Science behind the longest night’s (game of thrones) poor quality | Hacker News Reader

Science behind the longest night’s (game of thrones) poor quality

techcrunch.com

45 pointsrayraegah30 comments

>But neither of these are likely an option for HBO: Increasing the bandwidth of the stream is costly, since this is being sent out to tens of millions of people — a bitrate increase big enough to change the quality would also massively swell their data costs.

So what are they charging $3 an episode for if they can't even push 10 GB for those 3 bucks ?

Saw a pirated version, then saw it on a paid service. The pirated version looked lovely. The paid one was almost unwatchable and we had to pause it and dick around with the TV settings until we could see something.

Exactly my experience; I watched a downloaded version first on my PC, then my wife and I watched the version on our local streamed station (Fox, in Estonia), and we thought it looked terrible. It was so bad we were wondering if they dialed down the quality to account for demand. Ended up giving her our iPad to watch the pirated version on.

What's the source of the pirated version?

The internet.

I don't think there are sources other than streaming services.. So it's impossible that the quality would be better.

I was at a friends house and we had to wait until it finished being shown in the US and then we had to wait about 20 minutes before we could see it, I didn't ask which service it was through, but I do know that it wasn't an official one, could have been a torrent even. I could see people's faces in that version and didn't notice any banding. I then saw it again that evening, through my housemates paid account, which I think is NowTV, and couldn't see peoples faces and banding was everywhere.

I meant that the pirated version originates from some of the streaming services. I just downloaded the best version I could find (Amazon 1080p) and it didn't seem to be any better than the HBO streamed version, which I originally watched. To me the quality is just fine, but banding is visible in some scenes and I have to watch it in a dark room to see all the details.

The best pirated versions are from Amazon streaming, which apparently has a higher bitrate. I’m surprised that Amazon would get a high quality master from HBO that they can re-encode, but supposedly that is the case.

However, I actually checked all the pirated versions to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and for me, all versions looked abysmal.

The article completely forgets that one of the greatest strengths in video compression is temporal compression (how much a frame is similar to the previous).

Blizzards/snow/rain tend to add randomness to the pictures, greatly reducing compression factor and forcing the codec to decrease codification depth.

It looked great for me. The really subtle distortion effects that were added into really add a dissociation effect were an amazing add. This was, and I feel quite passionately about this, one of the most entertaining, enthralling, stressful hours of TV I have ever seen. Wow. What a work of art.

To me it was almost unwatchable. My eyes aren’t great, and excessive use of darkness / lack of contrast magnifies that. I have the same problem with some video games.

Could you give an example or two of these distortion effects you speak of? I guess they were too subtle for me.

It looked great on my OLED. The true blacks made a large difference in producing detail in dark scenes. I imagine a traditional backlit LED would have looked much worse.

I have an LG OLED. The episode looked laughably bad in many scenes. Very interesting how some people apparently had no issue with the video quality.

Is it possible you were sufficiently immersed to not notice the horrible color banding? I am very confident this was not a creative decision, and it was so bad as to be nearly unwatchable (I paused several times in the middle of the episode, downloaded multiple pirated versions to make sure it wasn’t something on my end, and even googled the problem, which only resulted in me seeing spoilers).

The banding was definitely the issue for me. I don’t know enough about these codecs, but could this be a specific issue with HBO’s encoding process, rather than simply nitrate? I would think that sections of video could be encoded with different bitrates, allocating more bits to scenes with low overall contrast to avoid banding. Or heck, if it’s possible, even trade resolution for reduced banding, I suspect that would have resulted in a far less atrocious image.

Incoming conspiracy theory: Does HBO have any strategic partnerships with TV manufacturers? This could be a clever strategy to get people to buy new TVs at a time when they're not normally buying new TVs. The article even explicitly mentions "Don’t worry about HDR, dynamic lighting, and all that stuff." This immediately makes everybody who reads that article curious about what all that stuff is, does their TV have it, how can I get it, etc.

I was watching it on a projector in a completely dark room, didn't see shit. From HBOs own shitty streaming service. I wish they just let me download the entire episode if I have the subscription because their service sucks so bad and the resolution is max 1080p. I would pay double the amount easily to be able to pre-download it. Their service hasn't been updated in years on HBO Nordic.

Amazon prime quality is definitely better than Hulu. But yeah the dark scenes look pretty horrible.

I found a strange problem with my 4K dimming tv if using captions. The caption text is bright white and the tv messes up dark scenes pretty badly.

Hopefully these and other video encoder/decoder issues will get fixed soon.

Captions definitely lowers quality significantly! I think there is post processing for dynamic range that basically kills the dark scenes if captions are on.

Halo around captions is a problem with any LCD TV even those with FALD with the exception of the high Sony ones (Z9D/Z9F) that use enough zones to minimize it.

Pretty much for captions heavy content you need an OLED.

I'm very confused about this comment from the article: "Don’t worry about HDR"

If HBO streamed with HDR like Netflix did, then this wouldn't have been a problem?

This applies to social networks & chat apps as well, data image/video is compressed to a level that camera/source quality doesn't matter and hence it's always recommended to email that important image rather WhatsApp it.

I watched it on Sky Atlantic (satellite, not streamed) and it looked ok, there was definite banding and other artefacts in the dark/foggy scenes. It looked fine for the most part, though.

Same, and I thought it was pretty awful. Sky Atlantic is 1080i IIRC, that can’t have helped.

It looked really good for me

Ahh I was hoping this article was regarding the science to how bad the episode was from a plot and writing standpoint

~~Strange thing to hope given the clear article title.~~ Edit: my apologies, was looking at the tech crunch title. hackernews title is def more ambiguous.

What were your issues with the plot/writing?

I really liked the episode but I can understand people's issues with the plot.

SPOILERS. SPOILERS. SPOILERS. I'll keep it abstract and speak of no names, but still will include spoilers.

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Sense of danger. - Imo one of the things that Martin did right was keep you on your toes. No one saw the red wedding coming. You were not allowed to have a favourite character as three episodes later they would probably meet a very gruesome end. Lately (and especially in this episode) seems the Hollywood approach took over. The hero was triumfant in the beginning, had a lapse of heart, he was helped to stand again, just to save the day at the literally last couple of seconds.

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