Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Sports is a good use of HFR. Sadly, when HD broadcast came out, most broadcasters choose 1080i59.4 to remain compatible with the interlaced HD CRTs that were around. One of them chose 720p60 for sports. As cool as HD was, it still had interlacing as a boat anchor chained to it. 4K finally saw the elimination of interlacing, but that's veering way off topic.

For talking head/creator type of stuff, 24fps is probably wasted and could be just fine at 12/15fps.

View on HN

12/15 fps is actually insane, thankfully nobody saying that is gonna be in a position to make those kinds of decisions. (and there are some things that do stream in 15 fps, like 1seg ... which broadcasts tv on a mobile phone screen, and not a smartphone, a tinier flip phone, like 3-4 inches. and it's really more of a technical limitation for a technology and phones from 20 years ago. and youtube can serve 12 fps ...at 144p.) Even for literally just watching someone sit and move lips, 24/30 is gonna look much more natural and believable, and not be jarring unlike going down to that low fps. Like, have you actually watched any 12/15 fps footage of people talking recently? Cause it's not gonna be giving what you think it's giving. It's not gonna look "fine" even at crystal clear 1080, making it feel like a shitty zoom call that might as well be in 240p. Unfortunately there is a reason why it's not a cool and totally useable life hack to just crank it down to 12, because it just looks bad. Some people in these comments really seem to be just saying things before they even try and see them with their own eyes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455895

Fox Sports was 720p.

Back then, all broadcasters had to conform to ATSC 1.0 MPEG2 transport and MPEG2 encoding due to terrestrial broadcasts. The choices were 480i/p, 720p, or 1080i/p.

12/15fps is way too low even for talking heads. 20fps would be the minimum for me, and 24fps fits better with the standards (30fps fits better with most displays).

yeah, it was more of a way of showing my disdain for said content and wasting of electrons pushing bandwidth

There's this thing called video compression, and it's gonna work pretty well for something that's mostly a still image with just a mouth moving. If anything, it'll compress that kind of thing the best compared to other kinds of content, like sports or games. Like, gameplay recordings are probably the worst type of content in that regard, needing the most bitrate and bandwidth to reach any kind of fidelity, and always looking bitrate starved with h264 (and likely even with newer codecs if it's at lower streaming bitrates). And due to how video compression works, lowering fps is not actually gonna yield any substantial space savings for talking head type of videos, if all that's gonna do is just cutting off inter frames that are already gonna be pretty small. It's quite literally the case with the least amount of any possible benefit from doing that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com