Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

netflixtechblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 200 posts

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#191

Post by jquery »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #169
jquery wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch a lot of anime, and Netflix consistently looks the worst. Recently, Devilman Crybaby in particular looked so bad I thought I was experiencing a technical issue but nope, I was watching the anime at Netflix’s top quality. The banding artifacts in many scenes were intolerable. It’s hard to get excited about Netflix saving bandwidth when their top bitrates consistently have huge artifacting problems. It’s so bad…

Is crunchyroll even higher quality than Apple TV? It seems like every episode is 1.3GB at 1080p.

Wow, you may be right. I haven’t run any tests personally, but subjectively I’ve always been satisfied with Crunchyroll quality. Funimation, too.

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#192

Post by teilo »

charrondev wrote: post #27
teilo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the native apps in my Samsung Q70 TV. They are really good, and I rarely find a need to use my 4K Apple TV anymore. Even the Samsung Apple TV apps, and the AirPlay 2 support is excellent. As it is, Apple has screwed up HDR on the 4K so badly that it's very difficult to make it work smoothly without also screwing up HDR on other devices.

The difficulty for me is that my TV doesn’t have enough HDMI inputs (LG B7). I use 7 through my yahamah receiver, but have struggled to get ARC (audio from the TV through the sound system) to do-exist with also also having everything else go through the receiver.

I have a Yamaha receiver also. Occasionally I need to power-cycle the receiver or the TV to get ARC to work again, but other than that, I've had no problems with it. I run everything through the Yamaha.

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#193

Post by [deleted] »

munkiefish wrote: post #142
throwawaythekey wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube mostly uses vp9 these days (I think it might fallback to h264 depending on the device?) You can confirm this by loading a video, right clicking somewhere in the player and opening 'stats for nerds'

I thought they moved to av1 now? https://www.xda-developers.com/youtube-for-android-tv-adopts...

[deleted]

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#195

Post by munificent »

riyadparvez wrote: post #91
munificent wrote: post #70

If only they would spend this much effort optimizing the quality of their screenwriting.

Are snarky comments like this really necessary or relevant to what's being discussed here?

No, they aren't. I usually resist the urge, but it's been a long week.

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#196

Post by rblatz »

dimensi0nal wrote: post #176
rblatz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the whole thing is stupid. 4k videos of everything on Netflix are available on the high seas. What’s the point?

Right now stripping Netflix's 4K DRM is possible but it requires buying a new Nvidia Shield TV for every release you do. If you could strip the DRM without buying expensive hardware every time people might be slightly quicker to release the entire 4K Netflix catalog.

That is interesting how does that work where you have to sacrifice a shield per release?

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#197

Post by namibj »

laurencerowe wrote: post #180
namibj wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google DNS supports EDNS-subnet info, and should work just as well as Comcast's DNS for Netflix. Cloudflare won't, though.

Do you know if this used to be an issue that is now resolved? The poor streaming quality I experienced was watching Netflix over Comcast cable internet with Google DNS several years ago. It was night and day different after changing DNS resolvers back to Comcast, though I guess it could have been a coincidence.

It should not have been an issue in the last few years. I do not know if this was a problem early-on, but Google themselves use it for their CDN-boxes they offer ISPs to offload what's likely mostly YT videos and popular android APKs.

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#198

Post by sreekotay »

ehsankia wrote: post #72
sreekotay wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isnt this.... Vbr?

maybe VBR just works on constant sized chunks, whereas this works on chunks that are computed to be optimal.

I mean --- not really - adaptive scene detection for Vbr is a long standing thing.

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#199

Post by thirdsun »

sjwright wrote: post #36
charrondev wrote: post #5

That seems like a pretty impressive achievement! Question for anyone here: What do you use to play 4K/HDR? I have an Apple TV 4K, which can do 4K Dolby Vision playback and looks ok, but the Apple TV tends to have some jittering when streaming certain shows (very noticeable in panning shots of animation). The sound quality is also noticeably worse on my set with it (it doesn’t seem to be able to do direct pass through…

The jittering is caused by the Apple TV defaulting to 60p frame rate for all content. But if you turn on “match frame rate” the jittering goes away.

I can‘t understand why it wouldn’t default to match the content’s frame rate. How can anyone watch content with a frame rate that doesn‘t match (or is a multiple of) the source material? Maybe modern TVs can hide those issues with interpolation, but I wonder how this isn’t a bigger and more widely discussed topic. It‘s my understanding that the Apple TV even handles this better than other devices, which sometimes simply don‘t seem to bother to offer this option at all.

Re: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

#200

Post by thirdsun »

charrondev wrote: post #50
sjwright wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried turning “match frame rate” on?

I had tried it a while back stopped because anytime you go into or out of video streaming it would black out the whole screen for a second or two before starting to buffer the content. It’s particularly annoying if trying to search for a particular episode of something. That’s probably the ticket for it though. I find the lack of audio pass through to be the more annoying piece though. I have a machine that costs sig…

> I had tried it a while back stopped because anytime you go into or out of video streaming it would black out the whole screen for a second or two before starting to buffer the content. It’s particularly annoying if trying to search for a particular episode of something.

That‘s the correct behavior though and not specific to the Apple TV. Any device that actually does switch and match the content’s frame rate will cause the output display to resync/adjust with a short black screen. The alternative of not adjusting frame rate is much worse and it’s such an underrated problem in video playback in my opinion. The Apple TV handles this better than most devices.

Post reply on HN