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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

After a decade of streaming movies, I started buying Blu-Rays again last year.

The last straw was trying to watch Kurosawa's "Ran". The supposedly 4K remaster available on Amazon Prime Video is criminally badly encoded. During the raid on the castle, you literally can't see the smoke because macroblocks are popping so hard on every keyframe.

The Blu-Ray is pristine and nobody can take it away from me. With streaming services, you pay for movies but you never know what quality they actually deliver on a given day. These are public corporations trying to deliver shareholder returns in what has become an environment of sinking stock prices, so if they can save on bandwidth costs by making the movie look a bit worse, they'll probably do it at some point -- and then again next quarter.

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> The supposedly 4K remaster available on Amazon Prime Video is criminally badly encoded. During the raid on the castle, you literally can't see the smoke because macroblocks are popping so hard on every keyframe

This is such a widespread issue, especially in dark scenes. Netflix is bad, but Prime Video seems by far the worst. I watched Mr Robot through a few months ago, and at times it was like watching 2009-era YouTube, despite being 4K on paper.

I'll take a 1080p Blu-Ray over a 4K stream any day. UHD Blu-Ray is nice, but it's a shame it's still 1.5-2x the price of regular BD. Then again you can still buy DVDs for some reason, so I guess high quality physical media is starting to be considered an enthusiast option..

This is just my observation & I don't know if others might have noticed:

Netflix streams sharp pixels towards the center of the screen, and the backgrounds are always bit worse due to the bandwidth constraints perhaps. It perhaps works on the assumption that our focus is on the foreground mostly, and not the background.

This is all good until the scenes are darker shades and you could notice the choppiness due to the network constraints.

That's one of the "psychovisual enhancements" employed by modern codecs. Here [0] is a nice explanation I could among in top search results:

"... x264’s psychovisual enhancements do a pretty good job of keeping detail where you’d notice it (the face), at the expense of the stuff you normally wouldn’t notice while watching (like those background areas)."

[0] https://mattgadient.com/comparing-x264-rf-settings-in-handbr...

> The Blu-Ray is pristine and nobody can take it away from me.

Actually…

> All BluRay player, devices, and drives contain a key that unlocks the encryption and DRM present on BluRay discs. Since 2007, the consortium responsible for this DRM scheme has been pushing updates and revocation lists on individual BluRay releases. Putting one of these discs in your drive will brick the device […].

https://hackaday.com/2014/09/08/unbricking-a-bluray-drive/

This is a primary point on why I groan that Discord is so popular.

The hyperaggressive codecs and bandwidth-saving behaviors make the experience absolutely miserable.

I may or may not have torrented many films available on Netflix (which I pay for) because of this issue.

I feel your experience is the stream end game:

Imagine you get two choices. One great quality and mundane to poor programs. The other is super compelling, but of dubious to low quality.

Which do you use?

Given a limit on stream throughput, choice will push quality aside every time.

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