> Reread my original post carefully - my point is that if you're stuck with 1080p as the maximum resolution, than the quality you can get with the revised ladder is strictly worse, because Netflix will want to jump up to UHD resolutions, but your device won't support it.

These are for their HEVC encodes. Apple (and most others) require H264 to have a separate ladder which will be 1080p limited and will be generated on different encode set and maximum video quality.* Almost any HEVC capable device can go to 4k, even if the screen is only 1080p. It will be used than down scaled.

> (And even assuming that the UHD will be better based on this chart is kind of a leap, because it depends on what artifacts you're most sensitive to. Objective metrics ≠ subjective experience. In several of their comparisons, I prefer the lower res version because the new one is simply too artifacted.)

Certainly objective and subjective metrics have differences, but VMAF does correlate pretty tightly with subjective metrics. This is a very detailed subject, I summed up many of my thoughts on the differences in my demuxed talk last year here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCUsXhSPyyw

* https://developer.apple.com/documentation/http_live_streamin... 1.23 iirc