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Video Quality Matters Less If You Enjoy the Show
An anonymous reader writes "Rice University researchers say new studies show that if you like what you're watching, you're less likely to notice the difference in video quality of the TV show, Internet video or mobile movie clip, putting a lie to some of the more extravagant marketing claims of electronics manufacturers. 'If you're at home watching and enjoying a movie, we found that you're probably not going to notice or even concern yourself with how many pixels the video is or if the data is being compressed,' said the lead researcher. 'This strong relationship holds across a wide range of encoding levels and movie content when that content is viewed under longer and more naturalistic viewing conditions.'"
The quality of sex matters less if you're having it.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
seems to favors special effects over storyline!
Soooo... does this mean that if modern games actually had better gameplay, people wouldn't care so much about the graphics?
Surely not! That way lies madness and a complete inability to sell the next generation of consoles!
(and NetHack! The horror!)
There are some exceptions, such as The Fountain or anything else that is heavily visual, but for the most part I'll watch crappy quality video if I like what I'm watching.
That being said, there's no reason to settle for bad quality video...there's always a way around it (except for our copies of every Bill Nye episode...VHS tapes only age so well, know what I mean?)
Living With a Nerd
My Playstation 3 came with a copy of the first BlueRay video I'd seen at the time: the latest Spider Man movie.
It's like Sony was trying to turn people off to BlueRay.
maybe enjoying the show randomizes bits
or those who enjoy shows tend to come from a lower socioeconomic status thereby causing them to buy fewwer bits
Yep, that's the same reason some parts of Japanese comics are drawn sketchy without making it any less nice.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Old episodes of Dr Who and Star Trek have held up very well, however Star Wars and Enterprise don't do all that well. The best example I have found of this is Primer, I saw it first on google video and bought it within a week of viewing.
We are the Borg...
Article makes sense - I was thinking about that when I noticed all of the bad jpeg artifacts around the anus area of the Goatse guy. That plus the overall poor resolution and colour balance.
But that's just me - you probably didn't notice the image issues when you saw it...
How else would you explain You-Tube?
I guess that explains why Twilight is only bearable in Ultra HDTV resolution
Ah scrambled porn. Waiting through 5 minutes of snow for one elliptical, green boob.
And if I'm trying to watch something that's low quality, I'm less likely to enjoy it in the first place. Only if I know I like something and really want to watch it and can't easily change the quality will I put up with low quality.
They need to test comcast HD vs Directv HD PQ
Not surprising to me. I grew up watching a B/W TV and the picture quality was definitely lower. Today, I am still happy to watch those old episodes in B/W. Its definitely about content. The thought that putting a movie in HD or 3D improves the storyline or the acting amuses me.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Game Show Network (now going by the name "GSN") had an uproar on their boards as they slowly cut back their black and white game show programming eventually to zero. It started as a Saturday Night block, then was moved to 7 days a week but in the early morning hours, and then was shrunk by infomercials and eventually canceled. It its place is "Wayback Playback" where they show game shows from the 70s and 80s... 90s and 00s game shows dominate the rest of the schedule with an occasional airing of Match Game being the only show that is still in prime position despite being old.
Yeah, people would rather see content from before they were born, even if it's before color TV, than a replay of what they've already seen enough of. TV Land, Nick at Nite, This TV, Retro Television Network and others are all proving there's enough old content to go around.
So this is why the local news stations were the big early adopters of HD?
Their make-up artists had to refine their techniques because HD was very unflattering on the facial pores clogged with beauty goop.
