Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings • Hacker News Board

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#311

Post by nkrisc » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:12 AM UTC

simonjgreen wrote: post #306

nkrisc wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. How does completely dropping a season flip that? Some shows with complicated licensing and rights have caused entire seasons to be dropped from a given streaming service and it’s very confusing when you finish season N and go right into season N+2.

When I say drop, I am referring to releasing in one big drop, not dropping off the platform. As I explained, that model can permit a binge of content which grants heavy context carryover.

I hadn’t realized the meaning of the word “drop” changed completely, hence my confusion.

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#312

Post by ubercow13 » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:13 AM UTC

dontlaugh wrote: post #251

DoctorWhoof wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the issues (like "judder") that people have with 24fps are due to viewing it on 60 fps screens, which will sometimes double a frame, sometimes triple it, creating uneven motion. Viewing a well shot film with perfect, expressive motion blur on a proper film screen is surprisingly smooth. The "soap opera" feel is NOT from bad interpolation that can somehow be done right. It's inherent from the high frame rate.…

I have a 120 fps TV. Panning shots at 24 fps still give me an instant headache. Real is good, it’s ergonomic and accessible. Until filmmakers understand that, I’ll have to keep interpolation on at the lowest setting.

It's not just the framerate mismatch, OLED's un-pulsed presentation with almost instant response time greatly reduces the perceived motion smoothness of lower framerate content compared to eg, CRTs or plasma displays

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#313

Post by shakna » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:14 AM UTC

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #276

omnicognate wrote: post #258

It would help if TV manufacturers would clearly document what these features do, and use consistent names that reflect that. It seems they want to make these settings usable without specialist knowledge, but the end result of their opaque naming and vague descriptions is that anybody who actually cares about what they see and thinks they might benefit from some of the features has to either systematically try every p…

The purpose of the naming is generally to overwhelm consumers and drive long term repeat buys. You can’t remember if your tv has the fitzbuzz, but you’re damn sure this fancy new tv in the store looks a hell of a lot better than you’re current tv and there really pushing this fitzbuzz thing.

Cynically, I think its a bit, just a little, to do with how we handle manuals, today.

It wasn't that long ago, that the manual spelled out everything in detail enough that a kid could understand, absorb, and decide he was going to dive into his own and end up in the industry. I wouldn't have broken or created nearly as much, without it.

But, a few things challenged the norm. For many, many reasons, manuals became less about the specification and more about the functionality. Then they became even more simplified, because of the need to translate it into thirty different languages automatically. And even smaller, to discourage people from blaming the company rather than themselves, by never admitting anything in the manual.

What I would do for a return to fault repair guides [0].

[0] https://archive.org/details/olivetti-linea-98-service-manual...

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#314

Post by atq2119 » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:18 AM UTC

sfn42 wrote: post #240

KeplerBoy wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV shows changed completely in the streaming age it seems. These days they really are just super long movies with glacial pacing to keep users subscribed.

As opposed to the House model where every episode is exactly the same with some superficial differences? I like the long movie format, lots of good shows to watch. Movies feel too short to properly tell a story. It's just like a few highlights hastily shown and then it's over.

A lot of this is personal preference, but I still feel like the most memorable shows tend to be the ones that have a bit of both. Season-long stories, but also episodes that can stand on their own.

In a show like Stranger Things, almost none of the episodes are individually memorable or watchable on their own. They depend too much on the surrounding episodes.

Compare to e.g. Strange New Worlds, which tells large stories over the course of a season, but each episode is also a self-contained story. Which in turn allows for more variety and an overall richer experience, since you can have individual episodes experiment with wacky deviations from the norm of the show. Not all of those experiments will land for everybody (musical episodes tend to be quite divisive, for example), but there is a density to the experience that a lot of modern TV lacks.

