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Comment by karim79 | Hacker News Reader

What I've noticed about Netflix's supposedly 4k content is that it looks like crap compared to the same show downloaded through illicit means (and viewed on Plex or something else).

What's the deal with Netflix's not-very-good 4k streams? Colour quantization or something? It's not just a one-off, why do 4k netflix shows look like rubbish compared to a moderately encoded whatever from bittorrent?

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It depends. The most common reason is bitrate - the non-Netflix could have been ripped from another source (BD), or even from another service that has rights to the show in a different market (with higher bitrate).

The other trick some groups use is so-called hybrid releases. This involves combining video and audio from multiple sources to achieve the best possible quality. These are usually explicitly tagged as HYBRID, and afaik mostly applies to 4K remuxes.

Semi-informed guess: Even when the rip comes from the same source (and not e.g. Blu-ray), they have a blazing fast internet pipe and/or a custom client that locks into the maximum bitrate -- while your residential connection and/or the local PoP's available capacity make your stream use a lower bitrate.

All video encoders have bit–rate — target number of encoded bits per second — as a tunable knob. Lossiness is compensated to match the target bit–rate. When a video is encoded with a lower bit–rate, it produces a smaller file that looks worse. Resolution almost doesn't matter, if your bit–rate is so low that the encoder doesn't have a chance of encoding pixel–level detail.

Bittorrent pirates may source shows from Netflix but they may also source them from other places with higher bit–rate encodings.

Probably extreme compression, their 4K streams are very low bandwidth.

Must be that way - watching "an evening" (yes, i just made up a time unit) of Netflix consumes 1/4 to 1/3 of the bandwidth "an evening" of consuming content on AppleTV+.

So, about 10GB or less on Netflix to 30GB or more on AppleTV+, dissected by DPI on my TP-Link Omada Gateway.

And indeed, i think it shows - i can't notice any banding or moire effect on pretty much any AppleTV+ content, while it is as clear as night and day that Netflix compresses the hell out of their content.

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