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.

Comments

Re:What exactly is Netflix doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is it's the codec equivalent of "See that tree in the background? Yeah, that's going to be there for a while so just draw it once and leave it there until we tell you otherwise and we'll only send you the data about the stuff that's actually moving."

Re:What exactly is Netflix doing?

[squiggleslash]

Bear in mind that while they may be using a new codec - that is, a piece of code designed to convert a video from one format to another - they're not using a new format, if they did, then they could no longer use the hardware acceleration they pretty much rely upon to ensure devices can play their content in real time, and without destroying the battery.

So insofar as they're doing the above, they're not doing it any more than any other codec does, because only compressing changes is what every current codec does well, and pretty much a fundamental assumption behind each mainstream format, from MPEG-1 and H.261 onwards.