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Netflix To Re-Encode Entire 1 Petabyte Video Catalogue In 2016 To Save Bandwidth (variety.com)

Posted by timothy on from the gotta-save-space-gotta-save-space dept.

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."

20 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. My little pony by Eunuchswear · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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?

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    1. Re:My little pony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Absolutely. I need to see every little pony in all its unpixelated, 4K glory.

      Wait... that didn't come out right.

    2. Re:My little pony by Kagato · · Score: 5, Interesting

      On a serious note, animated content is much harder for the 8-bit encoding. It's the hard edges with high contrast cell shading. You get a lot more compression artifacts than a typical movie. You can resolve this by using 10-bit encoding, but there's a lot of Netflix devices with embedding video codecs. They really can't change, and almost none of the chipsets out there support 10-bit decoding. So that leaves option two, which is to increase the bitrate.

    3. Re:My little pony by marcansoft · · Score: 4, Informative

      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).

    4. Re:My little pony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I recode a lot of video (don't ask), and in my experience, animation is a lot easier on the resulting files for the same quality. The absolute worst you can do if you want small high quality files is "film grain", whether it is from a bad source or artificially added for artistic reasons. Second worst is a badly compressed source with lots of artifacts. Then there's video with lots of small objects moving across a detailed background. The hard contrasts at the edges of cell shaded videos are only problematic if you don't have a good quality source, i.e. if your source already has lots of compression artifacts.

  2. Another year, another video codec... by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Another year, another video codec... by hawguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      Sounds more like as a part of re-compression, they are going to drop the bitrate (and video quality?) for videos that don't "need" it:

      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."

    2. Re:Another year, another video codec... by c0d3g33k · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I suspect that by the time of this announcement they have already done the testing, so have a good idea of how much they can optimize. From the article, it's more about optimizing compression parameters to fit the source material rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

    3. Re:Another year, another video codec... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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."

    4. Re:Another year, another video codec... by JackieBrown · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I am in the process of moving my fiancee's dvd/bluray collection to my server and putting her physical copies in storage. Using Handbrake, switching from x264 to x265 saves me at lease 10 % on dvd sources and closer to 30+% on the bluray sources.

    5. Re:Another year, another video codec... by bagofbeans · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I remember ripping my CD collection to ogg, only have to do it again years later to flac when space got cheaper. The ogg was fine, but not a good source for re-encoding to another format such as mp3.

      If I was going to rip movies, I'd keep the original streams. You'll never spare the time again to re-rip, even if you you think now that you will.

  3. Repetition by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Repetition by c0d3g33k · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

      Look into something called "Boxed Sets".

    2. Re:Repetition by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Funny

      Look into something called "Boxed Sets".

      So then .. looks like I'll have to buy the white album .. again.

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  4. Re:Neat... but why? by c0d3g33k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What problem is this trying to address?

    Saving on bandwidth costs?
    Providing a better streaming experience for customers on poor or throttled connections?
    Storage space savings?
    Getting the satisfaction of doing something better because why not?

  5. class action suit by sunking2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    As a My Little Pony enthusiast who pays the same per month as everyone else I demand the same quality as the Avengers.

    1. Re:class action suit by Kjella · · Score: 3, Funny

      Are you sure you haven't agreed to a binding arbitration agreement? >:-)

      --
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  6. Netflix's catalog is already shrinking by NotDrWho · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    --
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  7. Re:Neat... but why? by loony · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Three words: Comcast data cap...

    Peter.

  8. Re:90's sat tech by c0d3g33k · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Netflix probably aren't too keen on the idea of paying people to puzzle over what compression would best suit each and every item in their 1-Petabyte video library.

    The summary says they spent four years developing the new approach. I suspect that paying people to puzzle over (in layman's terms: do research) how to improve the encoding across their Petabyte video library was exactly what they did.