Thought this was gonna be a thoughtful nuanced critique but instead we get a wild unsubstantiated rant.
The thing is there's not much nuance to be had. Netflix's approach is just worse than existing best approaches on all axes.
Video encoding requires using your eyes
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#32I love bagging on lazy engineers who just chuck code over the fence without caring about the user experience, but I seriously doubt I would notice this. The sad truth is a lot of video is watched in the background and Netflix knows this. For the specific case of a children's cartoon, I doubt the children watching will notice or care. If there is user feedback about the quality, then by all means listen to users and a…
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Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Appreciate this, I was feeling the same way as the original comment. It looks maybe over-sharpened, but I don't see anything as glaring as the text of the article makes it sound! (Of course, I'm not a video codec developer.) It does remind me of how stereo & speaker manufacturers sometimes boost treble a little bit (rather than being perfectly "transparent" to the original signal) because it gives the impression of c…
Yeah, audio response curves have always been a bit confusing to me. Like, they say that headphones should use a Harman curve because that sounds 'best' to listeners, but how valid is it as an objective measure? (E.g., will listeners 50 years from now find a different curve 'better', the same way that instrument tuning has changed over centuries?) And how much of it is responding to current practices in recording and…
> Like, they say that headphones should use a Harman curve because that sounds 'best' to listeners, but how valid is it as an objective measure?
It should be valid because it's "neutral". IIRC it's basically a conversion to simulate how a neutrally tuned speaker would sound if you were in the same room.
There are many reasons objective headphone measurements aren't actually objective for you though. The biggest one is that they're taken in a silent room, so a single CPU fan or anything near you makes it invalid. Noise cancelling can mean a lot in practice.
The other reasons are that different people have different ear shapes, some people wear glasses so the headphones can't get a seal, your amp isn't electrically compatible with the headphone, your music is badly mastered so you prefer a headphone badly tuned the opposite way, etc.
Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#34I don't see (or maybe don't recognize) any issues with the image that they're talking about (ringing, color shift, or fake details). It most certainly doesn't look awful to me, it looks exactly the same, only a bit sharper.
Ringing is pretty obvious to me. It has a specific meaning in this context, it means edges are over-sharpened to the point that "fake" extra edges appear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_artifacts
That is what it should mean, but in image compression people use it to mean "mosquito noise" artifacts, which come from quantizing DCT compression applied to edges. (Nyquist theorem = DCT is bad at edges because they're made of an infinite number of frequencies.)
Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#35I don't see (or maybe don't recognize) any issues with the image that they're talking about (ringing, color shift, or fake details). It most certainly doesn't look awful to me, it looks exactly the same, only a bit sharper.
As someone who works a lot with sound I notice a ton of artifacts most people don't recognize. Often those artifacts are harder to hear on cheap speakers but become far more obvious with a good setup. But they also add up and while untrained ears can't hear specific examples, they do result in an overall worse experience which is especially frustrating for high end users when they paid a lot for nice speakers and it's just revealing the grunge that was always there.
That's all to say - I also could not find all the things they are talking about, probably a combination of not being trained, not working a lot with video codecs, and not having the best monitors - but I get the authors frustration, and I'm glad there's people who care about these things! But yeah, I hunted for that color shift and just not seeing it...
Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#36I don't see (or maybe don't recognize) any issues with the image that they're talking about (ringing, color shift, or fake details). It most certainly doesn't look awful to me, it looks exactly the same, only a bit sharper.
You can see some ringing in the sky around the trees and on the line between the crow's beak/feathers if you look closely. (Alvin's?) fur goes much farther down his forehead as well. People who work deeply with codecs are usually hypersensitive to these sorts of issues that mere mortals like us need to try to see. There used to be a legendary blog called "Diaries of an x264 developer" by Fiona Glaser [0] where she'd…
In the era of x264, we ( the user or the enthusiast communities ) and x264 developers deeply cared about preserving the original content as much as possible, even the noise and artefacts.
That was in the 00s. It is not the encoder's job to remove or filter out all the details. Background or not. There are some caveat to that but that was comparatively speaking at the time, say RMVB from Real Media or WMV.
Worth remembering it wasn't really the internet era back then. People encode so they could fit more things into CD and DVDs. At least that was how it started.
Somewhere along the line Internet, or mobile internet aka iPhone happened. Now everyone watches on a small screen. With all details washed out, people just want to consume. None of the details mattered. What we would only used to do in AVISyth Filter are now done automatically with Encoder. The 10 min Youtube video doesn't care about any of that. And then the 3 min, now the attention span is basically 30s TikTok or Instagram Reels. Worst of all a lot of these attention to details are also gone when doing Netflix or other long from of movie streaming. VMAF 90 is good enough, lets try to minimise the bit rate as much as possible.
