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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what this looks like but I probably hate it. It's like the frame interpolation that some TVs had to generate 120p frames from 60p. I actually prefer the original 24p (or 24p double-exposed to 48 like cinema projectors do) for films.

What really bugs me are the "Remastered" versions of songs on Spotify that sound like they were produced with today's audience in mind and doesn't sound like the original recording of the time, which has way more character and inherent texture by the artists without the soulless robo-producer repaint job. That would all be fine, except that they remove the original non-Remastered versions.

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I got an Apple TV 4K a while back to replace my Roku.

It sets my ancient sony 1080p TV to 24 fps when playing back 24 fps content.

On top of that, it let me recalibrate the colors using my iPhone camera.

Anyway, I bought it to reduce ad tracking, and was pleasantly surprised that it was roughly equivalent to buying a new TV.

Yes that is my favorite part of the apple tv as well, that it adjusts output to the source frames and resolution. As long as you have a good looking panel with nice color you'll never need to get rid of it. 1080 can really look gorgeous even with everything today being 4k

My 2013 Panasonic plasma is still going strong with AppleTV as the primary input source.

Well, short of Pioneer Kuro units, the Panasonic plasmas were the best screens of their time and are still very, very good.

I was sad both to hear that Pioneer got out of the plasma TV business, and also to let go of mine. It was funny how Pioneer basically perfected the form then promptly exited--true to name I guess. Panasonic bought Pioneer's TV biz, so that was the upside.

Same here. I have a Panasonic Plasma hooked to the AppeTV 4K in the bedroom, and the picture quality is awesome.

What are you doing for audio? That's been my big stumbling block when trying to use a newer AppleTV with an older TV and 5.1-channel amp. I've tried several HDMI audio extractors and found them all to be pretty terrible.

The best solution I’ve found is an HDMI matrix. If all you need is to connect your HDMI devices to the TV and an older receiver, get a 2x2 or 4x2 matrix, have one of the outputs go to the TV and one to the receiver. This solves the problem where the TV supports newer HDMI standards than the receiver.

Now if the receiver is old enough to not have HDMI at all, there aren’t too many options. S/PDIF from the TV to the receiver works, but is lossy above 2 channels. HDMI audio extractors work, but most suck. I had a monoprice one for a few years that was decent, but not great. There aren’t any other options than that though, unless your sources have discrete channel outputs (an RCA jack for each channel), which these days are effectively non-existent.

I have a decent - not great, but decent - Sony STRDH590 receiver that serves as an HDMI switcher. Apple TV and PS5 send HDMI to it, and it selects the signal to forward on to the TV.

What’s your setup like?

An antique Pioneer VSX-45TX receiver with an older-but-not-quite-antique Vizio LCD TV used as a dumb HDMI monitor. Looks good, sounds good, but doesn't work with the newest AppleTV since there's no way to get audio back out of the monitor, as there is with many newer sets.

Right now I'm using the previous-generation AppleTV with a S/P-DIF output to drive the VSX-45TX, but Netflix has announced that they don't want to support that AppleTV model anymore, as of the end of July.

Sounds like the HDMI matrix box as mentioned by jmb99 is a likely win. There are a few models that break out the audio to S/P-DIF. Maybe by spending $99 instead of $19 I'll have better luck than I did with the simple audio extractor boxes I tried a couple of years ago.

Got it. You’re almost in the situation where if you want to upgrade the CPU, you’ll need newer RAM, but that goes in a different motherboard, with connectors your PSU doesn’t have… but at least you can keep the case!

Been there.

It makes things in the foreground have very sharp edges and seem brighter than the things in the background. They call it "soap opera effect" because it reminds you of the way those sets and people are lit.

But also--never seemingly noticed--the technology leads to very crisp changes in direction of the camera panning. So you see a very smooth pan, stopping with no deceleration period, and then a quick new pan in a different direction, with no acceleration. It's disorienting and makes everything look fake. IMO this is the most annoying part, but it's hard to identify and articulate.

> I don't know what this looks like but I probably hate it.

A simple description would be: It makes film movies look like direct-to-video productions, so basically everything looks like a soap opera. Horrible indeed.

It butchers animation, which is carefully drawn at certain intervals. There's a reason you can pause anime at any frame and it will look like a defined, static image without blurring and smearing.

Motion smoothing absolutely destroys the look of the motion.

I've even commonly heard it referred to as "soap opera mode".

Yeah that's what I'd feared--I hate that soap opera effect. It makes fictional escapes into film look like every day life or a TV newscast.

I suspect that the mode was originally made for large screen TVs that mostly sold well for watching sports.

For the second part, 100%. I started years ago already collecting my own flac files, and I'm quite careful on picking the best mastering if possible. In 2024, finally, some of the latest remasters are great (like the new Steely Dans from Bernie Grundman). But between 2000-2015 or something a remaster of an album was usually just compressed to the maximum and made very _loud_.

For some of my favorite albums I have multiple masters available, because they can be very different how they sound and sometimes I can't choose the best one.

Oh, and for most of the people none of this really matters...

Earache Records released several remasters of classic metal albums with increased dynamic range:

https://bandcamp.com/search?q=full+dynamic+range&item_type=a...

(also finds some other high dynamic range albums)

Where do you find masters? I only know of stems ripped from games like Rock Band.

There is nothing official available. There may or may not be services in the internet that meticulously archive every possible master and of course you can go to discogs to buy a physical copy of a certain version of the album if somebody still has it.