Same applies to web comics. The aged xkcd comic has virtually zero artwork at all (much less 'quality' artwork), yet it has one of the highest readership counts of any web comic. It's because it uses very intelligent humor (most of the time) and it targets a very large, but very specific, audience.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I'm used to most movies and shows I like being in HD, I certainly notice how fuzzy SD suddenly looks. I find the same with video games, over many years the "state of the art" always looked great despite how much it sucked in retrospect. Nothing saves a bad movie, but there are stuff I wish was produced in much better quality and with better effects. Then again, I'm happy it was made rather than not at all under any circumstances. It just deserved more... persistance, not something you'll so easily say "OMG was that made in the 80s?" - at least those stories not actually set in the 80s...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't think the video quality matters less, I recently bought a bluray player and hooked up to netflix streaming on a 55" Samsung. One of the first things I watched was the new Alice in Wonderland movie and there were a few scenes in there (most notably when she first lands in the eat me, drink me room...) where the blacks were HORRIBLY pixelated, enough so that I commented to my wife, it was quite literally jarring to see how bad it was and definitely detracted from the viewing experience. I also had the same thing happen during a recent session on Netflix where I was watching the movie Heat. Lots of blacks in the opening sequences that were just horribly pixelated, Im not sure if it was just that the first part of the movie didn't have enough buffered up so they decreased quality in an area where it was most notable or what, but again is was jarring enough that I mentioned it to my teenage boy (he noticed it too).
Was it enough to make me stop watching in either case? No....
but it was bad enough to make me sit up and literally say...WTF is with all this pixelation? If I'm noticing that and not the plot/characters/movie, then its definitely lessoning my enjoyment of the media.
Perhaps their would have been a greater preference for high quality video if they had included...well, you know...among the movies and television shows. Me wants me Jenna Jameson in VERY high definition.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I believe a book titled "The Media Equation" came to this conclusion over twenty years ago.
http://www.amazon.com/Media-Equation-Television-Information-Publication/dp/1575860538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281639501&sr=8-1
Good book for anyone interested in the media field.
I've watched Eden Log, a refreshingly original, slow paced hard Sci-Fi movie, and enjoyed it a lot. Then I read the comments on IMDB, and someone was complaining that it's in black&white. It was funny, because I had completely forgotten the movie wasn't in color!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I've enjoyed watching bad quality videos of sci-fi shows online. It makes the whole show seem more realistic as you do not see all the fakeness! also you can't beat the matrix when you have bad quality and asian looking subtitles. Suddenly its a foreign documentary you are not allowed to see!
When I'm watching something I enjoy, that happens to have good video quality, one of the things always in the back of my mind is the desire for better video quality. It may be that I'm more of a visual person but I really don't have patience for poor video quality. Obviously, if I don't have a choice I can tolerate it when I'm watching something I actually want to see. But even then, I'm not willing to put up with it too long. And of course, it also depends on what level of quality we're talking about.
Most people seem to have fairly low standards. Haven't there been studies that have demonstrated that most young people actually prefer the crappy audio quality present with compressed audio? That's another thing I can't stand.
You could produce "Keeping up With the Kardashians" in super-HD, 3D, 240mhz video and project it onto an 40' OLED screen with a one-trillion-to-one contrast ratio, and I'm still going to gouge my eyes out with a rusty fork before I'll watch it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Turns out (citation needed) sound continuity is more important than video. People will put up with choppy or lossy video, as long as the soundtrack remains relatively coherent. But if the sound is dropping out or breaking up, they stop watching.
Which, if you think about it, is why we put up with crappy internet videos that speed along, but get frustrated when it's constantly buffering.
A.
Like, duh. Getting over fewer lines of resolution or compression is not as difficult as forgetting that you're staring at a box, screen, whatever and that you're watching actors and editing.
if you show someone crappy NTSC video that looks like it is a third hand copy from a dirty VCR from the 1980s, but with high fidelity stunning THX quality sound, the technical quality of the movie overall is rated highly
but if you show someone something better than IMAX resolution video with perfect clarity and lighting and editting... but with tinny, monaural or badly editted or badly recorded sound with hums and hisses, the technical quality of the movie overall is rated poorly
in other words, the human mind seems to have a built-in intolerant and strict bias about audio quality, but is very forgiving when it comes to video quality (as this story confirms)
budding filmmakers: don't fuss that much about your lighting, camera quality, etc. but make damn sure you get good audio. video artifacts and glitches can be explained away as aesthetic quirks but apparently you will be severely punished by your audience's perceptions if your audio sucks
the human mind has a high tolerance for poor video quality, but audio quality is something it is very attentive to and picky about subconsciously
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I've enjoyed and loved many anime series in crappy realmedia files and divx rips. The story, humor, and even some of the action get through incredibly well even in low video quality, and I didn't consciously notice the pixellation.
