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

The End of Video Coding?

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 131 posts

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#81

Post by lopmotr »

"new techniques are evaluated against the state-of-the-art codec, for which the coding tools have been refined from decades of investment. It is then easy to drop the new technology as “not at-par.”

This seems to be quite a general technology problem that looks like it applies to car engines, batteries, computer memory and any other highly optimized mature technology. I wonder if there's some way to change incentives so others get a chance. It happens in evolution in nature too and it's sometimes solved by mass extinctions. Hopefully that's not the only way.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#82

Post by ktta »

derf_ wrote: post #51
lostcolony wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still care, since at some point the cost of the extra encoder-hours used is going to outpace the bandwidth savings. I'm guessing she mentally assumed 'at no bandwidth savings, how much margin do we have?', since the amount saved wasn't ever quantified.

There are a couple of things that make Netflix somewhat unique. 1) They have a fairly limited catalog (contrast with the constant ingestion of new content by Youtube, for example) 2) The cheapest way for them to ensure they have sufficient capacity to handle peak loads leaves them with a lot of extra compute during non-peak times. That excess compute is essentially free.

>That excess compute is essentially free.

Since they host on AWS, wouldn't they just scale down during non-peak times and save money?

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#83

Post by syrrim »

cc-d wrote: post #52
izacus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, but YouTube doesn't require full DRM support.

Requiring protocol level DRM to be included in video/music streaming technologies has always baffled me. What's the point? Even with theoretically perfect protocol level DRM, the consumer eventually has to be able to see/hear the protected content. If the frames of the video are displayed on screen, and the audio played through the speakers, the output can be recorded and preserved, period. Do the people in charge of…

Here's the real rub: the videos have already been pirated at full quality, and are available online for free. They're doing a poor job of defending something that has already been breached.

That all said, camcorders don't get you anywhere: the goal isn't ripping the video, it's ripping the high quality video. DRM can theoretically defend against that, but you'd need to control the whole stack, incl. hardware, incl. the monitor and speakers.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#84

Post by isostatic »

vetinari wrote: post #79
cc-d wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring protocol level DRM to be included in video/music streaming technologies has always baffled me. What's the point? Even with theoretically perfect protocol level DRM, the consumer eventually has to be able to see/hear the protected content. If the frames of the video are displayed on screen, and the audio played through the speakers, the output can be recorded and preserved, period. Do the people in charge of…

DRM works on multiple fronts, causal piracy is one. The other is the control over player production, what features it will have, who can and who cannot make it, etc. Those who can make good deals, will get an advantage. Someone above linked a help page that says, that for 4K Netflix you need Edge and Intel Kaby Lake or newer. Do you think that it was free for Microsoft or Intel, or some good deal sweetened that?

> causal piracy

Not sure if you mean causal or casual. Casual is going to piratebay and downloading.

I would agree that DRM and other anti-consumer things (unskippable things on dvds, adverts accusing you of pirating the dvd you've actually bought, etc) does cause piracy though

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#85

Post by isostatic »

izacus wrote: post #67
dingo_bat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why should I, as a viewer, care about that?

Because content providers are making you care about that. They _demand_ that you're prevented from seeing high quality TV if your platform doesn't fully lock you out.

Do netflix limit their own shows?

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#86

Post by majewsky »

ktta wrote: post #82
derf_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of things that make Netflix somewhat unique. 1) They have a fairly limited catalog (contrast with the constant ingestion of new content by Youtube, for example) 2) The cheapest way for them to ensure they have sufficient capacity to handle peak loads leaves them with a lot of extra compute during non-peak times. That excess compute is essentially free.

>That excess compute is essentially free. Since they host on AWS, wouldn't they just scale down during non-peak times and save money?

The AWS-hosted part is not the CDN afaik, which will probably make up the vast majority of their infrastructure.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#87

Post by dick_sucker2 »

kemitche wrote: post #58
bufferoverflow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth is extremely cheap, so 15 million by a few kB is just 15+ GB, which costs pennies in terms of bandwidth. That doesn't buy you that much encoding compute time.

Netflix isn't necessarily trying to reduce the bandwidth on _their_ side. They want to be able to deliver higher quality to users on lower bandwidth connections. The better that goes, the larger their prospective customer base.

That's a big issue in rural areas with microwave links. Everyone who has one of these links is limited by bandwidth and they all want to watch Netflix.

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#88

Post by 21 »

dingo_bat wrote: post #4

It seems to me that despite the tech, Netflix video quality is really horrible. Youtube is consistently much higher quality, even though Netflix's own "fast.com" tells me my connection is capable of 75Mbps downstream. Which should be enough for crisp 1080p. Multiple times I've been so frustrated with Netflix's quality that I've started a movie, stopped it because it looked like something out of a VCR, torrented the t…

Are you sure you have a 1080p subscription? The basic one, single device, is 720p only. You need the two device subscription for 1080p

Re: The End of Video Coding?

#90

Post by svachalek »

ktta wrote: post #82
derf_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of things that make Netflix somewhat unique. 1) They have a fairly limited catalog (contrast with the constant ingestion of new content by Youtube, for example) 2) The cheapest way for them to ensure they have sufficient capacity to handle peak loads leaves them with a lot of extra compute during non-peak times. That excess compute is essentially free.

>That excess compute is essentially free. Since they host on AWS, wouldn't they just scale down during non-peak times and save money?

They do, but as any large AWS customer you want to reserve a lot of capacity, so that it's there when you need it and also it's a lot cheaper than spot usage. So, scaling down below the reserved capacity doesn't save you much if anything.
Post reply on HN