Why Is Netflix Secretly Cropping Movies? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is Netflix Secretly Cropping Movies?

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362 pointsnreece147 comments

Netflix almost certainly just licenses the pan-and-scan versions of movies for maximum compatibility.

I really don't know why this is blowing up all of a sudden. We've had pan and scan versions of films on TV and streaming for decades.

The only really troubling thing is that there's no "The film you're about to see may have bee modified from the original version" warning at the beginning of some, and it should definitely be clear that is the case.

Because now there is no technical reason to not have it as an option instead of forced upon us.

The technical reason is that Netflix is "cutting corners" for cash. I'm sure someone in the media licensing industry can elaborate on the true price of what you crave.

> what you crave

Electrolytes?

But in all seriousness: are there any numbers we can refer to for the economics of this? It sounds like it could be similar to the issues around royalties paid by music streaming services.

What, you're a plant?

I was going to say that this looks a lot more like expedience ("hey, we've got this version of Some Terrible Straight To DVD Movie stored in 4:3 SD 8Mb/s MPEG-2, let's send 'em that!") but both examples are a) relatively high profile and b) not 4:3 pan/scan crops. They look to be cropped to 16:9, which is weird, and makes me think that it's happening inside Netflix's video pipeline.

Hmm.

Watch and your questions shall be answered.

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Idiocracy/70028899?locale=...

How are they cutting corners? The wider aspect ratio would actually use fewer pixel data since about 80-240 vertical pixels (assuming 1920 width) would not be encoded. If anything, those versions would result is slightly lower bandwidth charges than the 16:9 versions.

That's not how it works. They'll set a bandwidth target and regardless of the number of macroblocks going in, their encoder will attempt to hit that target; having less picture data per frame is largely immaterial, at least at the sizes being discussed.

Parent is right, it's how it "should" work. Encode for a quality target not a bandwidth target, but with a bandwidth cap (of sorts, generally a virtual buffer average bitrate target to simulate refilling bit buffer at targeted line speeds when depleted by high motion or latency).

Source: Built and operate a commercial transcoding cloud for studios.

EDIT: Added "should". As jfb noted elsewhere in this thread, often poorly encoded content is shoved down aggregators throats by content owners or third parties in the workflow.

I built the iTunes Store's video ingestion system. We may have crossed paths IRL.

Small world. Could you drop me a note to my handle at gmail so I can reply?

I think a Netflix tech sounded off on reddit about this and said that it's not up to them, its up to the distributor they license the content from. They request the 16:9 format, but in the end they have to go with what the distributor gives them and they aren't allowed to alter it. This is a licensing thing, not Netflix interfering. As pointed out, Starz Play was the worse offender, which means Starz gave it to them preformatted. Possibly to make it so if it's pirated, it's not the full format version.

If you're such a cinephile, why watch it on Netflix anyway? Just go buy the Bluray and get the full resolution and director's cut. How many of you even cared before reading this article?

No technical reason, but all of the praise and success of Apple's lack of options certainly makes the case for business reasons.

Lack of options regarding hardware and lack of options regarding media files are different kettles of fish.

Apple has also made the decision to forego the Bandcamp/Beatport feature of multiple media download types, making everything AAC for simplicity. A fisherman using the same strategy for different kettles of fish, so to speak. And it seems to have worked out pretty well for them so far.

That's nonsense. Apple is not praised because of the lack of option!

it's praised by some despite the lack of option!

it's a price they paid to have somethings, because you can't have it all. it's not the feature per se.

Lack of options is 'elegant' and 'just works' and 'for people who aren't nerds'.

No, lack of options is the consequence of "just works in 95% of the cases, the others you are royally screwed"

See rob pike's "thank you Apple" for source on my opinion about the 5% since i never bought from Apple. (i don't give money to companies that profit from format lockin etc)

No, Apple is praised because of the lack of option! Trust me.

Why would I "trust you" when you have made no substantiative argument and are

I use the Mac not because "it has no options", but because there are no other options on other platforms that are better for my needs.

They are prized for their simplicity.

Show me simplicity which doesn't also mean a lack of options...

In N Out. The secret menu has combinatorics upon itself of options possible. All from the simple ingredients of a Hamburger.

Simple != restrictive options.

That's kind of like saying "I can adjust the volume knob and the panning knob independently. The combinations are limitless!"

