Delivering Breaking Bad on Netflix in Ultra HD 4K | Hacker News Reader

Delivering Breaking Bad on Netflix in Ultra HD 4K

techblog.netflix.com

75 pointsconorgil14561 comments

For a small to medium displays at typical viewing distances (this includes most "big screen" panels you can buy at your local electronics shop), 1080p meets or exceeds the limits of the typical human eye's resolving power. Without using a projection system and a large screen or a stupendously expensive (>100" diagonal) flat-panel, 4K is a subtle upgrade at best.

When video is encoded with insufficient bandwidth, compression artifacts (e.g. macroblocking) are anything but subtle. These artifacts typically are not constrained to one or two pixels, but ramify to much larger portions of the image. Netflix has, by necessity, used insufficient bandwidth on practically their entire library. My money is on Netflix's over-compressed 4K being inferior in quality to Bluray 1080p for the vast majority of users.

This might be useful in illustrating your point: http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html

Am I the only one who watches stuff on his computer, and sits about 2-3 feet from it?

What screen size are you on? 27 inches? Can you make out individual pixels with film material (which usually has no sharp edges in it)?

Not arguing against what you are saying, but there's a significant difference between "making out individual pixels" and "noticing a difference".

That's true.

I watch most things on my 13" mbp w/retina. and my eyes are typically 1-2 feet away from the screen. Very immersive experience IMHO.

This illustrates the point of dimishing returns with regards to ever higher amount of total pixels on a screen.

Doesn't mentions compression artifacts, though. Thus - at the same bitrate - higher resolution images might look worse than lower resolution ones. Which is what I think the OP meant to highlight.

> Thus - at the same bitrate - higher resolution images might look worse than lower resolution ones.

But the 4K stream is HEVC (H.265) vs H.264 for the other HD streams, so it may not be that simple.

Well, HEVC compresses the same quality to about half the size of H.264, so since 4K is about 4x 1080p and the bitrate is a little over 2x their 1080p Super HD streams I'd expect the quality to be a little better.

What I'd really be interested to see is the House of Cards intro at this bitrate - the 1080p Super HD stream had a lot of really off-putting banding in the clouds.

> HEVC compresses the same quality to about half the size of H.264

Eh, it's supposed to, but it's not there yet. The best H.264 encoder (x264) is actually still more efficient than the best H.265 encoders (and MUCH faster).

Development of the H265 encoders is progressing fast though, x265 will likely surpass x264 within the year.

Here's some recent samples (12th June) that compares a very recent build of x265 with x264: http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=1683608&postcount=907

Alternatively, http://isthisretina.com offers a simple way to input whatever value you need. Not that the computation is complex, but it's quite handy.

That imperial system.

That's total BS, you can notice alising patterns easily at much higher resolutions than your suggesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing

PS: I noticed issues standing ~10 feet from a 50' 4k screen.

That's for a display that you sit several metres away from in a living room. For a closer seating (2-3m) with a 50" panel it is noticeable though (I've tried).

For a ~30 inch computer display at desktop viewing distance, the difference between 2560x1440 (which is larger than HD already!) and 4K is clear to see.

Exactly, it would be nice if I could watch 4k content on my MacBook Pro, while not full 4k, it's close enough where I would be able to tell the difference.

Strange how it's only TVs currently.

I wonder what will be the gold standard for something like oculus rift?

I'm guessing the same as for print (600-1200dpi). The oculus rift guys seem to think, even a little higher:

"“If we want the “perfect” Oculus Rift, with 180 degrees FOV and an APD of 45, we’ll need a screen with a resolution of 8000 x 4500″ This matches up very well with Luckey’s comment of 8K per eye. Using a PPI calculator, a 7″ screen with resolution of 8000 x 4500 would require 1311 PPI."

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/IvanBlaustein/20131029/203543...

There are advantages other than just the high resolution available under the UHD/4k umbrella (ITU-R BT.2020). The BT.2020 colorspace provides a wider color gamut, increased bit depths reduce color banding, supports 4:4:4 chroma sampling and up to 120Hz progressive frames are standardized.

Of course that doesn't mean Netflix can or will make use of any of them in their releases.

