of screens closer than 10 feet to couches. On mobile, 720p starts to get shoddy once your screen hits 5 inches across. So while 4k is situational, and encoding quality is more important than the extra resolution most of the time, 1080 vs. 720 is pretty clear-cut; 1080 should be considered the minimum for most content…
Note that I was talking about the full benefit of 1080p, not 4k. My points are that 4k is usually pointless, and therefore that 1080p is usually better than just "minimally acceptable", since most of the time we don't even get the full benefit of it. > On mobile, 720p starts to get shoddy once your screen hits 5 inches across. Even assuming you're right abut this, I guess I really just have a hard time caring. Anythi…
Yes, so am I.
> therefore that 1080p is usually better than just "minimally acceptable", since most of the time we don't even get the full benefit of it.
If most of your users would be limited by 720p, and 1080p is standard and easy to do, then I'm comfortable calling 1080p the minimum.
> I'm suffering even imagining trying to watch a video this way.
The official "Retina" numbers have a phone 10 inches from your face. And that's about where I hold it when I have my glasses on.
> 20/20 visual acuity can resolve roughly 1 arc minute, or pi/10800 radians.
That's a good baseline number, but a lot of people can beat it by a significant fraction.
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>How much are we looking at for 1080p, 10%? We don't know yet. There are no public technical details (that I know of) for H266 yet, but if I recall H265 gave the same 50% reduction in bandwidth claims, and for years people stuck with H264, because it was higher quality due to dropping off less subtle parts of the video you really want to see. Only in the last couple of years has H265 really started to become embraced…
H.265 was always better from a technical perspective but that's not everything which factors into a video codec decision. H.264 was supported everywhere, including hardware support on most platforms. You could generate one file and have it work with great experience everywhere, whereas switching to anything else likely required adding additional tools to your workflow and trying to balance bandwidth savings against b…
Even though x264 quickly started seeing better results compared to DivX and XVid, you didn't see pirate encodes switch to x264 for years.
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Yes it is. The delay on a Twitch stream doesn't mean they don't have to deal with encoding and transmitting frames at full speed. If Twitch wasn't real time, you'd only be able to watch live streams slowed down!
That's a different definition than most people mean when they say "real-time".
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>So I don't appreciate new codecs coming out and obsoleting my hardware You could say something similar about any other technological advance.
100%, I was worried I'd seem like an old 35-year-old man when I posted my comment. And it's true, I upgrade my hardware much less frequently than I did when I was younger. I don't mind replacing a machine after 8 years of service, but h.265 still isn't supported by Google/YouTube, and Apple refuses to add hardware decoding for VP8/VP9, so there's no universal codec that will work as efficiently as h.264 did on my Min…
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Huh? TV and movies are widely shot with 4K cameras these days. What is 2K? I've never even heard of a "2K" camera. Where did you get the idea things are being filmed in "2K" and being scaled to 4K? Genuinely curious where you're getting this information from. Or are you confused because 1080p refers to the vertical resolution while 4K refers to the horizontal resolution?
https://www.engadget.com/2019-06-19-upscaled-uhd-4k-digital-... is one easily found example but it wasn't where I had read it. I'm pretty sure I've seen it on HN itself. edit : here's another https://old.reddit.com/r/cordcutters/comments/9x3v4e/just_le...
The top link in the reddit thread disproves what you're saying though:
https://4kmedia.org/real-or-fake-4k/
Somewhere between a third and a half of films are listed as "real 4K".
So there is actually tons of real 4K content. (And the list is just films -- there are plenty of streaming TV shows in real 4K too, like Mrs Maisel.)
There might be another reason for the misperception -- it's true that film editing is generally done in something lower-quality like compressed 1080p, but that's just for speed/space while you work. All the clips "point" to the 4K originals, so when the final master is produced, it's still produced out of that "real" 4K.
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H.265 was always better from a technical perspective but that's not everything which factors into a video codec decision. H.264 was supported everywhere, including hardware support on most platforms. You could generate one file and have it work with great experience everywhere, whereas switching to anything else likely required adding additional tools to your workflow and trying to balance bandwidth savings against b…
Another thing to consider, exactly the same thing happened when h.264 was first released. Even though x264 quickly started seeing better results compared to DivX and XVid, you didn't see pirate encodes switch to x264 for years.
So it was kind of a magical codec upgrade and now it seems more incremental to me.
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> H.264 was supported everywhere this. our TV (a few years old, "smart") can play videos from a network drive, but doesn't support H.265. reencoding a season's worth of episodes to H.264 takes a while...
Reencoding will cumulate H264 artifacts with H265 artifacts (and psychovisual optimization for one with psychovisual optimization for the other). Unless you reencode from source don't do that.