Slashdot Mirror
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
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!)
Ah scrambled porn. Waiting through 5 minutes of snow for one elliptical, green boob.
Sometimes special effects can make the movie though. Jurassic Park would be ridiculous and boring if it were animated, and A Scanner Darkly would be melodramatic and underwhelming if it didn't have such a fascinating look (or if you watch it in standard definition).
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 found A Scanner Darkly melodramatic and underwhelming anyway.
What about audio?
I tolerate dropped video frames, but if the audio stutters, I will stop watching very quickly. Often seen with screencasts or demonstration videos: Buzzing or humming because of low quality or built-in micro or loud fans. I cannot stand that, but do not mind if the video is a bit blurry.
>i'm sure there is an inverse curve here where as the quality of the media approaches sensory limits, the contents of the media would
>approach irrelevancy.
We passed that threshold with audio quality a long time ago, to the point where the listening environment is far more important than the recording. I wonder what the equivalent plateau is with video. I'm not suggesting that "you will literally believe the moving image is real" any more than a concert recording will make you believe you are at a concert and not listening to your stereo in your living room. But there are plateaus where differences in media quality are lost beyond a threshold of human perception (and in the case of audio, we have passed dog perception but not bats.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
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"...