Re:Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content
by dmurray on Friday August 28, 2020 @09:26PM
(#24312441)
> My point is that if Netflix thinks they can do better, it would be great to see their code contributed to the public, since they're using an open source program to do all their encodes.
This really is their core business and somewhere they can have a competitive edge, though. Even if you think it's unethical or that it might make business sense to contribute back to the upstream projects, you can see why they might want to keep some of that secret sauce in-house.
Re:Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content
by bscphil on Friday August 28, 2020 @09:29PM
(#24312463)
Fair enough, I'm not arguing that they're obligated to or anything, I just think it would be nice. I do suspect that catalogue matters much more at this point than any tiny competitive advantage they get through better encoding. And they've certainly been willing to share advances (like VMAF) in the past - that's why this tech blog exists, after all!
Re:Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content
by ponker on Friday August 28, 2020 @10:43PM
(#24312900)
Bandwidth is a huge cost for these services and if they share encoding techniques then their competitors can cut prices at the margins.
Re:Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content
by ksec on Sunday August 30, 2020 @01:59AM
(#24321661)
>since they're using an open source program to do all their encodes.
Is that still the case? They switched from x265 to beamr for HEVC. Not sure if they are still on x264 on recent encodes.
Also, you're making a slight mistake. About a decade ago (?), x264 was changed so that even 2-pass mode is really just using CRF under the hood. It's not "achieving the best quality", it's just figuring out what quantizers you need to hit your average bitrate target exactly. Some more information about that here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264
> normal 1-pass CBR encoding
You may be confusing constant bitrate (which no one should ever use) with CRF (constant rate factor), which varies the bitrate from frame to frame and scene to scene, without having to do a 2 pass encode.