Am I seeing the past in a nostalgic light or were DVD 480p considerably better than YouTube 480p?
I feel like streaming services compress their streams so hard that the resolution indicators become meaningless.
I feel like streaming services compress their streams so hard that the resolution indicators become meaningless.
They will then transcode it to h265, or webm which uses even less bandwidth, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here and assuming they target their transcoding setup to preserve as much quality as they recommend providing them.
And of course this is VBR not CBR, so some scenes will use less.
4mbps is the linked article description of where h264 matches DVD quality. Yes, 4mbps is more than most streaming sites will give for 480p. This does mean that most streaming sites are inferior to DVDs at 480p. The fact that most streaming sites use less bitrate than a DVD-equivalent quality is therefore not surprising, giving that people have noticed that exact fact.
Streaming sites do not pick their bitrate to maximise quality given a fixed maximum filesize, so it's not surprising that they choose a lower bitrate (and therefore lower quality) than DVDs. They're instead optimizing for things like their server costs, time to playback start, or the ability to perform uninterrupted playback over the internet connection of users resorting to these lower resolution settings.
That is for uploading. They will transcode your H.264 file when you upload it regardless of bitrate.
And your original claims of YouTube using 2.5Mbps and 4Mbps. Go and find me clip with those bitrate?
200MB - 300MB for full-length movies, ~150MB for series episodes. This is on "Standard quality", but still.
After some quick Googling (grain of salt) I see that a standard DVD of 4.7GB tends go have (usual encoding) up to 135 min of 480p video. That's a big difference! Even when considering that modern encoding might be more efficient. It is lossy compression, and the lossyness seems to be cranked way up.
The movie producers would try to hide it by placing the layer change in a scene change, but I often still noticed it.
That shouldn’t be noticeable if the 4K stream was encoded properly.
There could of course be other factors involved as well but this is definitely a pretty big contributor.
I've never really noticed effects from chroma subsampling so my guess would be the bitrate just being better with the higher resolution. Also "full res->compress->downsample" might be more efficient than "full res->downsample->compress" since downsampling is a (really bad) form of lossy compression as well.
I don't think this is true. At some point there are diminishing returns. At some point if the 4k video has twice the bitrate it is going to have more information available. Some will be lost in the down sampling but it isn't "improper" to end up with more data on the screen.
It is true that YouTube bitrates are pretty "conservative" for the resolution but I don't think that is "improper" it is just a tradeoff based on common device an internet speeds. They could be more bandwidth efficient if they did a custom transcode for each user's screen size and bandwidth but that is infeasible. So it is fine that some users will not be able to stream the 4k transcode on their 4k screen and will need to use the 2k stream and some users will have extra bandwidth on their 1080p screen so will stream the 2k version for better quality. The goal isn't to be perfect for each device but to be good on average.
In PAL regions, the PAL signal uses 625 signal lines, of which 576 (known as 576i signal) appear as visible lines on the television set, whereas NTSC formatted signal uses 525 lines, of which 480 appear visibly (480i).
In PAL video, every second line has the phase of the color signal reversed, which leads to the signals flattening out the frequency between the lines.
Effectively what this means is that damage to the signal appears as errors in saturation (level of color) rather than hue (shade of color) as it would appear in NTSC video, leading to a higher-fidelity picture of the original studio version.Here is Disney+ stream vs a Disc 1:1 copy:
https://nicko88.com/misc/compare/Ant%20Man%20Quantumania/
https://nicko88.com/misc/compare/Avatar%20The%20Way%20of%20W...
Streaming looks only slightly marginally worse IMO.