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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."
"You shouldn't allocate the same amount of bits for My Little Pony as for The Avengers."
So they're dropping the resolution for The Avengers?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Shaving 20% off seems pretty optimistic to me. Unless they've suddenly discovered some whole new realm of compression mathematics I'd be surprised if thats anything more than a peak compression in some rare edge cases.
So they should be able to do this without effecting quality due to better compression algorithms being available now, but what problem is this trying to address? Other then keeping that one intern they don't like locked in a small room running HandBreak 24/7.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Wow, 1 Petabyte... pretty soon they might surpass the size of the first volume of my porn collection.
Back in the MPEG2 Sat days they regularly used different bit rates depending on content talking heads very little compared to full out for sports and action movies. An actual knowledgeable encoding tech can do wonders, higher quality source material can also do wonders.
No sir I dont like it.
Almost sounds to me like they have switched to multiple pass encoding, rather than a fixed quality/bandwidth setting.
"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."
They can save about 500% of my bandwidth by just letting me perma-download Family Guy, American Dad, and Buffy, which I keep watching over and over and over again.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
As a My Little Pony enthusiast who pays the same per month as everyone else I demand the same quality as the Avengers.
Wasn't this the entire plot to that HBO series "Silicon Valley", where a group of geeks form a company to re-encode petabytes of porn?
I never really got to see the whole series, but it came on after Game of Thrones, so I saw the occasional episode.....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
TOECDN would have fixed this shit already. We don't want less quality, we want more!
I watch YouTube a lot, on average about 2-3 hours a day. As of late, I live in a country where there is a bandwidth cap of 40 GB/month. And I have no option but to YouTube at 144p to avoid extra bandwidth charges.
I applaud all efforts by tech companies to reduce bandwidth usage (and not to forget, making inter-webs more exciting). Then again, none of those efforts matter, if bandwidth caps are forcing consumers to use internet like back in 90s.
With all their efforts concentrated on their original series, it seems like their movie and TV offerings already shrink every month already, without any compression.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Whereas the original Star Wars is compressed down to one bit -- Solo fires first yes/no.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
From the article:
"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."
I thought existing VBR algorithms already account for the absence of interframe changes by reducing the effective bit rate for those frames.
I know my current LG has already limited upgrade support for older SmartTV functions, so it's possible (likely) that my current TV will not support this upgrade. Crap.
They could save 20% of their bandwidth by having a way to disable the auto-play of the next episode.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
You shouldn't allocate the same amount of bits for My Little Pony as for The Avengers.
Who the hell is deciding which content should have shitty artifacts? I have no interest in having shitty compression shoved down my throat because somebody at Netflix deemed my show unworthy of 'good' compression., especially if it's just to use those bandwidth savings to improve shows I don't watch. Netflix is playing with fire here, but I must admit they seem to be following the standard American business model: make a good product, gain a following, then cut corners on quality and service to rake in profits on the margin until people realized you've fucked them.
RTFA. They claim no loss of quality so who cares about the bit rate.
use x265 and save more than half while getting the same or better quality
They exist, get over it, you might decide you actually enjoy them depending on how much lens flare they put into this next one.
They've taken 4 years to figure out that parameters need to be optimized per film to produce optimum results for that film, and then to re-encode some films. The decisions for new parameters apparently aren't being made automatically, it's human choice. They're just beginning to consider that they may want to change parameters dynamically as a film progresses. This could and should all have been done in 2 months.
They haven't invented a new codec technology; they haven't advanced the state of the art at all.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Generally rec rooms/brorooms are wider/longer than the 3 to 4 feet that is the maximum viewing distance for 'decent' sized TV's, anything smaller than 60" and your sitting even closer to get any benefit...just another scam like 3D if you ask me. Don't get me wrong I'm sure it would benefit a small group but certainly not the majority so it's just another way to hopefully get the masses to replace their existing good TV's...what a waste.
I felt this way for the VHS to DVD conversion then even more so during the DVD to bluray conversion. I was completely wrong both times so I think I'll be shutting up during the jump to 4k and just look forward to enjoying it in 10 years when the price allows me to.
(I encode everything to 720p just so I won't start getting use to 1080p)
4K is not going to happen unless Comcast, TWC and the rest of the evil monopolies build pipes that can handle it, or they get some competition, which is not going to happen as long as crooks run the state and local governments.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
How is modern animation done? If it's done on computers in some sort of vector drawing format then, unless the drawings are really complicated, it seems a little silly to convert the (lossless) vector drawings to a (lossy) video in the first place. Surely modern computers can render 2D vector drawings in real time? I assume that the vector information can be stored relatively compactly.
FWIW, it sounds like some of the animation for My little pony is done with Flash, and much as I hate flash, a flash animation would surely would take less bandwith then a normal video, right?
> WTF are you blabbering about!? I got a 49" 4K and I am sitting about 3+ meters (10 feet for muricans) away with no need to move closer.
> WTF watches TV from less than 2 meters?
People stuck in small apartments in Europe where there may not be 10 whole feet from one wall to the other. [snicker]
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Instead of just giving the user the choice to watch at crap 480p quality or use ALL THEIR BANDWIDTH, how about a 720p option? The bandwidth jumps from .7 MB per hour with SD to 3 GB or more per hour for the next option. Why?
