It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but customers are losing

Re:It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but cu... by nvarsj on Friday November 19, 2021 @07:44PM (#29284513)

Except you can't really get good quality. Netflix 4k bitrates are atrociously bad. Compression artifacts are super noticeable especially in dark scenes. I think they use around 10mbps for 4k, which is just a joke. Blu-ray is around 50mbps, cinema is around 250. You can't actually get decent quality without buying physical media or pirating.

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Re:It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but cu... by Dylan16807 on Saturday November 20, 2021 @09:24PM (#29293636)

It's worth noting that cinema bitrates are a very different beast, because they store every frame as a separate jpeg2000.

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Re:It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but cu... by nvarsj on Monday November 22, 2021 @05:43AM (#29304982)

Yes, which avoids all compression artifacts that come from the cross-frame compression that mpeg does. There's a reason DCP is used in cinemas - those kinds of artifacts become a lot more noticeable on very large screens and are hard to avoid completely. But for now, you can't even get Blu-ray quality video over streaming which would be sufficient for everyone with nice TVs. Netflix takes a 250GB master and compresses it down to about 10GB. The dark scenes in most Netflix content make me want to cry. Macro blocking on moving scenes, and so on. It's the video equivalent of listening to 64kbps mp3s.

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