Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs (slashgear.com)

Netflix announced last week that it is getting offline video downloads support. The company has since shared that it is using VP9 video compression codec to ensure that the file sizes don't weigh a lot. An anonymous reader shares an article on Slashgear (edited): For streaming content, Netflix largely relies on H.264/AVC to reduce the bandwidth, but for downloading content, it uses VP9 encoding. VP9 can allow better quality videos for the same amount of data needed to download. The challenge is that VP9 isn't supported by all streaming providers -- it is supported on Android devices and via the Chrome browser. So to get around that lack of support on iOS, Netflix is offering downloads in H.264/AVC High whereas streams are encoded in H.264/AVC Main on such devices. Netflix chooses the optimal encoding format for each title on its service after finding, for instance, that animated films are easier to encode than live-action. Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%.

Comments

what about h.265?

[anthony_greer]

I hear it does great things for 4k, so it seems that it would be really great for HD, and even older 720 or 480 content too.

Re:what about h.265?

[Dwedit]

Nobody wants to pay the licensing fees for it, so it's dead in the water.

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

VP9 still seems better, overall, compared to HEVC.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-Great-UHD-Codec-Debate-Googles-VP9-Vs.-HEVC-H.265-103577.aspx

Re:what about h.265?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I hear it does great things for 4k, so it seems that it would be really great for HD, and even older 720 or 480 content too.

It's supposed to be better than VP9; but is there any hardware support for h.265 yet, though?

I think of all these codecs, h.264 is the only one where there's any phone hardware available for decoding. I'd be curious to see how the choice of VP9 affects battery life on Android devices (do any of them have h.264 chips, or would that be handled in software too)?

Re:what about h.265?

[pla]

Until we have (power) efficient dedicated h.265 playback chips in most mobile devices... Yes, it looks absolutely gorgeous, but it doesn't matter that you can store 10 hours of HQ video when your battery only lasts for half an hour of playback. :)

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

A little googling shows Netflix has done stuff with h.265/HEVC too. I would have thought h.264 would be the *obivous* / defacto standard prior to h.265 & HEVC gradually emerging as usable choices.... I'm not sure why there's anything article-worthy there? What else are they going to use? VP6 or VP8, which are far less often HW-accelerated on the decode side?? MPEG-2 which is typically 2x the bandwith per quality as h.264? The only reason MPEG-2 still exists is some executive at a cable company doing cost/benifit analysis on swapping out millions of ancient settops vs the bandwidth savings of going all h.264.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Netflix-Finds-x265-20-More-Efficient-than-VP9-113346.aspx

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

The H.265 licensing is expensive (both in terms of each download, in terms of there not being per-organization caps, like with H.264) and complex (there are two patent pools you need to negotiate with separately).

Re:what about h.265?

[haruchai]

Perhaps VP10?

http://www.techtimes.com/artic...

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rockchip and Allwinner were both making cellphone chips with h.265 decode at least a year ago. Nvidia and intel both do it on the desktop space now.

Re:what about h.265?

[Tx]

Most modern mid-to-high end phones and tablets have hardware h.265 already. See the SnapDragon video specs.

Re: what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sources?

Re:what about h.265?

[jaklode]

Welcome to 2014 and the Snapdragon 801 (up to 1920x1080).

Re:what about h.265?

[kelemvor4]

Most modern mid-to-high end phones and tablets have hardware h.265 already. See the SnapDragon video specs.

Even my older phone, a galaxy s5, has h.265 support.

Re:what about h.265?

[nadaou]

> I hear it does great things

Only because it has a well funded marketing campaign and VP9 doesn't. At this point VP9 is ahead but perhaps only because they had a bit of a head start as H.265 was delayed due to the member companies squabbling over who's patent protected tech got premier submarine status.

We'll have to wait for H.265 to be properly tuned before we can make a real comparison between it and VP9. VP9 has already won on the licensing front. H.265 might be faster at the initial encode but as mentioned it isn't entirely finished yet and new features could easily make the final product bloatier.

You do not want to use either of these codecs without dedicated hardware support. They aren't too different from H.264 and VP8, the primary change is trading disk space now for CPU cycles later. Think gzip vs. bzip2 - each has their place but different compromises are made.

Re:what about h.265?