That doesn't mean I wasn't blown away when I saw the same series at full quality. I had never fully appreciated Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop for the quality of animation and visuals.
Similarly, the great football games from days before HD were just as tense and enjoyable before they were available in HD. But that doesn't mean HD isn't appreciably better.
It's like drinking good wine from plastic cups versus fine crystal. You'll still enjoy it, and I at least wouldn't feel like something is "missing", but given the choice I'd take crystal any day.
Sure, some stories are more cerebral and require little in the way of quality to assure enjoyment. Ultimate form of this is ultra-low-budget movies where nothing is of quality yet the story & telling is engaging (El Mariachi, Babette's Feast, Cube, pi).
But some movies just have to be seen on the big screen. They're overwhelmingly visual, demanding a wide field of view and tremendous detail, because the visuals really are a significant part of the story (Watchmen, Matrix, Alice in Wonderland).
So, for those stories you enjoy which don't demand a big screen, video quality doesn't matter much either. But for those which DO demand a big forum to tell a visually big story, video quality will matter.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I worked for a while in an environment full of classical musicians. They would happily listen to old vinyl records with hisses and scratches, because what they were listening to was the music in their heads.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
since the quality of the storytelling has dropped, the technical quality of the presentation is raised.
but the truth is that a good radio story show from half a century ago, or book, is far superior to 99% of the entertainment crap marketed today.
However, the current market consists mostly of morons who are pained to use their mind
The inverse is true for me. If I really like the content (a movie or song I love), I just can't stand to watch or listen to it at low quality. Just the other day I was listening to Bowie's "Life on Mars?", my favorite Bowie song, but it was an MP3 sampled at 96 kbps and the compression was so obnoxious I had to stop listening. On the other hand if I'm watching some idiotic YouTube video for a quick laugh, I could care less how nice it looks.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Until you start seeing pixel artifacts and you get more and more annoyed by the low bandwidth issues.
At that time, all you do is spot artifact after artifact and loose attention to whatever was on.
Maybe people consider this a good thing, only because their mind is no longer focussed on the bad content.
Try watching a game where your mediocre team is doing badly while there are pixel artifacts to enjoy.
Load New Commander (Y/N)?
They had to research this?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Graphics don't make the game. It doesn't matter how many k-pixels you have or how hi-res the textures are if the game or video content is garbage. That is why I don't watch TV anymore.
I think more important than worrying about whether or not you're shooting SD, HD, or UltraMegaSuperFineNanoHD, is worrying about how you're shooting what you're shooting.
I'm tired of the MTV syndrome, where cameras can't ever be steady, and always have to jiggle around like a 7th grader on crack in order to appear more "live" and "in the moment." What's the point of ultra-crisp resolution if you screw it up by shaking the camera so much that I can't see detail in the first place? Rather than various production companies comparing the resolution of their penises to sell movies, I'd rather they concentrate on telling a story with good, steady shooting that draws people in to the scene rather than constantly drawing attention to the fact that they're watching something recorded by a camera in a major earthquake.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
I think it's pretty obvious that both movies and games don't need high-end graphics if the story / gameplay is there. Awesome visuals are needed just to cover up a piss-poor movie / game or justify the outlay on a super high-end home theatre.
I've noticed this myself when watching Netflix streams. I'm only bothered by low picture quality for the first few minutes; once I'm into the story I don't notice it at all. Even crappy "Starz play" is fine after a while. And this is on a 100" projector display.