Even including the "secret menu" (extra sauce? no bun? extra patty?), the options are resetrictive. You're not going to end up with chicken nuggets or a salad or beef wellington.

And that's okay. They have a restrictive menu, and they're very good at what they choose to focus on. I'd wager that no other popular restaurant chain is more like Apple in that regard.

I don't say you have to like Apple because of the lack of options, but for many, the lack of options is a feature.

The last thing I want is an iPhone - Android flame war, but something I don't like about Android, is that I constantly have to be searching for the ideal well... everything, since basically everything is changeable, I've gone through 4 music players, and have been disappointed several times, I did found a great one eventually, but in this case, I (and I said I god damn it) would rather have it Apple's way even if it's not perfect, it works if you do it their way.

So i take it that you use Apple maps solely and never looked at Google maps or the several fee offline turn by turn ones?

Also I'm pretty sure the default,music,player in Android is similar to the default one in ios... But i don't even have mp3s in my phone so i may be wrong on some exotic feature...

I don't know why you got defensive, I'm far from saying apple is perfect, no system is, you just need to know what YOU want, I'm all for variety.

In this case it sounds like it's the quality of Apple's default music player that you appreciate.

Imagine if their default music player was disappointing, and you couldn't change it... the lack of options would be a detriment, not a feature.

People don't like that Apple doesn't let you change things, they like that you don't need to because the default setting is good enough.

But you could go one step further, and ask "Why is their default considered so good by a broad audience?"

This could be attributed to how they identify (what they consider) the most important options, focus entirely on those, and implement them well.

The complexity of a system can go up exponentially with the number of features. If development resources were infinite, this wouldn't be a problem. But it is finite, and more complexity can lead to more bugs, more confusing interfaces, less maintainable code, and a host of other pitfalls.

In that case, if a lack of options is allowing Apple to a product that's better overall for most of its users, that's a definite feature.

I did found a great one eventually, but in this case, I (and I said I god damn it) would rather have it Apple's way even if it's not perfect, it works if you do it their way.

It would work, but not be perfect, if you just did it the way of any of those other apps you tried.

In this context, apple forced open pandora's box. There's no going back now. Businesses can present no choice, and only a minority of people (not enough to affect business) end up caring.

I can say without a doubt I prefer buying a laptop from Apple to anyone else I've tried due solely to the lack of options.

Over the last couple of years I've tried a few times at different vendors to find a different laptop, and every time I've given up because of all the options.

My problem is that when I'm presented with so many options, I spend hours trying to optimize them, and being unable, I give up.

I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More... has something to say about this.

Netflix offers a number of other options when viewing movies - languages, closed-captions, etc. Seems like this is another reasonable one to give consumers. Their DVD delivery service gave you a choice between pan-and-scan and letterboxed IIRC.

I should have said, for maximum compatibility at the lowest possible cost. They could get several versions of the movie for you to choose from, but it would make things more complicated for the user (who wants to click once and watch) and very likely more expensive as well. The option is available, just not on Netflix, a budget service infamous for poor selection and (although I understand it's improving) picture quality.

Complication is not an issue. It would be pretty easy to have a one-per-profile option to specify "I'd like original aspect ratio whenever possible".

There's already a video quality preference; it could even piggy-back off that.

It would be just two versions (original vs cut), not several, and an option like that would be hidden in the in-program options menu along with subtitles and audio. Technically you could only store metadata for the latter and do the resampling on the playback device, but there probably isn't a workflow that makes that possible.

I find picture quality excellent when using the AppleTV. The PS3 client is a bit less stable, but almost the same after some buffering.

I'm amazed by all of the answers in this thread, it's amazing how many people are just guessing or making stuff up. Netflix "cheaped out", wants it for "maximum compatibility" (what?), is doing it to be "simpler", or hand-wringing about whether or not it's technically feasible to automatically zoom in on the faces in that way.

It's really easy to explain why they are doing this: the studio is giving them this version of the movie and Netflix is uploading it.

There are plenty of 2.40:1 movies on the service, mostly newer ones. House of Cards is a nonstandard 2:1 aspect ratio. If they cared about cropping the movies they'd do it to all of them. They don't.

The studios just already have these HD transfers of movies that were probably made years ago for television broadcast and that's what they give to Netflix. Case closed.