The shaders in MLP:FIM are much simpler than those in The Avengers, no matter whether Emma "Black Widow" Peel is played by Scarlett Johansson or Uma Thurman. Flat-shaded animation has harder edges and less texture than photoreal-shaded animation and thus may need different compression techniques to improve the rate for a given level of distortion.
I don't want to sound like the devil's advocate, but why aren't they using BitTorrent technology to distribute the bandwidth problem a little. Something in the likes of Popcorn time. Each user will allocate a certain amount of hard drive space as a local cache and then use that to cache to distribute to others. Of course, it's not easy, you would need to have a very smart algorithm taking care of all this and distribute it along, but it should work much better than the standard Server => Client paradigm. Or am I missing something obvious? Piracy concerns? Copyright?
When are they going to fix their sound encoding?! I often have to switch to plain stereo from the default 5.1, because the higher-frequency is distorted which makes speech/dialog sound especially "tinny". Don't know if it's due to higher compression for 5.1 sound, or something else, but it annoys the hell out of me. I'm no audiophile either, so it is pretty apparent. Using PS3 hooked to a receiver, so it could be the PS3 client. Tried reporting this issue to Netflix, but there is no way to do it except by calling them.
I have a regular sized house and only have a 39"- don't want the TV to dominate the living room area.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I look forward to watching my six hours of Netflix every month. Good thing that Comcast lets me watch as many of their movies as I want on Hexfinicky.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So cant really go full HEVC, a lot of embedded devices in old TVs etc cant cope. But if it can take HEVC then do it for 60% for the same visual quality, so they need to start creating HEVC encoded versions as well as better H264. Then comes the 1 pass with 'constant quality' versus 2 pass with 'constant bitrate' (typically). If you use the 1st pass to work out where to apply savings, and encode on the 2nd pass to work at a variable bitrate that lowers space when it can, then its more than feasible to nail down 20%.
Gritty.
Im guessing. Maybe a million titles.
Your dark scenes suck. Fix them with this update as well!
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Because at that distance, your eyes can't resolve 4K. 350ppi is about the limit for holding a phone inches from your face. At 3+ meters, a 49" TV is going to be about the equivalent of a 3 inch phone screen.
ok, so, if I'm understanding this right, Netflix plans to keep the more profitable titles reasonably compressed, and the less profitable titles will have the living crap compressed out of them. Oh, they'll say you will hardly notice, but you know they'll do it. There's too much money at stake.
Just sayin', this is why we gave up on DirecTV. Stuff like football games (which I don't watch) were relatively uncompressed and very sharp. Stuff like the Disney channel and Nick, the reception of which was the primary use of the equipment, (having a young child and not watching much tv myself) were compressed to big splotches of color. It was so bad that even my grade school kid noticed that the video quality was crap. In the early thousands, we dumped DirecTV and switched to Netflix. Now some 12 years later, daughter still watches Netflix. Hopefully the stuff she watches won't be unpopular enough to be compressed to incomprehensibility. I guess the advantage is that Netflix doesn't do live sports, which was apparently the largest per-program usage of available bandwidth on DirecTV.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It's fine you don't understand. There's nothing to be ashamed of. Just try harder in the future - you'll be better off for it, and able to participate in these discussions without choking on your feet.
You still need II and III for Machete order (IV V II III VI). This order makes the most narrative sense by skipping the toy commercial that is The Phantom Menace and treating Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith as an extended flashback.
You could move to Kansas City.
That's easier said than done now that ISIL has been successful in sowing anti-immigrant sentiment among U.S. politicians.
Perhaps the only way for Seattle to get the hint is if people polish their respective resumes and then move out of Seattle in masses. Then Seattle would have to notice that, as Leia Organa might put it, the city has tightened its grip on the rights of way so much that jobs and property value have slipped through its fingers.
If it is a capacity problem they can simply cap the speeds during commercial hours.
It appears that only satellite ISPs do this nowadays. Cellular carriers used to offer "free nights and weekends" back when voice airtime was considered expensive and Sprint was running the "Scooter My Daisyheads" commercial. But in the end, demand-based billing turned out to be too complicated for non-technical subscribers to understand, and subscribers ended up choosing plans with uniform billing because they were simpler.
Go to your public library, install the "Video DownloadHelper" add-on in Firefox, and download from Youtube in glorious 1080p to your hearts content.
Which requires buying a laptop in addition to the desktop computer and mobile devices that you may already own. I don't think extensions like that are available for an iPhone or iPad. And good luck getting your library to let you bring in a desktop computer, even if you can fit it on your bike.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
But if you have a pure red, green, or blue, then you have a very limited range for that color. This is why for photo realistic, it's no big deal, in nature you don't really see concentrations of just a primary color, and not usually in a gradient . It's when an artist sits down to create the content and chooses much more simplistic colors and patterns, which interestingly enough causes a unique problem for the medium when only 256 levels are available to represent any particular primary.
Now dithering up to fuzz away the bands in a gradient is pretty much imperceptible, but the compressor sees a more 'noisy' source than if the band width is reduced by a factor of 4. Of course ideally a compression algorithm simplifies the model the same way at a certain compression level, but at best it's considering the dithering to be detail that can be discarded if necessary rather than that specific pattern of detail not mattering one bit.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They have stolen Pied Piper that's what they did. Don't let them tell you anything else!!!
Paul E. Bahre