I mostly don't notice low resolution, too much, if I'm enjoying a show, BUT the big exception is if there's something on screen where there's detail I need to make out (like maybe some hard to read small text, or something off in the distance[or just small] which has some important detail the audience is supposed to notice - like when a character is noticing some piece of evidence which is important to understanding further plot development), or sometimes when there is a lot of quick motion/action on-screen - low res feeds can get particularly high in the artifact count during rapid screen changes - fast motion, rapid camera cuts), and also when there are a lot of dark or similar colors on-screen (low-contrast footage).
Those are the situations I notice it, because it becomes hard to see what I need to to understand what's going on. The rest of the time, not such a big deal.
If you're already enjoying a video at low-res, why would viewing at hi-res add much to the enjoyment?
Some program material--in particular, material that is inherently visual--may best be enjoyed at hi-res. Most shows rely upon human behavior and interactions for their interest, which makes it understandable that hi-res is often unimportant for proper enjoyment.
There's a reason Planet Earth on Blu-ray is used to help sell HD TVs.
Study accidentally finds substance can trump appearance, Economy experiences downturn!
Multiple Hollywood Studios, and "Directors" Micheal Bay and M Night Shyamalan vow to prove flashy effects can beat out plot, character development, storytelling, or anyone even liking their work.
I'm a popular stranger, I'm nobody famous, I'm a famous nobody.
This story is from the world of obvious. It's why people used to watch scrambled porn all the time.
Help me fix my brother's injured butt!
Andy Griffith. Obviously some people still enjoy watching some ancient shows in black and white and so-so quality even for old NTSC. I'm one of them, though the B&W does tire me after a while. It's just too unnatural. However, I personally absolutely disagree with including time compression in that lot. Some of my favorite shows become unwatchable when frames are removed to speed up the show to cram in more ads. DVRs and TVs can't fix this, at least none of the ones I've seen yet, though I can imagine it's feasible since they usually only clip out frames that could probably be interpolated back into existence.
If I like a show for knowledge content (say, Good Eats or some foreign language tutorial) then I could care less of what the quality is (unless I need to read something on the board).
If I like the show for the visuals (scenery, sports, people, etc), then I need the best quality. Just think, Sunrise Earth would have been scoffed at if it was pitched under standard def. The world cup looked a lot better in HD.
For youtube videos of the meme of the day, usually you just need to get the jist of what's happening. Good visuals are nice but overall not necessary.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
All this is, is a way to for TV/Movie companies to justify the degradation of quality visual and sound in programming and movies. As a country (in the USA) we were forced to leave analog signal for digital, but shit, digital has some major flaws. So now we pay big $ for digital TV's for bad visual/audio quality. Because digital can be compressed, and it's expected, the results can be atrocious. When a movie like Blade Runner that looked pretty good for its time on anolog looks like garbage in digital, that just says the industry is out for cash and thinks society is too stupid to care.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
After all, I'd say probably %80 of what I "watch" when at home, I actually just turn on and listen to. The exceptions are about half foreign films in languages I'm not fluent in, so I have to read the subtitles, or they're films I'm watching in part -for- the visuals. On the latter video quality is extremely important and those tend to be the films that our household actually does buy the blu-ray on (The BBC's Planet Earth collection are amazing for instance). The rest we're just as content to stream from Netflix/Hulu/whatever as any other way of watching.
There has been much crap on TV lately.
Guess that explains why we had to switch to HD.
Kind-of goes along with my strong suspicion that for the great majority blu-ray is a marketing ploy and not a genuine need.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
if you like what you're watching, you're less likely to notice the difference in video quality
The fact that people don't care about video quality if they're enjoying the subject matter was proven irrefutably when people paid to purchase Paris Hilton's infamous sex tape(s).
The following is especially true on slashdot: You have to also consider the geek factor, or "the more a person knows about [compression|image sensors|filmmaking|professional audio|music|programming], the less they will tolerate poor quality [transmission|photography|sound|songwriting|software]."
