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Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

Gaming footage/videos, some games are so fast they are noticeably better to play at (and watch at) 60fps over 30fps.

I think many people would consider 60fps to be a minimum and 30fps to be almost disorienting, even for casual games.

Gamers often go for 120-240Hz monitors even.

Last time I went to the movies I didn't have a good time watching "motion" at 24Hz on a large screen while used to watch motion at 240Hz on a small screen.

I felt I was looking at a powerpoint presentation or an animation made at the edge of a (paper) notebook.

The cinematic obsession with 24 FPS is so stupid…

But those are 24 real frames. Not predicted ones like in your favourite Youtube video.

40 fps could be a much more workable minimum, it looks quite smooth, wish it was more commonplace of a target instead of 30.

40fps is probably 30fps with poor frame pacing. Most displays are 60Hz so there’s no benefit to being any non fraction of that, and you are likely to have issues with pacing if you are at a non standard frame rate.

> Most displays are 60Hz

This was true even a couple years ago, but these days, most mid-range and above TVs [0], phones [1], and monitors [2] support 120Hz, which is a nice integer multiple of 40Hz. But lots of these devices default to 60Hz (or slower), so you can't really rely on most people having this enabled.

[0]: https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/table/196699

[1]: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nDisplayFramesMin=120

[2]: https://blurbusters.com/faq/120hz-monitors/

But not of 23.976 or 29.97, alas.

TVs will almost certainly support either those frame-rates or a multiple of them like 119.88. And some even support variable frame rates so a "120 Hz" mode could display effective any frame-rate below that with precise timings.

No, not very many people would say that. Console games for many years were 30 FPS tops, and people were just fine with it. It's only a small but vocal minority that insists on 60 FPS as some kind of minimum.

> and people were just fine with it.

They didn't have a choice. It was literally "be fine with it" or "don't play most games". Console players complain now if a game only runs 30fps, because you can't really go back. It's just not possible to play some genres at 30fps.

This whole discussion makes me think of the old days, when I had a really outdated computer. I was playing Counter-Strike semi-competitively at around 15 FPS, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it...

Console gamers would say that mandatory spankings improved the experience if the marketing told them so.

Speak for yourself bud.

Especially retro console games, where sprites might flicker at 60Hz (either to create an illusion of translucency or because of hardware limits on simultaneous sprites displayed); viewing footage at 30fps can end up catching all the "off" frames and make screen elements disappear completely.

Yes, or in general everything that was originally 30 FPS interlaced should be de-interlaced to 60 FPS progressive video and not 30 FPS.

Oh, I somehow completely forgot about interlacing having been a thing.

I don't watch too many of those, and those few that I do are more 4X (Civ, Stellaris, etc), so that maybe that's why I don't notice it as an advantage for most of the content I see.

If there isn't much movement, it's probably a modest increase in bitrate anyway as the codec will see that most frames aren't changing.

At that, captured video of these things can be a total pain in the hoop to edit because OBS, Gamebar et al will write them as variable framerate files, only writing a frame with a suitably distant presentation timestamp when something changes.

And this will make most NLE software shit its legs off.

Improve software? It's job is to serve video editors, not the other way around. And it's a fun task, I bet there might be a dev or two who's working on that right now. And if someone is ready to pay for them, even better.

There is absolutely no reason for any sane video editing software to be able to read VFR files.

It should, however, reject them gracefully but positively.

I read that last bit in Hank Hill's voice.

We sell codecs and codec accessories.

Of course there is. A lot of older TV shows are effectively variable frame rates when properly detelecined/deinterlaced. And mixing two fixed frame rate sources with different framerates would naturally produce a VFR video and with current editing software you need to destroy some of the source information or interpolate some slop to make it work. There is no good reason for editing software to have these limitations either when most players and all modern video containers have caught up and are VFR-first with a fixed frame rate hint in the headers if you're lucky.

> A lot of older TV shows are effectively variable frame rates when properly detelecined/deinterlaced.

How do you figure that?

Broadcast TV is very very very very firmly locked to 25 interlaced frames per second (or 29.97ish in the US where they have to do everything with funny numbers), interlaced to 50 (59.94 US) fields per second.

How could that in any way be VFR?

Playing at low framrates is a lot worse than just watching though.

The main limitation on YouTube for fast movement is actually bitrate. Perhaps they allow higher bitrates for 60FPS videos though.

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