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Comment by alexrtan | Hacker News Reader

I just went back to Netflix Blu-Rays after being frustrated with seeing tons of imperfections in streaming quality. The artifacts are so annoying to me in 4K streaming that I mostly prefer just watching 1080p blu-rays.

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Assuming the title is even provided in 4k/HD. For example, I checked right now and Bram Stoker's Dracula is 540p at a reported 838 kb/s, and picture quality is worse than the DVD, with horrible aliasing indicating poor encoding, so it's even below that of SD. This film has a true 4K Blu-ray remaster, so you'd be doing yourself a huge disservice streaming it in the quality Netflix serves.

To really put this in perspective, the picture quality that Netflix provides is worse than pre-digital analog film projection. Dracula originally screened in cinemas in 1992 looked (far) better than what you stream on Netflix right now in 2019. Now I know the consumer has always traded convenience for picture quality, hence the popularity of early home media such as VHS, but that was bound by the limitation of the technology back then. Right now, there's zero technical reason for why quality can't be better, ignoring bandwidth. It's a digression and the fact it's so tolerated makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I'm not even a film buff, it's just that it's apparent like night and day, like a re-compressed jpg is.

I can't speak to everyone else, but I also still have a Netflix subscription because I use it as a place to dump movies or TV shows I'm interested in but don't have the time (movies in theater) or inclination (lack of TV cable) to see right away. A couple months later they show up without any extra work or hassle on my part.

I really should get a Blu-Ray drive and start getting doing Redbox or Netflix delivery for movies.. I'm pretty unsatisfied with the quality of almost every streaming service. They are basically optimizing the bitrate and encoding for the worst they can while keeping people from screaming about it. I'm frequently shocked how terrible the quality of Youtube movie trailers are..

Used VUDU when it first came out and recall being super impressed with its quality though. They have an HDX subscription that uses double+ the bitrate as their HD apparently..

Their web player has also started to have stuttering and frame dropping issues for me. It only works smoothly on Microsoft Edge, so hopefully they get it figured out before Microsoft swaps out the rendering engine for Chromium.

I've noticed Netflix stuttering on Edge too. I think there is a combination of web player and compression issues happening.

The quality is really good on some titles, like the latest F1 docu-series. Others have terrible quality, like the original planet earth. Lots of stuttering and compression artifacts.

Like another commenter somewhere, I'd be happy with smooth, artifact free 1080p over 4k any day.

Most people use 60Hz monitors, which means you'll always get uneven frame-timing with 24fps content (3:2 pulldown). Modern TVs support 24Hz for 24fps Blurays so the motion looks better.

> you'll always get uneven frame-timing with 24fps content (3:2 pulldown)

Uneven frame-timing, fo sure, but does it really use 3:2 pulldown?

IIRC the monitor, at least when using most of players on PC to playback, will just display/repeat each video frame uneven times, but no 3:2 pulldown, i.e. interlacing two frames together to generate 1 more frame every 4 frames, is involved.

I'm definitely not an expert on this topic though so please feel free to correct me!

It does not use interlacing. It seems my understanding of the term was wrong, and interlacing is required for it to count as real 3:2 pulldown.

> Their web player has also started to have stuttering and frame dropping issues for me.

I never understood the appeal of watching Netflix in a browser?

Why let DRM infect your browser? Why not use closed media services in dedicated, closed-source apps for such things and keep your browser clean?

To date I’ve honestly never seen anyone access Netflix through a browser. It’s all native apps.

What’s the appeal?

Not everyone has a TV. I used to watch Netflix on my laptop only - on Ubuntu.

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