That said, every movie should be available only in its original aspect ratio, and anything else is bogus. Film aesthetics rely on someone not cropping the shot. For example, in Super 8 the movie begins with a shot of a metal sign at a factory. That sign is 2:40:1, just like the movie's aspect ratio. It's almost certain that JJ Abrams had them build that sign at that aspect ratio on purpose so it would fill the frame. The version on Netflix, it's cropped off and you can't read part of it. Bad.

The examples given are not regular SD 4:3 pan/scan, though -- they're 16:9 crops. That's what's odd.

That's just pan and scan from a 2.35:1 source to 16:9. It's actually quite common. "Normal" people hate seeing black bars on their TV, some even more on their fancy new widescreen HDTV. The big problem here is that pan and scan jobs look particularly shitty, as if they were just blew up the center and cropped the edges.

Yeah, it looks like a straight center crop.

Whenever I watch a movie with some of my extended family, there's always someone who asks why the movie doesn't fill the entire screen. They want either the black bars removed and the area filled with images (like Photoshop Content-Aware Fill?), or the whole movie zoomed in (cropped) so that the sides are lost. I, along with some of the other serious movie-watchers in the family, have to convince these individuals every time that no, that's not how you watch a movie. (My favorite argument: "That area is reserved for subtitles.")

But I don't think most of the general public cares about the aspect ratio, only about utilizing the maximum square footage of their overpriced TV. Netflix is just catering to this demographic, just like DVD vendors who came up with 4:3 versions of 2.39:1 movies. The number of customers who complain about the wrong aspect ratio is probably much smaller than the number of customers who complain about the black bars.

You should put a fake bezel at the top and bottom of the tv, then remove it 1/2 way through and see if they notice.

> My favorite argument: "That area is reserved for subtitles."

I guess you're joking here, but I really wish subtitle presentated was more formally systematized. And, your idea actually seems like a good one, it's just too bad video players don't behave like that. E.g., I'd love if VLC player shifted the visible screen as up as it can, and reserve the one big bar at the bottom to showing subtitles.

VLC most likely has some filters (look for one called "expand" maybe) that will do this.

I was only half joking.

I'm not sure if VLC has the same feature, but KMPlayer (freeware but closed-source) has all sorts of options to tweak the way subtitles are displayed, and even allows you to edit the subtitles on the fly. I suppose these features are largely due to the fact that subtitles are absolutely essential in Korea (where KMPlayer come from).

Those features are from MPlayer, KMPlayer just puts them on a GUI.

Also, I don't get the idea that subtitles are favoured in any way by MPlayer. Did you see the amount of options you have for handling sound?

I meant the Korean KMPlayer [1], not KDE's KMPlayer [2]. The former does not use MPlayer.

[1] http://www.kmpmedia.net/

[2] http://kmplayer.kde.org/

This is one of the reasons I ended up using the Mac app Movist (which was once open source, but later redone to be on the Mac App Store for $5). I actually mainly use this because of better shortcuts and because of its subtitle handling.

> Whenever I watch a movie with some of my extended family, there's always someone who asks why the movie doesn't fill the entire screen.

I'm seeing more and more things like this, which seem to fit into a category of "geometrical illiteracy." Making 4:3 video wider to "use the pixels" on a widescreen just looks wrong. It makes people look squatter than they actually are. Many diagrams and animations on Discovery channel shows that supposedly fall into the category of "science education" seem to be made by scientific illiterates. Apparently, the visual artists are looking up all of the terms in the script and description, but who have no real understanding of the underlying concepts. Wildly incorrect geometries are present in the majority of these.

A prime example. The a plane moving as in the animation shown would produce forces in the exact opposite direction!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggP32UJeTHQ#t=865s

If this is what a large fraction of human beings are like, how are we supposed to maintain a democratic and technological society?

For years all the pubs near me would show 4:3 TV sports broadcasts stretched to their widescreen TV's so all the players looked slightly fat.

sigh.

If this is what a large fraction of human beings are like, how are we supposed to maintain a democratic and technological society?

...yet another reason I've concluded that democracy is seriously overrated.

Think of it as a kind of sacrificial metal. As it corrodes it prevents far worse corrosion. Totalitarian governments becoming corrupt cause an order of magnitude more damage per capita than rotting democracies.

