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Netflix's Secrets to Success: Six Cell Towers, Dubbing and More (variety.com)
Variety gets access to the people at Netflix who take care of the tech: Netflix has its own cell towers. Netflix wants to test its app running on mobile devices under a variety of conditions available around the world, so the company decided to bring the operating equipment of six cell towers to its Los Gatos offices. "Minus the towers," quipped Scott Ryder, the company's director of mobile streaming. The cell tower equipment is housed in the company's mobile device lab, where they are joined by a number of cabinets that look like fancy Netflix-themed fridges, but in reality are Faraday cage-like boxes to suppress any outside interference, and also make sure that those experimental cell towers don't mess up phone reception on the rest of the campus. Each of these boxes can house dozens of devices, and emulate certain mobile or Wi-Fi conditions. "We can make a box look like India, we can make a box look like the Netherlands," Ryder said. Altogether, Netflix runs over 125,000 tests in its mobile lab every single day.[...]
Netflix just re-encoded its entire catalog, again. To optimize videos for mobile viewing, Netflix recently re-encoded its entire catalog on a per-scene basis. "We segment the videos into shots, we analyze the video per shot," said the company's director of video algorithms Anne Aaron. Now, an action scene in a show may stream at a higher bit rate than a scene featuring a slow monologue -- and users with limited bandwidth are set to save a lot of data. A few years back, 4 GB of mobile data would get you just about 10 hours of Netflix video, said Aaron. Now, members can watch up to 26 hours while consuming the same amount of data. Netflix previously re-encoded its entire catalog on a per-title basis, which already allowed it to stream animated shows at much lower bitrates than action movies with a lot of visual complexity. The next step for the company will be to adopt AV1, an advanced video codec developed by an alliance of companies that also includes Apple, Amazon, and Google. Aaron said Netflix could start streaming in AV1 before the end of this year, with Chrome browsers likely being first in line to receive AV1 streams.
Netflix just re-encoded its entire catalog, again. To optimize videos for mobile viewing, Netflix recently re-encoded its entire catalog on a per-scene basis. "We segment the videos into shots, we analyze the video per shot," said the company's director of video algorithms Anne Aaron. Now, an action scene in a show may stream at a higher bit rate than a scene featuring a slow monologue -- and users with limited bandwidth are set to save a lot of data. A few years back, 4 GB of mobile data would get you just about 10 hours of Netflix video, said Aaron. Now, members can watch up to 26 hours while consuming the same amount of data. Netflix previously re-encoded its entire catalog on a per-title basis, which already allowed it to stream animated shows at much lower bitrates than action movies with a lot of visual complexity. The next step for the company will be to adopt AV1, an advanced video codec developed by an alliance of companies that also includes Apple, Amazon, and Google. Aaron said Netflix could start streaming in AV1 before the end of this year, with Chrome browsers likely being first in line to receive AV1 streams.
So they have cell towers, but they don't have cell towers. Nice.
How many people will actually be using AV1?
A few days ago, Netflix said that 70%+ of viewing happens on a TV, which implies a smart TV or a set top box and almost all of them use H.264.
#DeleteFacebook
StingRay.
On the plus side they added a "Skip Intro" button for some shows.
They are either orders of magnitude better at encoding than everyone else on the face of the planet, of their quality must be shit.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Netflix no longer "derates" shows that have subtitles (due to being in languages you do not understand) ...
For normal people, that's a feature, not a bug. One would almost prefer penalizing dubbed media...
Ezekiel 23:20
The good old days of 3-pass vs 2-pass encoding questions.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I've heard a mixed bag coming out of Netflix re: developer experience, but one thing I admire is their effort toward a reliable user experience.
From testing everything down to minutiae, to designing things so that failure is simply another regular and expected state to move forward from... most companies do not commit the time/funds to do this sort of thing.
This practical engineering is much cooler to me than Facebook/Google's latest me-too Javascript libraries that iteratively steal the next good established idea from desktop coding and call it innovation.
"We segment the videos into shots, we analyze the video per shot," said the company's director of video algorithms Anne Aaron. Now, an action scene in a show may stream at a higher bit rate than a scene featuring a slow monologue
Video encoders have supported constant quality modes for quite a while that already do this very effectively. I'm guessing they don't do this out of some need for precise control or for hardware compatibility. It's obviously not a wasted effort, but it's unfortunate that Netflix is needing to reinvent the wheel here.
