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Netflix To Re-Encode Entire 1 Petabyte Video Catalogue In 2016 To Save Bandwidth (variety.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Netflix has spent four years developing a new and more efficient video-encoding process that can shave off 20% in terms of space and bandwidth without reducing the quality of streamed video. With streaming video accounting for 70% of broadband use, the saving is much-needed, although the advent of 4K streaming, higher frame rates and HDR are likely to account for it all soon after. Netflix video algorithms manager Anne Aaron explained to Variety that certain types of video benefit little from the one-size-fits-all compression approach that Netflix has been using until now: "You shouldn't allocate the same amount of bits for My Little Pony as for The Avengers."
The article is actually in English, you know.
"The new system will encode from the raw source material more intelligently, considering whether or not the material itself can really benefit from higher bit-rates, or whether identical quality can be maintained with less space and bandwidth."
That animated content benefits from 10-bit encoding is true. That has less to do with hard edges and more to do with banding artifacts on flat shaded areas - TFA actually goes into that, mentioning soft focus and fog as producing hard-to-encode gradients, the same kind of gradients present in many kinds of animation and which would benefit from using 10-bit mode. Hard edges do tend to be hard to encode with typical video codecs too (but 10-bit probably won't help you there).
However, My Little Pony isn't a particularly good example, because it's full of completely flat areas that are trivial to encode. It might take a higher quality setting than you might expect to look crisp, but at the end of the day, you're going to be spending fewer bits per frame on it than on The Avengers. Animation has its own set of encoding tradeoffs/challenges (which is why good encoders have presets tuned for animation).