Thank you for that concept. I'm going to go have a drink and hold my head for a bit, but it's definitely a useful way to think about it.

That clip is from a show called, "Penn & Teller Tell a Lie," wherein they present lies (and one truth) as fact.

Additionally, you probably misheard when Penn said, "centripetal force," and assumed he said, "centrifugal force."

Probably not the, "prime example," you thought it was.

> That clip is from a show called, "Penn & Teller Tell a Lie," wherein they present lies (and one truth) as fact. Additionally, you probably misheard when Penn said, "centripetal force," and assumed he said, "centrifugal force." Probably not the, "prime example," you thought it was.

1) If the plane would spin sound its own axis like that, the iced tea would have hit the canopy. The diagram is just wrong.

2) They presented several truths and one lie.

Are you trolling by "telling a lie?" You would have completely mislead anyone who only took a casual glance at the video.

Call me crazy, but I doubt Netflix has permission to modify the films in this way. Something tells me the studios are providing them to Netflix pre-cropped.

Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly not just cropping off the sides. It's anchored to the right. I also doubt Netflix either has a smart algorithm that can figure out the focus of the scene, or hires a bunch of people to choose the right focal point for every movie. They probably ask for movies from their providers in 16:9 format and they show whatever they get. They could ask for both formats and give users the choice, but I'm guessing there might be extra licensing costs to get both, and the majority of their users aren't cinephiles, and they just want their movies to fill the screen.

Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly not just cropping off the sides. It's anchored to the right.

That's what pan-and-scan is. Its done by the studio so they have some "artistic" control of how the cropping is done.

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

I thought etler was saying that the Man on the Moon crop wasn't pan-and-scan at all. It was just a complete lopping off of the entire left portion of the film that didn't fit the aspect ratio.

yeah there is no panning or scanning there, that's for sure.

I'm not saying its well done but just "cropping" would crop to the middle "lopping off the left portion" is a film thats "panned" to the right.

I do believe it's pan and scan. I just didn't mention it because it wasn't really necessary in my point.

It's not a 4:3 crop, though. I looks to be a full-frame 16:9 one. That makes me think that it's an artifact of Netflix's pipeline, not the encoding house's.

However, the original aspect ratio of these films is 2.39:1, and they're being cropped down to 16:9.

The linked Wikipedia article is mistaken in stating that pan and scan applies only to 4:3. The same technique can, and often is, used to prevent letterboxing when showing a films shot at 2.35:1 on a 16:9 display.

You seem to be arguing, but that's the guy's point: Netflix couldn't be doing this, because the decision in that frame to crop the left off isn't something an automated algorithm is going to do, nor is it reasonable to believe that Netflix has people going through making all of these decisions; the result is that we must believe that Netflix is being given these modified movies by the studios, as opposed it being Netflix's decision to make the modification (as proposed in etler's parent comment by mullingitover).

Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly anchored to the right because the focus of the scene is the guy on the right talking, and since the quiet guy on the left has nothing to contribute to a cropped frame but half a head or so, the sensible (if uninspiring) solution is to show just the one guy talking.

Overlooked in the outrage expressed is that movies are shot knowing that cropping will occur, and the scenes are often viewed with the cinematographer & director marking out which parts of the frame will be preserved for various formats. In the scene where Carrey is cropped out, he may very well have been positioned in the full frame such that if/when cropped to 16:9 he simply would not appear, rather than awkwardly have just his arm show while sensibly trying to preserve enough of the speaker within the frame.

http://library.creativecow.net/carlin_paul/35mm-evolution/5 describes a variant of this, presenting and addressing (as a deliberate process!) a little-discussed variant: the 2.39:1 and 16:9 versions may be the ones in fact guilty of cutting off part of the scene, with the 4:3 frame containing the whole scene, and the others preserving the full width but dropping top & bottom portions to make them fit the narrowed frames.

> Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly anchored to the right because the focus of the scene is the guy on the right talking, and since the quiet guy on the left has nothing to contribute to a cropped frame but half a head or so, the sensible (if uninspiring) solution is to show just the one guy talking.

That's etler's point: you seem to be disagreeing and correcting, but all you are doing is restating what he said. The idea is that "clearly" (and we now have this said twice): this is not just a blind crop, this is a crop that took into account something that Netflix wouldn't know (who is speaking), so it is thereby an unjustifiable stretch to believe that Netflix is modifying the movies themselves (which is the premise that etler was responding to, if you re-read mullingitover's comment).