[pavon]

It's not just about money, either. The licensing situation for H.265 a cluster-fuck, with patent holders having split into 2 licensing pools and several other patent holders that aren't participating in either pool. So even if companies were content with paying the licensing fees (which are significantly higher than H.264), they don't have any easy way of doing so that will cover all the patent holders. Most big players would prefer to pay and use H.265, but the patent holders have gotten too greedy and too splintered.

Most of the major players have gotten fed up with this shit, and committed to pool their patents and expertise create a royalty free format AV1, in place of H.265. Alliance for Open Media includes: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Netfix, Amazon, BBC, ARM, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Broadcom, Cisco, Polycom, and more. The only companies that haven't signed on yet and are big enough to prevent wide adoption are Apple and Qualcomm, and Qualcomm has previously supported VP9, so I don't know why they wouldn't support AV1 once it is ready.

Re:what about h.265?

[Kjella]

I hear it does great things for 4k, so it seems that it would be really great for HD, and even older 720 or 480 content too.

The main reason it does great on 4k/UHD is that the fixed 16x16 macroblocks in H.264 are too small, HEVC brings flexible coding tree units (CTUs) that vary from 64x64 to 16x16 which obviously has the most effect for the highest resolutions. If you restrict it to 16x16 CTUs you get a ~37% penalty on 2160p, ~19% on 1080p and ~9% penalty on 480p. So not as big a deal for older content as you might think.

Re:what about h.265?

[FellowConspirator]

It's not just a matter of money. h.264 caught on specifically because the entire patent portfolio for is pooled and licensed as a single entity from a single organization. h.265 is not only patent encumbered, but the patent holders have not agreed on terms to form a pool for licensing. If you want to license h.265, you literally need to negotiate with a half dozen different organizations.

Re: what about h.265?

[KingMotley]

For Nvidia (Support for 10-bit and up to 8k video):
https://developer.nvidia.com/n...

For Intel:
https://software.intel.com/en-...

"4th Generation Intel Core processors (Haswell CPU 2- 3.5GHz, 4 Cores): Includes an HEVC Software Decoder capable of real time decode of HEVC 4K streams.
5th Generation Intel Core processors (Broadwell): Supports HEVC 8-bit software/hybrid encode.
6th Generation Intel Core processors (Skylake) Supports hardware accelerated HEVC 8-bit decode and encode."

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. H.265 is a superior encoding method, what it has though is a clusterfuck for licensing, if it wasn't for licensing bullshit they created then H.265 would have easily dominated the market already.

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by licensing fee? I download a lot of video in h.265 and it is always free.

Re:what about h.265?

[OverlordQ]

And?

Phones and Tablets is a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of devices that have h264 hardware decoding.

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hardly think that storing video is the biggest issue here, nor is battery life. A more effective compression algorithm preserves bandwidth for the download. That is why Netflix is interested, in the main. It's the transmission bandwidth that is the scarce resource for most people, most places, most devices.

How many people are saving YouTube streams, Vimeo streams, Netflix streams? Sure, some are, but I'll bet a week's pay that "some" equates, in the real world, to less than 10% of users and views.

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps VP10?

No. VP10 is being merged into AV1.

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

H.265 would have easily dominated the market already

But it hasn't and it won't. H.265 has no future in web video. AV1 from the Alliance for Open Media is the future of web video. Netflix will use VP9 for now and transition to AV1 when it's ready.

Re: what about h.265?

[Guspaz]

h.264 doesn't have fixed macroblock sizes, but it's true that 16x16 is the largest.

Re:what about h.265?

[irving47]

The software you use to play it has to decide whether they want to support it. If they do, THEY pay the licensing fee which is either passed on to you by charging for the application, asking for donations, or absorbed by them.

Re:what about h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Bullshit. H.265 is a superior encoding method,

[Citation needed]

I encourage you to head over to http://planet.xiph.org/ and read some of Monty's blog posts and links to double blind tests at various bit rates.

Even then the world is not much concerned with +/- 5% in subjective viewing tests. See Betamax vs. VHS or Vorbis vs. MP3. First to market, the licensing fun you pointed out, and marketing campaigns often matter more. If we were talking H.265 vs. VP8 you'd have a valid point, but VP9 and H.265 are close enough that a minor win or loss in a given encoding test is neither here nor there.

