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Comment by vivegi | Hacker News Reader

Of all the video streaming services I have used, PrimeVideo is the one where the video/audio sync becomes terrible progressively.

It is pretty bad. It happens in 8 out of 10 movies. There is some misconfiguration in their AV transcoding pipeline.

And here, we have an article talking about Monolith vs. Microservices improving user experience.

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Of all the streaming services that have irritated me, I can't recall any serious technical problems with prime. I suppose I have a vague memory of poor AV sync that could have been on prime, it was always a problem at the start of streaming that would work itself out after a few seconds.

Netflix's shiny new compression scheme a couple years ago didn't work on my Sony TV's buggy silicon. The only way I got that fixed was by knowing someone on the inside.

Hulu usually can't make it through an episode without the video freezing at least once. Sometimes it just refuses to work at all until I completely reboot the TV.

HBO Max's UI is just really cheesy and slow, but whatever it's fine.

Paramount+ is my new favorite to hate on. The UI is maddeningly glitchy and lethargic. I pay for no ads, but it plays ads anyway, on Star Trek episodes from 1996. It doesn't remember progress in a show more than once every week or two, just enough to remind you that it's supposed to be a feature. On my phone, it doesn't hide the typical menu overlays unless I do a complex sequence of finger taps. One time I tried to file a bug report from inside the logged-into app, and I got an email back claiming that they would love to consider my concerns but can't because they don't have an account associated with my email address.

For me, the sync is fine at the start of playback on PrimeVideo. It just becomes bad progressively (which leads me to believe they have used a video framerate that is ever so slightly different from the source and have keyframes insertion after a longer than optimal duration; similarly sample rate mismatch for output audio relative to input audio stream could be a potential cause).

And I use a FireStick, FWIW.

BTW, their own trascoder product MediaConvert seems to have this issue (It is possible that it could be user error too in how they have used the product or setup the parameters). [1]

My guess is PrimeVideo dogfoods MediaConvert and they also have this issue. They could have fixed it for newer content, but previously transcoded content still has issues (which will remain until they are re-transcoded).

[1]: https://repost.aws/questions/QUGajgu4zKTlewlTg1M96i_Q/questi...?

Nevers had any issue with bittorrented AWS.

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