You're right. I misread etler's wording. (As usual, if there's two ways to interpret something, one obvious and one obscure, my brain will seize the obscure.) Must...sleep...

My bet is that the studios don't license in scope format either because they are afraid of "stealing" or to retain an edge over streaming.

I can't imagine it's seen as retaining an edge, as the vast majority of Netflix's customers would have no idea this is going on.

That's the point. Netfilx = movies for the masses who might actually prefer the inferior version anyway.

Movie studios want to keep enthusiasts away from all-you-can-eat streaming services because they're one of the few groups that appreciate (and are willing to pay for) quality over quantity. Quality includes framing as the director intended.

And thus the question posed in the title has been successfully answered in the comments.

But netflix is surely cheating by hiding the warning.

If i'm paying to watch a movie, i want to at least be informed it it's a mutilated version of the movie.

...not that i would be paying netflix if i wanted movies. everyone knows it's just for TV series anyway.

Why would the average user want to see that warning before every movie? It's a waste of time for most people.

If one is such a nitpicker, Netflix isn't a good fit. Pay for the BluRay director's cut. Netflix $7.99/month, and it's a pretty good deal for what they provide.

Who said anything about seeing it before every movie? Add it to the other metadata presented about the movie (probably next to the indicator whether the stream is SD, HD, or "Super HD").

not talking about nagging warnings before the movie.

but making clear what they are selling to being with.

what if there's now a competitor that has decent movies and does not crop the image, and charges 8.99?

it would be a much, much better choice for me and everyone here. but since netflix does not disclose they have the low budget licensing of the movies, i would compare wrong and support the lesser service thinking they are similar and one is just cheaper.

i.e. cheating.

What a misleading title! It's really not Netflix's doing, and it's definitely not some kind of evil conspiracy.

The studio isn't going to pay for a new transfer just for Netflix, or maybe they have a better one but are only realizing it on Blu-Ray. Netflix just gets whatever version of the movie the studio happens to already have on hand, which is likely the HDTV version, which is sometimes pan-and-scan.

But that doesn't make a very sensational headline.

Every transfer for home video I've ever seen has been anamorphic widescreen since the earliest days of the DVD. There were a few releases among the very earliest DVDs that were pan-and-scan, because the studios were afraid people would freak out if they saw black bars on their TV. They didn't, so pan-and-scan vanished. And that was back when 4:3 SDTVs were the norm, now almost everyone has 16:9 sets, so widescreen transfers if anything would be more easily welcomed now.

Considering how much of their libraries they have now mastered for DVD, it would seem like it would take more work to go back and do a pan-and-scan transfer than it would to just reuse the one they made for widescreen DVD.

I only have about 10 dvds, and I've got one that they encoded the black bars on instead of doing anamorphic (first region 1 release of Dune), and at least one 4:3 that was released in 2004 (Grind... I only have this as a result of a disturbing practice of giving horrible birthday gifts in my circle of friends)

> Every transfer for home video I've ever seen has been anamorphic widescreen since the earliest days of the DVD.

That's interesting because one of the things which disappointed me most with DVDs was how immensely hard it was to get DVDs with actual anamorphic widescreen.

Most movies was actually fullscreen or letterboxed, and for 2.35:1 films that meant effectively 200 lines for film content.

This was after DVDs had been on the market for 5+ years mind you.

TLDR: An anecdote does not make facts nor data.

As dumb as it sounds, these masters that were made for DVD are oftentimes standard definition.

A lot of early DVDs were 4:3 letterboxed. On a 4:3 SDTV, they look the same as anamorphic widescreen. Sometimes better, on some of the old DVD players that did a bad job of downsizing.

+1, the title makes the problem sound way bigger than what it really is.

You're wrong. This is not a 4:3 pan & scan, it's a 16:9 crop (or custom pan & scan), which is something quite rare - anamorphic widescreen is the norm.

I am not wrong. You are obviously right that it is not a 4:3 pan & scan: it is a 16:9 pan & scan. Which is not rare. These are commonly generated for airing on HDTV channels, and are likely one of the few HD versions of the movie that the studio has lying around already.