Re:what about h.265?

[Shirley Marquez]

Not to mention that MPEG-2 is baked into the ATSC broadcast television standard. OTA reception will continue to use it until when and if ATSC 3.0 is adopted. The ATSC 3.0 standard is still being finalized but it will certainly include more advanced video encoding. The proposed standards include standard H.265 and scalable H.265 (HEVC). The latter is linked to the fact that ATSC 3.0 also provides for sending relatively low bit rate data in a robust form that can handle weak reception, while also sending higher bit rate data that is less robust. In scalable HEVC a lower resolution version of the picture is sent in the low rate stream, while additional data for higher resolutions is sent in the high rate stream. The result is that a mobile viewer or a viewer in a weak signal area might only get 1080p reception while somebody in a strong signal area will get UHD, or for secondary subchannels get SD instead of HD.

Most cable systems distribute the same bits that they receive for OTA channels. The only change is that they demultiplex the subchannels (putting them on separate cable channels) and repackage the picture and sound bits for compatibility with DOCSIS. So they will also be likely to continue to use MPEG-2 for a while at least for those channels. The alternative would be to reencode the OTA channels, but they would have to buy expensive encoders to do that without loss of quality for the viewers. The satellite people don't seem to care; look at the awful quality they offer for local broadcast channels. To be fair, they're up against the rock vs hard place problem of having to carry local channels for a bunch of markets on a single satellite.

TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[Anonymous Coward]

netflix uses multiple codecs and depending on the platform you are requesting content on, netflix will send content encoded with the best codec and best compression profile for that said platform... The rest of this article only concerns use of the high profile vs main with h264 for downloads and that android devices receive vp9 files since the codec is supported by the android os. The rest of the entire article seems to be filler much like its inclusion on slashdot.....

Sorry, I'm British, we point out such things....

Re:TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, Sir Buzz Killington.

Re: TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[Anonymous Coward]

Being British, he speaks The Queen's English, where "sorry" means "fuck off."

Sorry, I'm Canadian. We have long experience with translating The Queen's English to 'Murrican.

Re: TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I'm Canadian.

Canadians...always apologizing for something, eh?

Re:TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[gsslay]

We should all be using VP9 video compression, because it doesn't "weigh a lot". Must be it uses mostly zeros with empty centres. Although this does make it particularly ideal for android phones. Who wants heavy videos weighing down their pockets?

Re: TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[Anonymous Coward]

The zeroes are lighter, but the ones pack tighter. Tradeoffs...

Re: TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[Mister Transistor]

No, I think he was using the "Queen's English" he spoke of.

In the South in the USA we have the phrase "Bless your heart" which means the same thing.

Re:TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[tsqr]

We should all be using VP9 video compression, because it doesn't "weigh a lot". Must be it uses mostly zeros with empty centres. Although this does make it particularly ideal for android phones. Who wants heavy videos weighing down their pockets?

Obviously you didn't read TFS carefully. It's the file SIZES that don't weigh a lot, not the files themselves. Sheesh.

Re:TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Netflix-Finds-x265-20-More-Efficient-than-VP9-113346.aspx

this is Sir Buzz Killington. Another fantastic PSA.

Banding

[edxwelch]

Bad luck if you're watching a film that has a sand storm or fog in it. The banding artifacts caused by compression make those scenes nearly unwatchable

Re:Banding

[Anonymous Coward]

I never noticed - I assume you mean movies like the Mummy.

I have an ATT shit service 1.5Mbps down -the fastest they offer in my area ($49/mo) - and Netflix worked pretty damn well - and so does Bloomberg; which is something I cannot say about Crackle, PBS, TubiTV is total garbage.

So, the people who handle the streaming for Netflix are doing a damn good job.

It's too bad that Netflix' content sucks otherwise I'd keep it. Getting rid of Doctor Who was the last straw.

Re:Banding

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess Lawrence of Arabia is out then.

I wonder how well the codec would handle banding in the ultramegazord widescreen format original to that movie.

Re:Banding

[swb]

This seems like all streamed content. A night scene at the ocean in last night's Westworld finale looked awful, full of banding artifacts. What's the point of a panel with good black levels when the content looks like a VideoCD?

