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Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

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Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#31

Post by mdasen »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #3
CharlesW wrote: post #2

Fascinating, thank you for this analysis! Currently pining for release of an updated Apple TV, which will have an SoC capable of hardware AV1 decode. It'd be great to hear from someone at Netflix about the unexpected Bojack Horseman results. I'd bet that Netflix just isn't yet taking advantage of AV1 features designed especially for this kind of animation and synthetic content.

What benefit would a new appleTV have other than reduced bandwidth usage?

As someone who tried Roku, Android TV, and Fire TV before switching, better hardware offers a vastly better experience. The Apple TV's hardware is fast. The UI doesn't lag. Things feel smooth as butter. Yes, maybe the Apple TV doesn't need more, but more can be helpful.

In terms of AV1 support, YouTube often only does 4K with AV1 so that's an issue for people.

Personally, I'd love to see an Apple TV that was great for gaming. New Apple processors have hardware ray tracing and decent gaming performance.

I think it's also likely that Apple will try and make an Apple TV that will support next-gen Siri and on-device AI stuff. Yes, you can complain about Apple's AI delays, but Apple's probably looking toward an Apple TV that can support their AI models.

In some ways, "what benefit would a new have?" Sometimes we don't know until we have it and people start using it.

Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#32

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

alwa wrote: post #27
jpalawaga wrote: post #4

I feel like this was copy edited by ChatGPT and it really grates me. I couldn’t help but lose focus after I started seeing telltale signs of AI. While the topic matter is interesting, I feel like obviously synthetic content falls into the “that which was not worth writing, is not worth reading either” trap. If the authors tone is extremely ChatGPT-esque, I apologize in advance.

Intolerably ChatGPT-esque. Which is a shame, it seems like a nifty little DIY experiment. I think what stands out to me is this cartoonishly punchy, faux-dramatic framing. That, and specialist terms that seem to be thrown in there in an empty way, just to signal subject-matter expertise that’s not even expected of a DIYer’s experiment report: > It’s a multi-decade, billion-dollar street fight over bytes and pixels, w…

LLMs tend to produce ridiculous similes, idioms, euphemisms, and analogues that fall apart upon the slightest scrutiny, as though they are genuine English constructions. I despise it. No one in reality writes like that. Who the hell thinks 'bytes and pixels' are a battleground? if you want to talk about licensing problems, just say they are licensing problems, don't accept shitty similes from LLMs that humanise decidedly non-human constructs. More so if it's a technical discussion: just get to the bloody point.

I like using real idioms that have percolated through culture ('birds of a feather', 'white elephant', 'nip in the bud', etc), not stupid contrivations.

As someone who sweated through hours and hours of English essay-writing in school, LLM output that is misrepresented as genuine human writing is annoying and highly disrespectful of the reader's time and effort. The moment I saw the stupid, contrived headers and dozens of emojis, I closed the tab.

I refuse to waste my time reading the output of a matrix multiplication done in some server farm when I could do the latter myself.

Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#33

Post by input_sh »

newman314 wrote: post #13

Does anyone know what was used to produce the graphs?

Do you mean charts? If so, it's Datawrapper: https://www.datawrapper.de/charts

One of the quite expensive paid plans, as the free one has to have "Created with Datawrapper" attribution at the bottom. I would guess they've vibe-coded their way to a premium version without paying, as the alternative is definitely outside individual people's budgets (>$500/month).

Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#34

Post by CharlesW »

zamadatix wrote: post #20
alfalfasprout wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What benefit would a new appleTV have other than reduced bandwidth usage?

I wouldn't mind if they enabled the 120 Hz support with the new chipset. I like my TV but the framerate matching feature causes a few seconds of black screen each time I switch between and also drops the UI to 24 FPS. Would be nice if everything just ran at 120 FPS all the time, and since 24/30/60 are perfect frame multiples that's nice to. NTSTC content at 23.976 I'd hope the player would just speed up at that point…

> Also apps seem to assume "because hardware decode isn't available don't serve AV1" sometimes.

This isn't a completely unreasonable decision, since the current 2022 model's software AV1 decode apparently can only sustain 4K AV1 decode (although it handled 1080p content fine in my test) for as little as 45 minutes before thermal throttling kicks in.

Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#35

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

landl0rd wrote: post #28
jpalawaga wrote: post #4

I feel like this was copy edited by ChatGPT and it really grates me. I couldn’t help but lose focus after I started seeing telltale signs of AI. While the topic matter is interesting, I feel like obviously synthetic content falls into the “that which was not worth writing, is not worth reading either” trap. If the authors tone is extremely ChatGPT-esque, I apologize in advance.

> article about compression > uses slopbot 9000 to explode his point into ten times the "prose" > mfw

I laughed. Now only if this was a real greentext.

Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#36

Post by ElijahLynn »

Very good read, love some of the humor in this article. It helped me get through to the end!!

Also, If anyone was wondering where AV1 stands in comparison to VP8 and VP9... I just looked it up after a few years of not paying attention and I guess Google donated VP8 and VP9 to the alliance for open media foundation (AOMedia) in 2015 and they created AV1 and released it in 2018.

Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#37

Post by pnw »

bashtoni wrote: post #11
jpalawaga wrote: post #4

I feel like this was copy edited by ChatGPT and it really grates me. I couldn’t help but lose focus after I started seeing telltale signs of AI. While the topic matter is interesting, I feel like obviously synthetic content falls into the “that which was not worth writing, is not worth reading either” trap. If the authors tone is extremely ChatGPT-esque, I apologize in advance.

Came to say pretty much the same thing. This slop is unreadable for me at this point. I keep getting a paragraph or two into something, read one of the terrible "It's not just word - it's massive hyperbole!" sentences, see that there are several more in subsequent paragraphs and can't continue. However bad the author's original writing that generate this output was, it can't be as awful as this.

The "it's not this - it's that!" phrasing is everywhere now and is driving me insane.

Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#38

Post by galaxy_gas »

kllrnohj wrote: post #25

Interesting charts, but this is all completely meaningless without image quality comparisons. I can easily use 50% less bandwidth than Netflix's H264 streams as well, with H264 even, by just cranking up the compression & dropping the bitrate. Presumably nothing jumped out at the author as being worse, but come on how can you have a whole section on why AV1's regression on Bojack is actually a good thing because the q…

Taking screenshot of netflix on my device results in black square, I dont know if this applies on lower levels of Widevine but if it doesn't then the quality will be much lower as Netflix do not serve 720+ video unless there is protected DRM path

Re: Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

#40

Post by pnw »

mdasen wrote: post #31
alfalfasprout wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What benefit would a new appleTV have other than reduced bandwidth usage?

As someone who tried Roku, Android TV, and Fire TV before switching, better hardware offers a vastly better experience. The Apple TV's hardware is fast. The UI doesn't lag. Things feel smooth as butter. Yes, maybe the Apple TV doesn't need more, but more can be helpful. In terms of AV1 support, YouTube often only does 4K with AV1 so that's an issue for people. Personally, I'd love to see an Apple TV that was great fo…

Apple just hasn't been able to get traction with gaming on Apple TV. Gaming on Apple TV is so small I couldn't even find an analyst report breaking down the market size.

I don't think new graphics hardware solves the problem. Beyond the friction of the unit not shipping with a controller, tvOS lacks good discovery for games and there is no ad infrastructure comparable to mobile. Most game developers aren't looking to invest in small, closed platforms with bad discovery. It's hard enough to make money on Apple's mobile platforms.

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