My guess is that this cropping is being done by video editing service companies at the request of the studios.

Netflix and a studio come to a distribution agreement. Netflix tells the studio the technical requirements for the digital files to send over. The studio realizes they don't have exactly the right format on hand, so they contract out to some firm to encode their content. The studio may not realize that there is an aspect difference, and the service company might automatically adjust the cropping to make it fill the screen to fulfill their contract and meet the technical specifications.

Ah, this is close to my heart, and I have worked in video and streaming video for ten years, for many companies. Which is why I am so surprised the author does not realize that Netflix is not making this decision--video is supplied by third parties and sometimes this is out of control of Netflix or other streaming video vendors. Sometimes the pan and scan version is all that exists as a digital encode. Generally Hollywood studios are resistant to spending any extra money or labor to put our widescreen versions that customers can't generally discern from the pan and scan versions (and re-encoding costs are often absorbed by the streaming video service, in this case Netflix).

Netflix is generally making a smart business decision here--expanding selection and using a product that appears identical to 98% of viewers--and I say that as one of the 2% who can tell and do care.

In short, the author should know this, and have said it themselves, citing their video clerk experience--customers, if anything, think widescreen is the inferior product.

I saw this interesting overview of the history of aspect ratios the other day. There's a lot more variety than you'd think.

http://vimeo.com/68830569

wow, that was well made and informative. I had no idea that that's where the 16:9 aspect ratio came from (the mean ratio of the two most disparate ratios in film)

HBO and the other "premium" cable channels also do this. Not every single time, but much of the time. Try watching any of the Lord of the Rings movies on HBO or Cinemax for example. They're all 16:9, even though they were 2.39:1 "scope" in the theater.[1]

Forcing everything to be 16:9 has become the new "pan and scan", and it's actually been around for a while.

[1] Some of the time a movie has been filmed in a format which contained extra space on the negative, such as "Super 35", and in some cases the 16:9 might actually be showing more of the image rather than less, but it's very hit-and-miss and requires a custom transfer and master of the movie (which HBO has been known to do in at least some cases).

Isn't it just the content providers sending altered movies?

It most likely the content providers sending Netflix these alterned movies is as it is way too much work for Netflix to do this cropping themselves. I think it is customary for every film to have a "pan and scan" version created by the studios/content providers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-and-scan

Now, Netflix may be at fault for purposely not requesting letterboxed formats, and opting for the cropped 16:9 versions.

To nitpick, Netflix wouldn't want to request letterboxed formats. They should want the native format, because I'm confident that every video player they support will do the letterboxing for them.

They definitely do not do a good job of checking what formats they're getting. If you watch Star Trek or The Twilight Zone on a 16x9 TV, you'll actually see bars on left and right because it's encoded for 16x9 even though the source is 4x3.

They opted for maximum compatibility. Start licensing one for every screen AR and the fees start piling up.

Unfortunately the majority of their users probably don't want the letterbox format because they don't understand what the black bars are for. If they requested both formats to give users the choice it would probably cost them more in licensing.

There's no reason to deliver video in a 16:9 box if the aspect ratio of the content isn't 16:9, so nobody should be wasting macroblocks on black bars. Which isn't to say that someone won't jam it down your throat.

Wouldn't be the first time. I complained to Netflix about censoring tv shows, and they said the content providers did it, and they had no control. I canceled my service.

What was being censored? I haven't noticed too much but it's probably because many of my first and only viewings are now on Netflix.

The tv show "Louie"

Really? I feel a bit cheated, I only watched it on Netflix (struggled through the first season sometimes).

Ugh. Now I need to look up each Netflix movie to see if they have messed with it before playing?

Shouldn't be difficult to give us an option, Netflix is already encoding in many different formats.

Reminds me of the good old DVD days where I had to always check for two things: region restrictions and "anamorphic" format.

I somehow still have to deal with region restrictions today, because technology.

  I somehow still have to deal with region restrictions today, because technology.

Actually, it's because licensing.

It's awful. I'd get Netflix in a heartbeat if I could do so easily, but I need to get a VPN and fart about to make it work. And in the evening, the last thing I want to do is fix stuff, after a day of all sorts of format/file/network battles (radiology department job). Fix the licensing stuff and I'll pay.