Re:Banding

[ClickOnThis]

Bad luck if you're watching a film that has a sand storm or fog in it. The banding artifacts caused by compression make those scenes nearly unwatchable

This. I'm not sure whether it's the fault of Netflix or the ISP (throttle much?) but any scene that has a background with a smooth gradient of intensity or color shows those banding artifacts. It's incredibly distracting and annoying.

Re:Banding

[Anonymous Coward]

Might it be that you're using a TN panel for your monitor / TV?

They have six-bit colour. Gradients look really bad there.

Find a display with a PVA or MVA or IPS panel.

Re:Banding

[swalve]

They will just slap black bars around the content to make it a certainty that it won't fit ANY screen conveniently.

Also nothing supports it

[Sycraft-fu]

I mean the newest devices support it in hardware, but it has to be a very new chip to have H.265 support. The vast majority of devices in use don't. For computers you could do it in software but that isn't ideal, since H.265 decoding is rather heavy so you'd hit the CPU pretty hard, whereas hardware accelerated H.264 would hit it almost not at all. For mobile/embedded devices though it just won't work. Too CPU intensive to do in software, so people need a new device.

Re:Also nothing supports it

[Ramze]

I can play H.265 1080p content on my 3 year old laptop without any issue. VLC barely budges a single core on the cpu. My Nexus 7 2013 can handle H.265 720p files just fine with VLC, but it does hit the CPU really hard. (1080p on it plays audio, but the video is jerky) Almost all ARM chips that were produced in the last year or two support H.265 .

The only thing I have that probably couldn't handle H.265 is a 6 year old smart TV... but, I could easily get a Roku or something for that.

I'd say it won't be long before they switch to H.265. Sure, licenses aren't cheap, but when you factor in the bandwidth savings from the file size reduction, I can't imagine it not being worth it for Netflix to switch. It's just a matter of time, testing, re-encoding, and ensuring customers are ready for the switch. It wasn't that long ago that Netflix re-encoded everything from masters to H.264. They drug their feet on that for quite a while, and they paid for a license for H.264. VP9 isn't that impressive. Maybe the next iteration will be better, but for now H.265 is the best out there.

Re:Also nothing supports it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say it won't be long before they switch to H.265.

Netflix has done some H.265 streaming already but H.265 is a dead end as far as web video is concerned. The pathway forward is to use VP9 now and then switch to AV1 from the Alliance for Open Media when it's ready. Netflix is a member of the AOM.

Re:Also nothing supports it

[Shirley Marquez]

A lot of newer phones have enough CPU power to do H.265 decoding in software. But it would kill battery life so it's not going to happen.

Welcome to 2008!

[BenJeremy]

h.265 is where it's at, excerpt a lot of devices don't support it yet.

Still, at a quarter the bandwidth for the same quality, it should be the target, if supported.

As for savings using h.264... what the hell were they using as a codec before?

Re:Welcome to 2008!

[Anonymous Coward]

dv

Re:Welcome to 2008!

[Anonymous Coward]

h.265 is where it's at

No. AV1 is where it's at. H.265 has no future in web video.

As for savings using h.264... what the hell were they using as a codec before?

H.264 Main profile whereas for this download service they're using H.264 High profile. It even says so in the summary.

Check Available Codecs

[randallman]

Couldn't the Netflix app check the available hardware accelerated codecs, and choose the best one?

What compression efficiency means

[TheSync]

Codecs (such as H.264 or VP9) describe a bit stream, and how to decode the bit stream. They basically provide a kit of tools that can be be used by encoders.

The quality of video encoding is mainly due to the technical knowledge and artistry of the encoder manufacturer and how the use that took kit. I can show you great H.264 encoders and horrible H.264 encoders, but they both emit valid H.264 bit streams.

In particular, the biggest challenge is rate control. If you don't care about the details of a variable bit rate, almost anyone can write a great H.264 or VP9 encoder, with the bit rate jumping up and down all over the place. However if you expect a bit rate to be held within say +/- 100 kbps, only a few vendors have the expertise to make a more constant bit rate look good.

I'll also add that I've seen no good data that shows that VP9 encoders perform better over a wide range of content than H.264.

