Netflix Responds to Crop Controversy | Hacker News Reader

Netflix Responds to Crop Controversy

avsforum.com

45 pointsparasubvert22 comments

IMO, this was a non-story from day one. Not sure why so many people fell in love with the conspiracy theories or Netflix-bashing. Netflix shows what they get.

> IMO, this was a non-story from day one.

Not quite a non-story though. It's garbage the film studios are giving bad copies to Netflix to stream. Bringing this up and complaining about it is a good first step to getting that fixed, right?

The studios should really have been suspect #1 in this case from the start. Doing Pan and Scan of 2 hours of film is a chunk of work - not just cropping, but reframing each and every scene to focus on the action. I don't know if Netflix have the resources for this, but would they have permission?

I can't find the story now, but there was an instance of a set of "widescreen" DVD releases (my memory tells me they were from WB) which were 4:3 cropped releases, cropped yet again to 16:9 aspect - a small chunk of the original picture left at this stage... but as I say, I can't find this story so I may be misremembering.

Replying to myself as the edit window has passed - still haven't tracked down that double-cropping story. The thought occurs, what happens with source material which fits no definition of "wide"? Older TV shows or many Kubrick films?

Horizontal black bars on screen to correct aspect are common, vertical black bars are less acceptable for whatever reason (Aesthetics? Acclimatisation? Who knows?). My xbmc setup not only has a hybrid stretch+crop for 4:3 stuff on my widescreen TV, it also has a setting which stretches more towards the edges than the centre of the picture. Acceptable presentation for my old TV recordings and such but if someone handed me a Dr. Strangelove recording distorted similarly, I'd be less than impressed. I prefer to ruin the presentation on my own terms!

Another mode I use for presentation of 4:3 material on the wide TV is 14:9 + crop - this is essentially a halfway-to-fullscreen zoom mode I use for my old game consoles. This has never, in my experience, cut out any relevant action or HUD info as these games needed to be designed for ludicrously variable CRT overscan in the first place.

The "story" is the fact that people aren't warned that they are watching a modified version of the film. Netflix is not at fault for showing what they get, but you could argue they are at fault for not informing customers of what they're showing.

This. I don't think people are necessarily expecting the literal Blu-Ray to be streamed, but even casual cinephiles (over a certain age anyway) probably expect to be notified if a film has been "formatted to fit [your] screen".

If read their response you'd know you're dead wrong.

Tl;dr for you: e get several formats and because we underpay or temp workers sometimes we upload the wrong one to some region, but we try to fix it fast if someone complains.

Reading what i type on the phone afterwards is painful

It is good it is fixed. Show it how it was filmed and framed. Still goofy for people to rage out hard on. Netflix is a great value and provides a great service cropping or not.

And their statement says that what they got was not what they expected.

Not sure why we're linking to a weird forum. Here's the source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/netflix-cropping-as...

I'd trust avs forum over huffpo any day..

My first reaction was to click on the HuffPo link to triumphantly find where they linked to a primary source that they excerpted heavily from...but in this case, HuffPo was the primary source:

> In a statement to The Huffington Post, Netflix categorically denied that it intentionally cuts off portions of the picture for movies it streams, claiming that any altered aspect ratio is a mistake.

> "We want to offer the best picture and provide the original aspect ratio of any title on Netflix," Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said in an email. "However, unfortunately our quality controls sometimes fail and we end up offering the wrong version of a title. When we discover this error, we replace that title as soon as possible."

I'll be the first to say...huhh? I thought this was completely a situation of what arrangements Netflix had with the studios (perhaps to get a cheaper rate on deals)...but it turns out it was just a mistake that would've gone on if people hadn't made a good sized ruckus? Good for the Internet.

This looked to me like they were trying to say "It's the studios' fault!" without pissing off the studios.

FWIW, I think the evidence that "it's the studio's fault!" is sufficient to consider it likely. In particular, when they had Starz, I was flabbergasted at the low quality of the Starz video; they were, at times, in SD. There is just no way that Netflix was proudly pushing that out of their own free will.

I was curious about the article claiming "... the 16:9 HD widescreen aspect ratio that the majority of films are shot in ..."

and came across this:

http://www.projectorcentral.com/build_home_theater_screen_as...

OP or not, favoring HuffPo over AVSForum for this story is about as useful as favoring them over Hacker News for a startup-related story.

Yet another example of the mad rush to jump to an incorrect conclusion.

Determining the aspect ratio of a video file seems like a simple process to automate. Anybody really think they've seriously gone looking for anomalies?

It's not that simple, you can't just look at the source pixel dimensions as the source file is likely to a hardware standard (e.g., 1920x1080). Web encoding can and generally should be cropped to the actual content, but mezzanine files generally are the standard dimensions of the production or editing workflow.

You scan for black bars, but you'll have to scan the whole movie, as sometimes content (usually documentaries) is presented in a mix of aspect ratios, parts with bars on top and bottom, parts with bars on sides, parts in full screen. So that's an expensive operation, taking you from one or two pass "off the shelf" encoding to three pass encoding where the first pass is this custom scan.

Note that the best encoding shops have a human make some judgment calls about the content, and set encoding parameters individually.

To me the bigger question was the "captions" - and whether it's possibly for them to be almost always working.

Actually, it would be significantly easier to acquire the content outside the studios, for video streaming sites.

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