No argument here. It's changing, but keep in mind that many of these licensing deals were multi-year, and that therefore the technical decisions necessary to support these deals have been baked into standards since day one. Thankfully, Blu-Ray is the last physical format we'll have to grapple with.

Yeah, a reasonable attitude like yours is what I need. I skipped blu-ray and went straight to digital. Discs in the bin etc. I think I jumped too soon. Meta data accuracy, library software, media servers etc have all changes vastly in the time I've been purely digital and every change is awful. My last change over was so awful that I said never again. I'll see if that holds, but having a third part sort it for me seems ideal.

I wish I could go fully digital but sadly the only way to get high quality "DRM-free" (in the sense that at least it's easy to strip the DRM) video today is by getting BDs. It saddens me that the actually good digital options are pretty much all illegal.

Admittedly I do currently have a Netflix account as well, mainly for some casual watching. I wouldn't be paying for it if it wasn't for MediaHint, though, which allows me to watch everything available on US Netflix.

Though speaking of DRM, incidentally just 10 minutes ago I was trying to show an example of some horrible subtitling on Netflix to a friend of mine and ran into a DRM error with Silverlight (it was claiming my time and date were inaccurate)... took a while to figure out how to solve it. Ah, DRM, always so friendly to legal consumers.

Exactly. We got into the Sopranos and I got out a few series from the local video store on DVD. This was a few years ago. Never again. The DVD player was the wrong region, so I put it into the Mac. It played fine. I tried to output the video on the Apple TV. Some kind of (according to apple forums) DRM prevents this. I was in the brink of encoding the DVDs to a different format, when it occurred to me to torrent them. I set off the torrent and the encode at the same time, and a short time later stopped the encoding, and the torrent had got enough to get us started. And I didn't have to watch the anti piracy warning. How can legal be so hard and free be so easy?

I agree that it's bafflingly hard to legally use legally bought media.

> How can legal be so hard

Because rights holders have weird beliefs and think that DRM is great, and they won't sell the rights without DRM.

" and Milos Forman made a decision when he chose to show both Jim Carrey and Jerry Lawler."

I'm amazed that Netflix edits the frame to a degree that may actually change the meaning of a scene or a dialog. I know that cropping even a few mm off the edges is bad, but 'cropping' one entire guy from a scene involving two people is outrageous.

Now, I'm not a fancy big city video-editor but I think it has more to do with the characters placement in the original shot than the editing.

Begin Speculation

You can probably be pretty specific with your cropping placement but whoever did the editing, likely didn't understand the meaning of both in the shot (I would've missed it initially) and had a directive of, make this look good and full screen, so they chopped it that way.

End Speculation

Yes, in pan and scan when there's a wide shot with two characters, it is generally preferred to show one person in full at a time and cut between them if you can.

Directors generally don't film with this in mind, so it can be rough on certain styles and completely ruins some shots. Has for decades, nothing you can really do if people won't watch letterboxed.

yes, pan and scan is generally pretty destructive, which is why directors are all so happy everyone is getting at least 16:9 TVs in their homes. Imagine how it was cutting down Lawrence of Arabia to 4x3.

I contacted Netflix support about this, and they claimed that this isn't the case generally, but it might happen with some devices. Has anyone been able to reproduce this?

i would if they had any movie worth watching.

why people subscribe to a service that is 95% tv shows, and then complain about the few movie image quality?

I've actually noticed this (because, technically speaking, widescreen films should still have black bars on them even with "normal" widescreen televisions). I always assumed it was Netflix just accommodating the average user who would get pissed that they bought a widescreen TV and the picture is still showing up with bars on it.

Also consider that the average user usually watches television with their TV that auto-crops and/or zooms and stretches pictures, not to mention interpolates 120Hz viewing for a delicious soap opera effect.

I have to say, though, that cinemaphiles complaining about Netflix quality is a bit like the audiophiles that buy $10k sound systems to listen to their MP3 collection.

It's crazy; almost all forms of broadcasting are made without any consideration of proper display. 4:3 TV shows from the 80s and 90s are cropped to 16:9 (which kills the resolution to abysmal levels); films on VOD services and TV are cut down from cinemascope to 16:9; black and white sources are colorized and made weird and ridiculous. why on earth would I ever want to pay for any of these services? Well, I don't. I don't watch TV anymore; I buy a couple of DVDs here and there, and that's about it.

