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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.'"
One dirty but fairly open secret of HD On Demand services is that the providers compress the hell out of the stream to save on bandwidth costs. What you noticed were edge cases where this practice aggressively breaks down. It's proof that high-resolution doesn't mean much if the actual bitrate is too low to take advantage of it. You're unlikely to notice this on a Blu-Ray disc unless it's been horrifically mastered - I'd go far enough to say that a Blu-Ray disc exhibiting this kind of visual anomaly would probably be subject to a recall. That is, unless it's a $6 bootleg advertising "THREE NEW HOLLYWOOD MOVIES ON ONE DISC"...