This is for me over two decades of hard work and deep interest into music. I highly value my collection.

Mp3Caprice

The site seems to sell high quality 320kpbs mp3s but as far as I can tell none of them are seperate multi-channel recordings (aka masters)

Real film does have (effectively—the aperture’s closed half the time so you don’t see a smear of moving film) a blacked out every-other-frame which makes the perceived motion smoother (some digital projectors can replicate this, though it halves the effective brightness so you need a really bright one for it to work ok) but yeah, I’d take a little judder over faked digital smoothing. It looks awful.

[edit] I just mean that an actual film projector does achieve smoother motion than most TVs displaying 24 fps the best they can “naturally”, but a TV’s natural best is still far better than the alternative of alien-looking digital motion smoothing.

Another thing that annoys me endlessly: a few months ago, Apple Music introduced animated cover art and then proceeded to animate album covers that shipped decades before Apple Music existed. If modern artists want to use this for their new albums, or if an artist wants to rethink the album artwork for a remaster, fine. But, Apple deciding to do a shoddy job of moving the Beatles to another layer and having it pulse in and out on the cover of Abbey Road? Fuck that.

The loudness war has ruined a lot of music on streaming services for me. Remasters where you lose the ability to distinguish instruments. No way to listen to the original version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

So it's back to digging out and ripping my old cds.

> What really bugs me are the "Remastered" versions of songs on Spotify that sound like … [a] soulless robo-producer repaint job.

Spotify serves up a stereo version of The Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You" that completely destroys the atmosphere of the song. It's nearly criminal.

> It's like the frame interpolation that some TVs had to generate 120p frames from 60p. I actually prefer the original 24p (or 24p double-exposed to 48 like cinema projectors do) for films.

I realize that I might just be the exception here, but I honestly really like it.

I'm glad other systems offer it as an option for people who enjoy it. I can't fathom the decision process that permanently enabled it for everyone.

They made the feature, they’re gonna enable it or nobody would use it and it would have been a waste of time making

You’re really gonna hate the fact that 99% of people think this is what stuff on their digital television is supposed to look like.

(Which is exactly why Roku did it)

Which is why Roku decided to take away the option to disable it for people who understand and notice the effect and actively don't want it?

Pardon me, it makes zero sense at all.

I was trying to say that we’re in an extreme minority; they didn’t even think more than ten people would disable it. What’s the reason that makes sense? They forgot?

There were way more than 10 people who read, commented on, and liked that Verge article.

Both your assumptions (that we're an extreme minority, and that Roku thinks that way) seem to be only supported by the conclusion you make from them.

All that said, putting the feature in enabled by default and seeing how many people end up disabling it would be how they could be grounded in reality and avoid creating a shitstorm.

Put another way, the best explanation for a metric not being collected is that it's not going to reflect well on the decision-makers.

A way more realistic scenario than what you suggest (i.e. that it doesn't hurt Roku, or even makes business sense) is that it's an outcome of a promotion-driven development.

Someone's getting a promotion for launching that "feature", and statistics that show that people turn it off the moment they realize it's there wouldn't bode well with that.

Instead, it appears that the new feature has a 100% adoption rate among the targeted userbase.

Modern problems require modern solutions, you know.

Yeah, we are not an extreme minority. My wife - who really doesn’t notice SD vs HD, let alone 4k, if the aspect ratio is correct for the screen - went ape when we got a TV with motion smoothing.

I said yeah, I hate that too, give me a few minutes to fix it, believe me I don’t want it.

I don’t think I know of _anyone_ who prefers it on.

I don't either, but you've got to be a close friend before I'm watching TV at your house, and I don't pretend that my close friends are a randomly selected portion of the populace.

Most people probably don't notice it, or just think "that's the way TVs are now".

If you have to force people to turn it on, maybe it sucks and you shouldn't waste your time developing it.

That's just not true. My non-Roku TV has this as an option alongside dozens of others I can turn on and off.

I'm gonna need to see some data on that. The nearly universally description I hear from regular, non-techie people is "my TV started looking weird", especially when they're watching content they're familiar with. If a brand new movie or show looked like this and that's the only way I'd ever seen it, fine, so be it. I remember seeing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in soap opera mode on our then-new TV and thinking "WTF is this and how do I turn it off?". That's not what Indiana Jones movies are supposed to look like.

> I'm gonna need to see some data on that.

It’s enabled by default on all smart TVs. Q.E.D.

Same for me. I can't stand watching sports with fast motion or large panning scenes on a low refresh rate screen.

But agree with the post above that 24p double exposed is even better. Smooth and no artefacts. Luckily that's an option Sony TVs have by default if you pick cinema mode.

For sports it’s the one and only time I enjoy 60 Hz content, to the point that 25/30 feeds look like garbage. I mainly watch footer and hockey, slower sports it might not look so bad.

For the music listening use case, if you can get your hands on a CD and rip it to FLAC that's the way to go.

When the CD format first took hold in the early/mid 80's, it was common for the record labels to push out CD's that were just straight digital transfers of the original analog mastering that was used to create the vinyl LP.

Now we're here 40 years later, and you can still find those CD's on Ebay and rip them using a program like foobar2000, and the result is basically flawless for all the common playback use cases (I'm not here to make the audiophile argument).

I'm also impressed that the 80's and 90's era CD's are not going bad on me. Boomers and Gen-X-ers will always have that box full of treasured CD's, and not a single one of them has failed on me so far.

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