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Re:Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix by rbutcher on Thursday March 23, 2017 @10:13AM (#13939876)
Nobody has said that the quality would be bad, just that some amount of generation loss [1] will occur when you use a lossily compressed [2] video (the netflix stream) as input for the creation of another lossily compressed video (the "recompressed" video file). The "recompressed" video would be slightly worse than the streamed video, which would be slightly worse than the original video.

An approximation of an approximation of a video is going to be worse than an approximation of a video.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_loss

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression

Re:Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix by braveo on Thursday March 23, 2017 @12:00PM (#13940956)
right, but what algesten originally said was (emphasis mine):

> _Problem is_ that grabbing the last frame buffer would mean you're doing it post decompression. To distribute something you grabbed like that you'd need to recompress it and then have a generation degradation of lossy compression.

In the context of getting a decent pirated copy, that's not really a problem due to how good those streams are.

That was my point, anyway.