Slashdot Mirror
Netflix Uses AI in Its New Codec To Compress Video Scene By Scene (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: Annoying pauses in your streaming movies are going to become less common, thanks to a new trick Netflix is rolling out. It's using artificial intelligence techniques to analyze each shot in a video and compress it without affecting the image quality, thus reducing the amount of data it uses. The new encoding method is aimed at the growing contingent of viewers in emerging economies who watch video on phones and tablets. "We're allergic to rebuffering," said Todd Yellin, a vice president of innovation at Netflix. "No one wants to be interrupted in the middle of Bojack Horseman or Stranger Things." Yellin hopes the new system, called Dynamic Optimizer, will keep those Netflix binges free of interruption when it's introduced sometime in the next "couple of months." He was demonstrating the system's results at "Netflix House," a mansion in the hills overlooking Barcelona that the company has outfitted for the Mobile World Congress trade show. In one case, the image quality from a 555 kilobits per second (kbps) stream looked identical to one on a data link with half the bandwidth.
Why are they calling it AI? That's silly.
It's just an improved encoding scheme with better algorithms.
Nothing new to see here. We've been improving video encoding schemes since we started encoding video.
What I think is that they devised an algorithm, probably based on neural networks, that is particularly good as estimating the perceived quality of the picture.
This data is then used to adjust the level of compression of each part of the picture, so that the least important parts of the picture get compressed more aggressively to save bitrate for the more important parts.
This is nothing new really, the idea of using AI techniques and perceived quality to help with compression is decades old. The interesting part here is that it is done on a commercial scale.
I don't think that word means what you think it means...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I hate these things, they never work as stated. All it means is they can save money by buffering ahead even less. Days past if you had a poor connection you could load a video and pause it and it would buffer through. Now if you pause it buffers what it seems to think is all you actually need. It never is.