For some examples, I deal with the details of video compression, signal transmission, CCD cameras, camera electronics and display technology for a living, looking at systems from photons in to photons out to optimize image quality for the users. So when I see crappy compression creating blockyness or pixillation, or skewing and compression from line scan cameras, or ghosting and edge artifacts from poor amplifier chain tuning, I am distracted from the story, no matter how good. My brother is a video producer, and he can't watch most movies without being distracted by poor lighting, sloppy continuity, or amateur camerawork. My dad is a singer, and autotune drives him nuts.
The thing that gets me the most is when it doesn't have to be bad, but it is. I can understand that things like multipath interference cause ghosting, and bandwidth limitations forces lossy compression, and atmospheric effects cause momentary bit error rate increases. Therefore I find their effects more tolerable. But ignorance and incompetence are less tolerable - like when ignorant compression settings cause noticeable periodicity in image quality (either temporal or spatial), or when sloppy calibration results in poor MTF or chroma accuracy, or amateur filmmaking results in crappy lighting and cameras wielded like firehoses (thanks, bro, now I see it everywhere, too).
It's gotten to the point where I can't watch most porn because the lighting and camerawork is so amateur, I'm distracted from the girls. (Thank God for Andrew Blake, though he does tend to like darker, moodier lighting...)
I can see the fnords!
This is the stupidest idea ever to suggest to the content providers. So what, now they will lower the video quality the most on the most popular channels/shows? I guess there's also no longer a need to wait for Star Wars or LOTR: Extended Editions on Blu-ray now.
I think more important than worrying about whether or not you're shooting SD, HD, or UltraMegaSuperFineNanoHD, is worrying about how you're shooting what you're shooting.
I'm tired of the MTV syndrome, where cameras can't ever be steady, and always have to jiggle around like a 7th grader on crack in order to appear more "live" and "in the moment." What's the point of ultra-crisp resolution if you screw it up by shaking the camera so much that I can't see detail in the first place? Rather than various production companies comparing the resolution of their penises to sell movies, I'd rather they concentrate on telling a story with good, steady shooting that draws people in to the scene rather than constantly drawing attention to the fact that they're watching something recorded by a camera in a major earthquake.
Yes. The idiot "cinematographer" that destroyed the second two Bourne movies with his shaky-cam bullshit needs to be kept as far away from a video camera as is humanly (or inhumanly) possible. He (or she) absolutely ruined what would have otherwise been decent movies.
Video quality may not matter much if you're interested, but it can definitely be distracting. Just the other day I was watching a streaming video clip from a local cable news station that was very pixelated... it looked like it was encoded at about 160x120 resolution and I was watching it full screen. Even though I was really interested in the particular story, the entire time I was watching the jagged edges of everything and wondering why they didn't encoded it at a higher quality or at least apply some sort of smoothing algorithm to it.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Where K is a "personal image quality demand level factor" (whew!) and it means how one values things like perfect typography, awesome perfect focus on photos, HDR well done, etc.
Therefore, bad films can become cult with enough special F/X thrown into them...
For me, with a high K (IMHO), even soap operas look a lot more interesting on digital over-the-air free TV than cable. My father perceives all images to be good, since there's no ghosts or interference. His K is about zero...
moving on to actual news...
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Anyone who liked, what's not called classic, Dr. Who has known this for years. It had bad special effects, sound, sub-par video quality (even for it's time), etc. But because of the uniqueness of the show many of us did, and still do, enjoy these shows. My seven year old daughter is enthralled by the series from the 70's, as well as my 10 year old nephews. The video quality of this show is even worse in relation to modern television than it was when it was new and yet it's still interesting, though sometime laughable.
Aesthetic quality matters more than technical quality. What a revelation!
...and we wonder why Hollywood is pushing all of this technology; HD, 3D and whatever other acronyms you can think of. It's because most of the work they're pumping out is aesthetically crap (think, 90%).
You're just jealous because I got J. J. Abrams to follow me around all day shaking and smacking my head to make every moment of my life as exciting as a space jump onto a drilling platform.
Indeed, if the story is good enough, you don't need any picture at all.
But on the other side of the coin, I believe there's certainly a knee in the curve where once you achieve a "good enough" quality, any additional quality doesn't really matter, and the viewer won't even notice it, unless the story fails to engage him such that he's now just looking for "stuff that ain't right".