If only we could make resizeable screens.

OT: site is unreadable on my Android device with Chrome (latest).

It disables zoom but is too wide for the screen and doesn't reflow the text (I should just turn off allowing sites to disable zoom...).

I have disable zoom turned off but it didn't help it only turns off ability to restrict zoom in not out. Apparently its for the hard if sight... Rotating the screen was OK though here.

Well if you believe in conspiracy theories, Netflix subtly alters the film so that if it shows up on Bittorrent they know where it came from :-)

But I suspect that Netflix isn't doing the altering, rather their source material comes that way. Either because the distribution channel gets it that way or because the content providers want it that way. Like the author I suspect that if it wasn't being done by the media companies there would be a big stink about it.

These are the opposite of subtle, more like "Netflix ruins the film"

I think you read half of the parent comment before replying, and missed the point of that.

I just noticed this a couple weeks ago with "Serenity" - I mostly watch TV on Netflix, rather than movies - but they absolutely should be giving us the whole picture. TV's have anti-letterboxing modes, and the people who don't know any better than "the picture isn't taking up my whole TV" should use them. And of course there's no reason whatsoever for them to provide anything but the original version on the website.

Personally I've never understood the 2.39:1 aspect ratio. My TV, computer monitors, laptop and phone are all 16:9. TV shows I watch are 16:9 as well. Other than 4:3, it seems like the universal ratio. So why are movies shot at 2.39:1, a ratio that causes black bars on any device you watch it on?

Movies are shot for theaters, not your devices.

Because some directors or DPs want to present in widescreen?

Because 16:9 wouldn't exist except for the existing theater ratio of 2.39:1. 16:9 is a compromise between existing movies and academy ratio[1]. 21:9 would have been a better ratio, but we got the compromise just like the resolution is 1920 x 1080 instead of something that jived better with computers.

If you shoot a movie in 16:9 it will look cropped when viewed in a theater.

1) there is a YouTube video that explains it. I think it made HN a while ago.

This also reminds me of how they take TV originals, like Seinfeld, for example and originally shot for 4:3. They enhance them for 16:9. I would like to see a comparison of that too.

However, I will admit I think the Seinfeld enhancements do look pretty good from what they used to.

Next you'll tell me that their movies are compressed and not at the same quality as blurays!

Why is it a change without some giant announcement is suddenly some sort of secret conspiracy?

There's an outside chance that Netflix only has a license for the pan-and-scan versions, and the studios want more $$$ for the widescreen versions.

When I look for the majority of the movies in the article and linked site, they come up as unavailable (US netflix). Kind of makes it all moot.

Does anyone know if Amazon streaming does the same?

I'm not sure if it's intentional irony or not, but the site is too wide on my iPhone and doesn't allow me to pinch/zoom.

If the author intended that to inspire frustration with mobile readers... then well played, sir/madam, well played!

Is fine in landscape on iPhone 5.

I contacted Netflix about this on twitter. They say it ain't so. https://twitter.com/lo_fye/statuses/357851185140596736

Ironically, you can't resize the article to read the full lines on mobile safari.

That first paragraph had me rolling. I worked for Transworld from 99-2002ish and had to explain the exact same thing to people. Got the same result. Glad I can laugh at it now. At the time it pissed me off more than anything.

What are the chances that this person had the DVD flipped to play the 4:3 version of the film? (Studios sometimes release pan & scan and the widescreen on the same disc, but on opposite sides).

Does Netflix source their content from DVDs? I would have thought the studio would send over some sort of lossless master file of the video which is then scaled on Netflix's side.

Uhh, I was actually thinking about the DVD-by-mail service. But yeah, an employee at Netflix could have flipped it when encoding it. But your explanation with the studio sending a master is the most likely.

this is usually the case when watching a movie on the HD feed of HBO/Showtime/what have you as well. They're probably getting the same source as netflix.

It seems that some directors have the clout to demand that their movies are distributed in the original aspect ratio. Or perhaps they're willing to trade some cash for control of that aspect of distribution.

The iPad app used to let you watch the movies in both portrait and landscape modes. I found portrait mode worked better for me when watching a movie in bed.

As of a month or two ago, they took away the ability to watch in portrait. Why. It just made the app worse.

summary: the article does not answer why.

The NSA wants the cropped out bit.

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