Anyone noticed that streaming services start to compromise on quality? With Netflix it's been like that for a while. Apple TV+ seems to be the best. I really want to get into Blu-ray now, looking for a decent player.
Question: what's the streaming budget for the big platforms? Can they offer 50-100 mbps? For example, a 70 gb video for a 2.5 hour movie would need 67 mbps to stream. Having access to a rip like that for a popular movie (meaning new or classic) is normal "on the high seas" and it has a detectable difference on my budget-tier setup compared to a ~20 gb rip. I'm wondering if streaming platforms can afford to offer something like that.
Sure, they could. But given that the average consumer really doesn’t care that much about picture quality (DVD _still_ outsells Blu-ray for example), why would they bother? Increased storage and bandwidth costs, for what exactly? To cater to the small group of consumers that have good enough hardware (and eyes) to distinguish/care about 20Mb versus 100Mb? Those people are probably buying physical media anyway.
We're misunderstanding each other. I take what you say to mean that Netflix could offer me unlimited bandwidth for 5 euros a month or whatever they're charging.
Yeah. I see overcompression on a lot of shows. Dark scenes and star fields tend to make it obvious. Three Body Problem was the worst -- I imagine it would have been consistently visually spectacular if they hadn't compressed it to shit. I've seen it on Apple TV too though-- e.g. really visible on Silo title screens. Love, Death and Robots on Netflix quality was great.
Disney's Coco did it for me. There were so many scenes with so much visual detail, streaming compression absolutely wrecked it. I've seen it on Blu-ray since and it's an entirely different experience.
How they allowed the release to streaming without manually adjusting the compression for those scenes, I don't understand, but someone was slacking.
We actually had the opposite idea, where we'd steal a few kbps from the video to increase the audio. If you hear poorly compressed audio, the video feels bad too. Hearing clean audio made the video feel better. However, this was way back in the early days where 700kbps total bitrate were on the high end pre-AAC
Netflix is "4K Ultra HD: Up to 7 GB per hour".
Blu ray is 25GB per side, so max 50GB for 2 layers. Typical movies are 35-50GB.
So, BR, and think even DVD still looks much better than any streaming service!
Interesting. I was looking back at my BluRay collection (physical) the other day, looking for a UHD movie to test with, and in my memory, all BDs with UHD, but to my surprise, very few of them were actually UHD, with most just being HD (1080p). I doubt there's in in my collection that are BD100; could I even play them? Currently using a PS5 as my BD player, and PS4 and PS3 before that.
A PS5 can play UHD Blu-Ray, PS3 and PS4 (even the Pro) can’t.
UHD discs are fairly noticeable at a distance as they usually use black disc cases instead of blue. They’re somewhat niche (if Blu-ray wasn’t already niche) and often sell at a premium, so I suspect unless you’ve been seeking them out you won’t have them barring the odd multi format bundle.
And Netflix HD (1080) is hardly what one would expect. It may be technically 1080p but the bit rate is often quite low. Most people don't notice or care.
I mostly see a lot of stuttering. Either during high action scenes or when there's little happening at all. It's especially noticable on HBO / MAX at 4k DV. I assumed it was due to aggressive encoding.
