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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

I swear they used to mix for two channel AND multichannel. I know they did because I’ll rip a dvd or Blu-ray and see four or five English channels of various formats.

Online stuff especially seems to only mix for multichannel and it doesn’t downgrade to two channel well at all.

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Yes. I still buy everything I can on BD (or DVD as a fallback)[1], and nearly every release has separate stereo and surround mixes for the primary language of the film. Sometimes even for multiple languages.

I assume only having one audio mix on streaming services is a cost-cutting measure, like how most streaming services seem to omit professionally-produced subtitles from third-party content in favour of awful phonetic subtitles they produce themselves using ML or similar.

[1] So I'll still have it when obscure content is inevitably removed from streaming services, for the higher picture quality, and for the finer-grained playback control.

Streaming services are absolutely awful for image quality and your favorite shows will disappear at the whims of corporate lawyers and executives. Netflix 4K streams are less than 16 mbps at the absolute max with 4 mbps being commonplace whereas the specification for UHD Blu-Ray discs allows for three disc capacities, each with its own data rate: 50 GB at 72 or 92 Mbit/s, and 66 GB and 100 GB at 92 Mbit/s, 123 or 144 Mbit/s. The bitrate difference is not something advances in codecs can make up for because the gulf is too wide.

The vast majority of us are thrilled with streaming quality and would rather use speakers from our TV than a sound system. I actually have a sound system and haven't bothered to turn it on in a few years.

We are optimizing for the minority.

I agree. Just give me a stereo track, and I'm happy enough. I don't want to buy a receiver and install multiple speakers in my living room/kitchen/office, thank you

Object-based audio is a great idea that makes the most sense with some sort of headphones while watching something on TV so you can be fully immersed in the scene as you turn your head. It is definitely the next major frontier on the audio frontier. Unfortunately, it is mired in proprietary protocols, very expensive hardware that doesn't work right, totally deceptive advertising, and poorly mastered source material.

And, like VR, works wonders if you're in a room by yourself; once you are watching something with a group, now everyone has headphones on and it's all a mess.

It turns out the vast majority of people around the world prefer the convenience of streaming (large choice, worldwide selection of content, immediate access, etc.) over waiting for and managing physical discs. Moreover, nobody would want to wait for the next episode of a TV show to arrive on a disc.

You could stream at higher bitrates (apparently Apple does) without resorting to discs.

You might even be able to design an adaptive bit-rate codec that improves/devolves as your internet connection demands.

On the flip side, every blu ray player I've ever had the pleasure of using has been clearly audible over the content I've been watching.

I gave up and bought an Xbox as a blurry player, and it works decently well.

But I prefer to rip everything anyway, and the Apple TV that plays the rips is silent as far as I can tell.

There's two easy options for this:

Put the player in a cabinet with glass doors. That will dampen most of the noise.

Turn the movie up. This also works for road noise in a car.

> Put the player in a cabinet with glass doors. That will dampen most of the noise.

So replace my furniture? No thanks.

> Turn the movie up. This also works for road noise in a car.

Have you heard the sound balance on movies these days?

> Have you heard the sound balance on movies these days?

Yeah, it's not always great, but it's usually enough to drown out the sound of the disc rotation. About the only time I hear the player is on DVDs with rough layer transitions, the video and audio pause a bit and you can often hear the pickup seeking or refocusing, especially if it's a parallel track path disc so the next layer begins at the other end of the disc from where the current layer ends.

There is an exception here with AppleTV+ which has a 20-40Mbit/s bit rate. Not quite Blu-ray level but it's very obvious when compared to Netflix.

That is a good bitrate for 4K with modern codecs.

A true stereo Lt/Rt mix was standard in the DVD era. But even before Blu-ray/HD-DVD was released, the move to removing the Lt/Rt mix in favor of 5.1 only was already gaining traction. The number of 5.1 mixes encoded correctly that would allow for a decent 2.0 fold down was quite small.

Even today, I'm dealing with 5.1 content where the LFE was not bussed correctly so that there is frequencies > 120Hz. This isn't from Bob's Audio Post House. These are from people that should know better.

Yeah, that’s the whole selling point of Atmos. No more discrete channels to mix to, instead spatial locations that the receiver decodes for your system.

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