Hey, the marketing team worked very hard to make changing to VBR seem like a major accomplishment only possible through an enormous expenditure.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
even though all my equipment is capable of 1080P, I don't have the "approved by Netflix" devices.
VBR seem like a major accomplishment
It's more involved than that.
Netflix could start streaming in AV1 before the end of this year, with Chrome browsers likely being first in line to receive AV1 streams.
But Chrome is a famously poor choice for Netflix - it only supports 720P, despite that it's apparently possible to force 1080P playback with tweaks.
(To be clear, the 720P limitation appears to be Netflix's doing, not Chrome's.)
You assume Apple and Google will allow software decoding of AV1, which is extremely bad for battery life.
Apple :
No, they wont. They have high stake in H265 patents.
(I am actually surprised that there are part of the alliance)
Google:
Yes, they will. AV1 is also designed to be easy to implement in hardware and in GPGPU acceleration.
Means that, there will be some implementations on whatever is closest to a OpenCL / Vulkan combo available on the hardware.
So even before AMD, Nvidia, and the other hardware manufacturer of the alliance start shipping dedicated AV1 hardware on their GPU, the GPU will already be able to offload a significant bit.
Your battery won't suffer as bad as if everything was 100% decoded by the ARM CPU core.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The problem is that only high-end devices are just getting H.265 support
(which is also due to the patent mess and thus nobody being in a hurry to jump into the bandwagon)
If the industry keeps coming out with new codecs at this rate,
If you look, "the industry" is more or less grouping around two entities :
- the MPEG which still tend to design codecs the old way (file patents and monetize through licensing)
- and the Alliance for Open Media, where basically any industry member that has anything to do with video in their business is represented (the whole chain from the camera to the mobile device receiving the stream seem to be represented) with a completely different approach to financing it (these are video companies. they earn money from video any way : be it selling hardware, services, etc. they don't need to sell AV1, they only need to get rid of the licensing madness of h265. Making an open/free codec makes entirely sense for them)
So we're not bound to see dozens of new codecs, we're basically only expecting 2 :
- whatever MPEG comes up with after H265
- AV1
given the list of members behind AV1, it's bound to be supported by most software and hardware pretty fast.
we are going to have to adapt our chips to be more flexible, perhaps even programmable in the hardware decoder area
Congratulation, you've successfully described a compute shader.
More seriously : GPU have flexible blocks - the compute shaders available to Vulkan and OpenCL. They might not be as efficient as a dedicated core, but they are deffinitely better than a naked CPU core. AV1 is on purpose designed in a way to be easily implemented on a GPU, and decision are taken in this favor.
H.264 and VP8 is easy to find these days,
Yes.
VP9 and H265 is slowly but surely coming,
h265 is *very slow* at coming, mostly due to the patent minefield making manufacturer less in a hurry to support it.
releasing a brand new codec today will take 5 years to get it in the majority of high-end chip fabs and another 5-or-so years to go mainstream with at least 15-20y more years of having to have both available.
Unless the chip manufacturer are part of the process. Which is the case (ARM, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, etc.)
They are considering hardware implementation while the AV1 is being designed and contributing appropriate feed-back.
- compute shader code will be available at codec release time (you'll be able to have decent performance on smartphone on day 1).
- the manufacturer plan to have chips ready within one year.
- means by 3 year (counting the current 2 year churn) there will be a lot of smartphone native-capable on the market.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Netflix now starts playing video willy nilly with no way to stop it ...
The 'back' button stops it just fine on my U.I. As far as them doing away with the rating system: I'm fine with that since it was utter bullshit anyway. I don't recall it ever having a way to filter for language ... but I believe you.
Netflix is dying.
In what world is it dying? This chart ...
https://www.statista.com/chart...
Shows steady and consistent growth.
If something that works "like netflix used to" comes along, netflix will go bankrupt in a week.
So we agree it is currently the best thing going.
Does Netflix do any similar optimizing for streaming to TVs? TV/non-mobile streaming is typically not subject to data caps or paying per amount of data, like mobile data, so the financial incentives to optimize the streams are different. Just wondering...
My country used to pat itself on the back for having world-class movie dubbing, but those decades are a matter of past, and whenever I hear something dubbed, I vomit. Especially in those cases where I had heard the original before. Not only are those voices often obnoxious on their own but it also feels like they're competing who butchers the original voice the most. I agree with the occasional mumbling problems; that is why I prefer English subtitles on English shows. For any other language, well, I take whatever is there, but it's mostly English subs, too.
Ezekiel 23:20