For example, when I was watching Star Wars II (Attack of the Clones) in a theater with digital projection, I was very much noticing the pixellation!
These bozos have missed the whole South Park paper cut outs that are popular. Amimation outside of Pixar is terrible, but the story can carry it. An MP3 from ear buds? That is a great listening experience? If the song is good, the kids don't care. If the story is good, your brain will fill in the spots between the dots.
I have a Netflix account that lets me stream "HD" to my PS3. In many cases it is only 720, and sometimes even 480. It SUCKS on a 50+ inch Samsung screen. On the laptop it isn't too bad, but on the big screen forget about it (even with the aspect ratio changed). If I really want to enjoy a show, I will watch it on the laptop. The huge, blurred pixels ruin it for me. Once the mind gets used to perceiving true 1080p HD, anything else just sucks. I hate even typing that because it makes me sound like a snob or some sort of elitist. It's not that anything less than 1080p sucks. It is that having a 1080p TV and then watching less then optimal quality is a let down. The high resolution TV makes it worse, it exadurates the poor quality because the blurry pixels are stretched across more screen space.
No fucking shit. I've said for ages (on a related topic) that I'd rather have my TiVo hooked to my old 9" black-and-white TV than suffer through regular TiVo-less TV--on the networks' schedule, with all ads, and no abolity to pause or rewind--on the best A/V setup in the world. I might be an outsider in the Slashdot world but, as much as I love neat stuff, I don't really care about HD at all, and surround-sound, only a little. It's nice, and I really enjoy it for nature shows, but it is absolutely not essential. I have worked in movie theaters, a car audio shop, and with a home theater installer, and I can design, build, and enjoy a good home theater setup, but it's just not that important to me. And not once in my life have I ever suffered through a show and thought "I'd enjoy this a lot more if it were highly defined." My main setup at home is an SD projector and an old L/R/surround system.
Long story short: good presentation will make a good show better, but it absolutely can not make a bad show good.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
South Park proved this 12 years ago.
I still remember the first time I heard about it; a college buddy came running up all excited, "you have to see this new show! it's like this terrible animation with crappy cardboard pieces... and it's FUCKING AMAZING!"
Story is king (unless it's gameplay).
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Buy yourself a DVD box of Jeeves and Wooster (with Fry and Laury) and I guarantee you the picture quality will not be the best you've ever had -although not too shabby- and unless you don't have a sense of humour you will actually like the eloquent wit.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The inverse must be true as well, because I actually enjoyed watching Avatar.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
I used to watch scrambled porn channels
I enjoy my shows more when they don't have block artifacts.
So now what?!
-]Phreak Out[-
that I attended for DigitalTV, the claim was made that studies indicated in the US viewers were more concerned with sound and audio whereas in Japan these preferences were reversed.
Same with music.
It's hard for it to be *so bad* that I can't listen to it. However, bootlegs, already lower-quality source material, need the HQ help a bit more. [especially when you could choose between a HQ and LQ recording of similar concerts]
Then again, same content in better quality hardly hurts. The specter of inferior artistic content in higher technical quality is where the problem lies, though.
An illustrated example:
Revolver in 128kbps >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Animal in FLAC
Revolver in FLAC >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Animal in FLAC
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I notice a bit of difference, but I don't see what the big deal is.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I couldn't watch TV on our new LCD TV, as it was hooked up to a SD satellite box. Pretty poor quality and I could tell. Now that it is 720p, I'm more inclined to actually watch something on it as it looks much nicer.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
... me watching scrambled porn on cable as a kid.
Have gnu, will travel.
As I posted in the 3D Hollywood article a few days ago:
"Five minutes into a movie, it's barely relevant whether I'm watching it on a motion-interpolated widescreen TV with 7.1 channel surround sound or an 8" black-and-white with a whip aerial and tuning knob."
