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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

People just don't realize just how garbage even 4k streams are from all the services. It's not in their interest to give you real bluray quality.

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Yes! Someone came after me on here because I said there really is no 4k streaming.

I’m going to develop 8k streaming - it’s just the normal low bitrate shit, but if you pause it sends a full quality 8k frame.

Nobody will figure it out!

When your source material shows fast sweeping motions you'd certainly get away with that.

The marketing of a resolution really won out. People will fight you if you suggest a high bitrate 1080p encode can look better than a low bitrate 4k.

Bitrate aside, the marketing stopped making sense long ago:

- 720p/1080p is counting vertical pixel resolution

- 4k/8k is counting horizontal pixel resolution

- "4k/8k" is not actually 4,000/8,000 horizontal pixels

- Suddenly the "p" becomes irrelevant (Not that most people even knew what it meant to begin with)

- 720/1080/4k/8k totally disregards aspect ratio

- Consumers already have a way to compare, and they're called "megapixels"

- 2.1MP (1080p) and 8.3MP (4k) etc. is a lot more consumer friendly since it's already used for cameras.

Marketing really won at making this a mess.

That's not even including HDR and the fake 4k upscales.

I don't know, 4k HEVC at 15,000mbps looks plenty good to me.

...what service offers 15Gbps stream?

None. No matter how much you pay, the best you'll ever get from streaming services is a bit-starved encode with fake film grain in a bullshit codec that'll look worse than 720p DVD rips you'd find on Zamunda yet still require more power to decode...

Sorry my unit was wrong 15Mbps is pretty common for the highest nitrate streams

Commercial 4k Blu-ray’s are twice that all the way up to 4x or sometimes more. And I’d say even on the best mastered disks there’s still obvious encoding artifacts.

And that is good for you, giving you the benefit of the doubt that you meant 15mbps, but I know I can personally tell the difference between 15mbps and 50mbps. Seeing more detailed film grain and seeing less artifacts in fast moving scenes are two of the most noticeable.

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