Re:What compression efficiency means

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll also add that I've seen no good data that shows that VP9 encoders perform better over a wide range of content than H.264.

Don't worry. Netflix has and YouTube has

Just torrent it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just make a torrent file and give to The Pirate Bay ;P
Everybody wins! :)

IOS supports it

[Danathar]

The newer iphones (and presumedly ipads?) support H.265 in hardware but it's only available in facetime calls .

Re: IOS supports it

[mrmaster]

My iPad Air has no problems playing h.265. Been only encoding with H.265 for a few months now and love the small file sizes. 16gb iPad Air.

Awful audio

[GWBasic]

I tried watching a movie on a plane last night. The sound was so full of pops that it sounded like a very scratched vinyl record.

Great... except

[Anonymous Coward]

for the devices that don't have hardware decoding support for VP9.

There is a problem with this

[Anonymous Coward]

with the way these video services always adopt the newest and most bandwidth-efficient codecs, it also means nobody ever has hardware support for them; it takes longer for the market to get wide hardware support, than it takes for the next generation of codecs to become available.

The consequence is that we're doing heavier and heavier CPU decoding for online video, and never get any use of the hardware support in our video chips, because it effectively lags behind.

Re:There is a problem with this

[Anonymous Coward]

just checked my phone seems to support, it is over a year old

What weight?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always been curious. How much does a byte weigh, anyway?

Re:What weight?

[Nidi62]

How much does a byte weigh, anyway?

About a kilo

ATSC v3? Isn't that h.265?

[Anonymous Coward]

Big broadcasters will mandate the use in the USA in a few years.
Internet video may skip it completely to avoid the obscene license fees.

None of my playback devices support h.265, so h.264 is my preference today. Previously, it was xvid and prior to that it was mpeg2.

ATSC today is mpeg2. I'm forever transcoding to h.264 - sometimes that saves 70% of the size, after removing commercials. Commercials are about 50% of the size, BTW, even if only 1/3rd of the content.

Netflix DVDs

[PPH]

Because their streaming catalog still sucks.

Hosts files help vs. bandwidth caps

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: Blocking ads (typically ads = 40% of website pagesize). For the best hosts file APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?...

Ads rob speed, security (malvertising) & privacy (tracking).

Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively.

Works vs. PUSH ads.

Avg. page = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... & ads = 40% of it.

Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)

Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity.

Compliments firewalls (blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load).

Gets data via 10 security sites.

APK

P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )

So, by "low", they mean less 35% of all traffic?

[supremebob]

The last report I saw said that they were using 36% of all Internet traffic, and that was in early 2016 before they had a bunch of 4K offerings:

http://fortune.com/2015/10/08/...

Still streaming in Main in 2016.

[SeaFox]

Really? That's absurd. Any device they support should be able to handle High Profile.
I wonder if they're using CABAC -- it took Apple a little while to start using it.

Drining in the "slow" lanes.

[Ostracus]

Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%.

So the advantage is everyone in the internet "slow lanes" can currently enjoy the same experience as those in the fast lanes?

All the new high end ARM CPUs do

[Sycraft-fu]

My phone (LG G5) supports it because it has a Snapdragon 820. That's great and all, but there aren't a lot of devices out there that are so new. So no real point in Netflix supporting it. They'd need to wait a few years for enough people to replace their hardware with new units.

Re:ATSC v3? Isn't that h.265?

[Shirley Marquez]

The current ATSC 3.0 proposal includes H.265. But it's not finalized, so it is possible that AV1 will replace it or be included as an alternative.

I'm not surprised that the commercials don't compress as efficiently as the programs. They tend to use more rapid cuts and point of view changes.

Tremendous news about compression

[Anonymous Coward]

We're (#MindAptiv folllow us on twitter) testing a new approach that reduces video file sizes by over 98%. Sounds crazy, but it works by detecting object details (lines, colors, shapes, lighting, motion) and packaging them as math, compresses the math with 3 different compression algorithms, and then creates little DNA-like packages. These are used as blueprints to regenerate video as higher quality than the original. We're able to turn DVD quality into 4K subjective quality this way. It's possible because everything is done in parallel with high efficiency so does not require beefy hardware. Bandwidth required to store and send videos is about to go way down.