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
a little snow was a lot less noticeable than the image tearing you get with a bad hd signal
In other news: food quality matters less if you enjoy it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I don't find this to be true.
Sure, maybe most people might not care, but if they knew what the difference is, they would.
For example. I won't watch camera captured screeners, or even the TS (telesync) screeners.
They look crappy. don't matter that i'm a big tron fan and that would be the only way I'd see the new tron movie first (unless i go to the theatre). Will I download a cam or TS of it? No.
I have a 1080p tv. All resolutions except 1080p get stretched to fit. And while 720p stuff looks fine, 720x480 is about the lesser limit I want to watch anything on it.
As for that matter, comcast likes to squeeze as much channels as possible, thus you get a lot of crappy screen things, like boxes and other crap. I hate it. Rather download something and watch it then watch it on via comcast.
Movies or TV shows that were not originally shot in HD but being shown in HD doesn't look as good as something shot in HD. I can notice the difference.
I think the test is bogus since it doesn't actually list much info about it.
Not to mention what sort of media they are watching it on, so on.
if you talking about watching stuff on a normal tv, ya, you might find that people won't noticed as much crap. Move that up to a 1080p TV and you'll see more people complaining.
I use an old commodore 1902 monitor for my old video game systems, since i made an adapter to use the seperate svideo jacks (chroma & luna on the monitor). Ya, i'd love to use my 38" HDTV to play my ps2 games, but they look like serious shit on it.
Even some of my Wii games looks pretty bad on it, but not bad enough I won't use it.
Be seeing you...
Watch out for when Netflix implements this.
When you see a movie that has a bit rate of 1.5 Mb/s, it's probably good.
When you see a movie that has a bit rate of 40 Mb/s, steer clear.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
The study doesn't say that people claimed Schindler's List in Real Player 25 kbps 160x120 video looked better than Plan 9 From Outer Space in 4K raw RED footage.
It says that the content had a large impact on the *perceived* quality of the video.
Obviously, the same content was higher-rated in higher quality.
But the content itself had a lot to do with the relative quality rankings. So Schindler's List in 1.5 Mb/s would likely have been considered "better quality" than Plan 9 From Outer Space at 5 Mb/s. But obviously Schindler's List at 5 Mb/s would be better still. Likewise, Gigli at 10 Mb/s would probably be rated worse than The Dark Knight at 1.5 Mb/s. However, Gigli at 20 Mb/s would almost assuredly be rated as "higher quality" than The Dark Knight at 500 Kb/s.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Dwarf Fortress. Nuff' said.
*runs*
Yes. The idiot "cinematographer" that destroyed the second two Bourne movies with his shaky-cam bullshit needs to be kept as far away from a video camera as is humanly (or inhumanly) possible. He (or she) absolutely ruined what would have otherwise been decent movies.
Oh god ... this...
95% of the time I couldn't even work out who was in what position in the action scenes.
Ayjay on Fedang
Films like Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate factory use a much broader range of colors than other films. In fact, they exaggerate colors a great deal. I was responsible for compressing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for VoD consumption in Scandinavia a few years back and the film was a nightmare.
:(
Standard definition VoD is typically streamed at 4.5mbits/sec including a MPEG-2 video stream, an AC-3 audio stream (possibly 2), an MPEG-1 layer II audio stream (possibly 2) and multiple subtitle tracks. This leaves at best 3.75Mbits/sec for video. Compressing Charlie, I finally managed by manually tuning the bit rate allocation and sometimes the quantization matrices in up to 40 places in the film. And this includes using pristine source material (270Mbit raw 4:2:2 SD). I used CinemaCraft Encoder SP2 and run 15 passes to do the rest. The results were less than spectacular and mediocre at best.
Encoding a film like Batman Begins took 5 passes and no manual tuning to get near pristine results, far better than the 7.5 mbit/sec DVD that was released in the Scandinavian market.