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#315

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

pentaphobe wrote: post #265

XorNot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly what I don't get is how this even happened though: it's been I think 10 years with no progress on getting the volume of things to equal out, even with all the fancy software we have. Like I would've thought that 5.1 should be relatively easy to normalize, since the center speech channel is a big obvious "the audience _really_ needs to hear this" channel that should be easy to amplify up in any downmix....ins…

Yeah it's wild - not only not improving but seemingly getting worse doesn't seem like anyone outside the audience thinks it's a serious problem (?)

[deleted]

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#316

Post by ragazzina » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #138

xenospn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very bad.

All of the characters are constantly arguing with each other. The story line requires constant suspension of belief based on the endless succession of improbable events and improbable character behaviors. Contradictions with earlier episodes and even details within the same episode. It's really bad. I hope the final episode redeems it but I have my doubts. I want to have an LLM rewrite season 5 and see how much it im…

Can you give an example of a contradiction within the same episode?

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#317

Post by vanviegen » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #23

Game of Thrones Season 8 was lambasted for having an episode that was mostly in darkness...in 2019 . You'd think television production would be calibrated for the median watcher's TV settings by now.

But that would mean that everybody is experiencing a quality level based on the least common denominator.

I think TV filters (vivid, dynamic brightness, speech lifting, etc) are actually a pretty decent solution to less-than-ideal (bright and noisy environment, subpar screen and audio) viewing conditions.

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#318

Post by ryanjshaw » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

pupppet wrote: post #66

The fact that I have to turn on closed captioning to understand anything tells me these producers have no idea what we want and shouldn’t be telling us what settings to use.

Apple TV (the box) has an Enhance Dialogue option built-in. Even that plus a pair of Apple-native HomePods on full volume didn’t help me hear wtf was going on in parts of Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) on Disney. If two of the biggest companies on the planet can’t get this right, I don’t know who can.

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#319

Post by spoiler » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:23 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #298

KeplerBoy wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they be miles better if we allowed screens to be thicker than a few millimeters? I believe one could do some fun stuff with waveguides and beam steering behind the screen if we had 2 inch thick screens. Unfortunately decent audio is harder to market and showcase in a bestbuy than a "vivid" screen.

Anyone who cares about audio will have dedicated speakers, so it barely even makes sense to make TV speakers good.

I'm a bit on the fence about this.

If someone buys a TV (y'know, a device that's supposed to reproduce sound and moving pictures), it should at least be decent at both. But if people want a high-end 5.1/7.1/whatever.1 sound then by all means they should be able to upgrade.

My mum? She doesn't want or need that, nor does she realistically have the space to have a high-end home-cinema entertainment setup (much less a dedicated room for it).

It's just a TV in her living room surrounded by cat toys and some furniture.

So, if she buys a nearly €1000 TV (she called it a "stupid star trek TV") it should at least be decent—although at that price tag you'd reasonably expect more than just decent—at everything it's meant to do of the box. She shouldn't need to constantly adjust sound volume or settings, or spend another thousand on equipment and refurbishment to access to decent sound.

In contrast, they say the old TV that's now at nan's house has much better sound (even if the screen is smaller) and are thinking of swapping the TVs since nan moved back in with my mum.

Re: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

#320

Post by ubercow13 » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:25 AM UTC

Sammi wrote: post #297

DoctorWhoof wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the issues (like "judder") that people have with 24fps are due to viewing it on 60 fps screens, which will sometimes double a frame, sometimes triple it, creating uneven motion. Viewing a well shot film with perfect, expressive motion blur on a proper film screen is surprisingly smooth. The "soap opera" feel is NOT from bad interpolation that can somehow be done right. It's inherent from the high frame rate.…

24 fps looks like terrible judder to me in the cinema too. I'm not afraid to admit it even if it will ruffle the feathers of the old 24 fps purists. It was always just a compromise between film cost and smoothness. A compromise that isn't relevant any longer with digital medium. But we can't have nice things it seems, because some people can't get over what they're used to.

>It was always just a compromise between film cost and smoothness.

I think the criticisms of The Hobbit when it came out in 48fps showed that it's not just that.