We need higher / best quality at minimal bitrate, instead of having bare minimum / good enough quality at lowest possible bitrate. The two are very different.
While the march of internet / tech giant on video codec means someday we may lose out. Somewhat fortunately we still have a small group of old people in the movie production, broadcast industry, and private torrents release group still cares about these.
Hopefully, someday, especially the west, could move back to celebrate greatness rather than mediocre.
Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#37I don't see (or maybe don't recognize) any issues with the image that they're talking about (ringing, color shift, or fake details). It most certainly doesn't look awful to me, it looks exactly the same, only a bit sharper.
As someone who works a lot with sound I notice a ton of artifacts most people don't recognize. Often those artifacts are harder to hear on cheap speakers but become far more obvious with a good setup. But they also add up and while untrained ears can't hear specific examples, they do result in an overall worse experience which is especially frustrating for high end users when they paid a lot for nice speakers and it'…
I remember a while ago we have a thread on HN discussing this. 50% of the world cant taste the difference between Pepsi and Coke Cola. People cant tell the difference between 128Kbps or 256Kbps MP3. etc.
For the people who are sensitive to a lot of these, it is more of a curse than gift. Some cant taste the difference between Corn Fed ( or Finished ) and Grass Fed Beef. The colour shift in this article, or how the latest TV perform between OLED, QD-OLED, Four Layer OLED, Mini-LED with different brand.
It turns out being able to "compare" is a skill set in itself. I would assume comparing is also a function that requires more brain power / energy, and most people's natural state would be to conserve that energy.
I have been thinking about this for quite some time. Most people dont know how to compare, or what to compare it to. And precisely because most people dont know how to compare or how not to compare, we need marketing. And I think most successful founder are very good at comparing things. Steve Jobs would be a prime example.
Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who works a lot with sound I notice a ton of artifacts most people don't recognize. Often those artifacts are harder to hear on cheap speakers but become far more obvious with a good setup. But they also add up and while untrained ears can't hear specific examples, they do result in an overall worse experience which is especially frustrating for high end users when they paid a lot for nice speakers and it'…
I remember a while ago we have a thread on HN discussing this. 50% of the world cant taste the difference between Pepsi and Coke Cola. People cant tell the difference between 128Kbps or 256Kbps MP3. etc. For the people who are sensitive to a lot of these, it is more of a curse than gift. Some cant taste the difference between Corn Fed ( or Finished ) and Grass Fed Beef. The colour shift in this article, or how the la…
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Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ringing is pretty obvious to me. It has a specific meaning in this context, it means edges are over-sharpened to the point that "fake" extra edges appear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_artifacts
That is what it should mean, but in image compression people use it to mean "mosquito noise" artifacts, which come from quantizing DCT compression applied to edges. (Nyquist theorem = DCT is bad at edges because they're made of an infinite number of frequencies.)
It's the exact same phenomenon in both. Not sure where you're making the distinction.
Re: Video encoding requires using your eyes
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, audio response curves have always been a bit confusing to me. Like, they say that headphones should use a Harman curve because that sounds 'best' to listeners, but how valid is it as an objective measure? (E.g., will listeners 50 years from now find a different curve 'better', the same way that instrument tuning has changed over centuries?) And how much of it is responding to current practices in recording and…
> Like, they say that headphones should use a Harman curve because that sounds 'best' to listeners, but how valid is it as an objective measure? It should be valid because it's "neutral". IIRC it's basically a conversion to simulate how a neutrally tuned speaker would sound if you were in the same room. There are many reasons objective headphone measurements aren't actually objective for you though. The biggest one i…
> It should be valid because it's "neutral". IIRC it's basically a conversion to simulate how a neutrally tuned speaker would sound if you were in the same room.
Is it, though? Blogspam posts about it waffle over the exact definition, but Olive's original post [0] gives the methodology, "A panel of 10 trained listeners rated each headphone based on overall preferred sound quality, perceived spectral balance, and comfort," and a later Harman post seems to cite the original methodology without comment [1].
Unless the subjective part was just to select between different headphones that had been calibrated to simulate neutral speakers? The posts don't make it entirely clear where the curves originally came from.
[0] https://seanolive.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-relationship-betw...
[1] https://pro.harman.com/insights/akg/defining-the-standard-th...