These days, the companies I used to stream for would never consider paying for the extra hours to compress an SD stream when the solution for people demanding higher quality is to get them to buy Blu-ray or to download from iTunes. In fact, the theory is that since DVD is so damn easy to rip and a full film can be 2 pass re-encoded in near equal quality on a laptop in an hour, it's better to keep the DVD quality low, I feel as if Disney is particularly guilty of this.
Also, services like netflix certainly are not sending 30 gigabyte streams for a film. In fact, they're probably sending closer to 3 gigabyte streams having used the Blu-ray as a master in the first place. The quality of this will be painfully obvious the larger the screen gets. Services are constantly selling "HD" when in reality, they're simply pushing more pixels and the quality would have been 10 times better if they sent SD at the same frame rate. But, you'll pay more for HD. They take advantage of the fact that the average consumer thinks that HD means more pixels as opposed to higher definition at a particular resolution. The name is sadly a terrible misnomer.
I recently saw there was a Bluray for Casablanca and asked myself "Why?". I have a fairly terrible DVD copy released by a company famous for paying $200 to a college student to master a DVD from whatever they can send. The audio is in sync with the video and that's pretty much all that matters. But if you were to buy a film like "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs", then you need a 3D set and glasses since the film was designed from the very beginning as a demo reel for 3D video, the film just isn't good enough to buy the disc unless you're trying to show all your friends how great a 3D TV is.
Sadly, these days, I often have to wait for films to come out on DVD or VoD to watch them since it's the only way I can see them in 2D anymore as the cinemas here in Oslo have almost completely converted over to 3D projection now
This is what happens when Psychologists study something technical. At first I thought that I must be an exception because I look at the quality of the video I want to watch, but then I read the article.
Bit rate is not the same as quality. Changing the bit rate is not the same as changing the quality. Different rate-distortion algorithms can allocate bits differently depending on how many bits are available. It's not really a suprise that a lower bit rate video can have higher quality.
I haven't read their paper but I would guess that they didn't look at what bit allocation strategy would be chosen depending on the bit rate. Furthermore I expect they just plonked the coded video on a laptop and showed it using Windows media player; so they didn't take into account that higher bit rates can have choppier playback and again it all depends on the specifics of the codec, whether it needs a lot of grunt for decoding or it puts all the effort in the coding part. There is actually a lot of work involved in preparing video for storage on a DVD or transmission, it's not just a question of selecting a bit rate.
If their article didn't say things like "probably not going to notice or even concern yourself with how many pixels the video is or" then I might believe they knew what they were doing. Had they Googled things like "MPEG video quality assessment" they would have found that there is a lot of work in this area, done before video coding standards are finalised and with the help of psychology!
I'm positive that content suppliers will notice this and stop trying to push for 'MORE PIXELS' and instead give better content.
In before "VeryHD tv"
That TV manufacturers are producing higher and higher quality sets so that the quality of programming can reduce without affecting TV viewership.
then broadcast TV better bump up to 4k to compensate.
I am in Brazil and I see all the videos with subtitles in English - so I can see differences of spoken and subtitles. Because I am a visual learner ( as I think ) If a show is good I can see it about 5-10 times. I mean, a good movie for my personal taste. When I am in this condition it means usually I did not see the video but enjoyed the content, but about the time 3+ I start looking many more things. It looks like a new video, sometimes It is exciting to see a new scene. This case the intensity of graphics and visual goes up over time when I repeat. A lot up I feel. I now friends that can get the video much more than me and yet enjoy the show. So I do think it's a simple matter of multitasking. Most shows/movies has to do with a story so the story being good will affect the whole thing. In order to do the exercise and experimentation one has to test with a changing show - a bunch of 5 minutes elements in a row and get the results. I also think would be good to test with kids and also separate by sex to see the results. And also to test with silent movies with subtitles only and not audio.
If I like a show I want it to be the best quality. This can be proven in one statement. No one downloads a blue ray rip of something they don't like. IE if it's the newest stupid movie (like the new comedy making fun of the vampire movies) then I could care less if the audio is even a tiny bit out of sync and the file is 500 megs. If I even come close to adore it I want the best quality. This is stupid to make a story about because everyone knows this.