I see various claims about the uselessness of 4K all over the web usually combined with words like "visual acuity" and "resolve". So, yeah, it might not be a huge deal in many cases, but saying that you need a 100"+ screen to tell the difference is just wrong. In this test, viewers easily tell the difference from 9 feet on a 55" screen:

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/4k-resolution-201312153517.ht...

This is not a weird audiophile kind of thing, these are very noticeable differences.

All that said, I'm more excited about all of the other improvements coming to display technology these days: HDR, wide gamut, high/variable FPS, low persistence, etc.

Requiring a 55" screen to tell the difference is still outside the realm of the VAST majority of home setups. I don't even know anyone with a screen that large other than a single friend of a friend with an expensive home theater room with a full-screen projection setup. And it doesn't do 4K.

For my anecdote I will state that I know quite a few people with screens larger than 50 inches. None with 4k since it is so cost prohibitive, but that can change when the cost of 4k screens comes down.

The test is still relevant: most people (especially those with smaller TV's) sit closer than 9ft away, in my experience.

All of my nearby friends do. But then, I live in NYC. So, the biggest TV of a nearby friend is 45". Then again, most folks I know in CT and CA stick to around 42" even in much larger houses.

Wasn't the color spectrum increased with the 4k standard too? Would this be noticeable?

More colours in the compression artefacts? /s

Put another way: Due to the low bitrates used by Netflix, the 4K streams will show a dramatic improvement in quality even on 1080p screens.

I'm old enough to remember tv shows making a big deal about being in color, then stereo, then HD. The big change in going to 4K is that Netflix doesn't need regulatory permission or ten years of drafting standards to make the upgrade.

Except that at least back then, all you had to do was pay to upgrade your tv and you got the content.

Today, not only do you have to buy the new TV, you have to hope your ISP has enough bandwidth to deliver the content, possibly pay more for that, then hope that your wifi network is high-speed enough to deal with the new bandwidth requirements.

> Except that at least back then, all you had to do was pay to upgrade your tv and you got the content.

Pay to upgrade your TV, hope you lived in a market with a channel that broadcast in color, hope you got good enough reception to receive the color carrier, maybe redirect the antenna on your roof with someone downstairs yelling "the picture looks good now!". Maybe you needed to even get a new antenna with VHF band coverage instead of UHF... Technology has never been easy.

You might say living on the cutting edge never has a dull moment.

"...Netflix doesn't need...ten years of drafting standards..."

When do you think standards work started on HEVC? When do you think NHK were first demonstrating UHDTV?

They were both being worked on by 2004 and much of the research work will have preceeded that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_High_Definition_Televisi...

Good point. And I'm sure Netflix engineers had a certain amount of internal bureaucracy to deal with as well. The point I was trying make was just that it's easier now to make a change like this than what had to be done in previous iterations.

Of course, before colour was HD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/405-line_television_system

The biggest problem holding back adoption for 4k media is vendor lock in. You can't get 4K unless you're on a Sony/LG/Samsung "Smart TV".

There is not a legitimate technical reason why I can't watch House of Cards in 4K on my Seiki through my PC. I watched the trailer in 4K over a dozen times on YouTube.

Gamers want to play games on low input lag 4K screens from brands like Asus, Dell, Acer. 4K is much more easily justifiable when users can buy a single screen for their games and ultra-hd content.

Gaming PC's are about the only units with enough compute for highly compressed h.265 playback without built in hardware acceleration, so I don't understand why the market has not made this content accessible for me to purchase.

You are right there is no technical reason why you can't but there are probably commercial and practical reasons.

The number of people with gaming PCs is relatively small and the complexity of providing it to them might be quite high. I don't know what the availability of stable HEVC decoders is like or what the licensing cost for them is or the difficulty of integrating them with Silverlight or whatever it is that Netlix use.

The Youtube trailer was probably VP9 not HEVC but was possibly using a higher bitrate that could effectively be downloaded rather than streamed for a short trailer.

Basically the complexity of supporting the small group of gamers with the right PC's and 4K monitors was probably not worth it initially especially considering the backlash from customers who's PC's weren't fast enough. It is easier to launch on a set of known devices and then they can expand from there. I'm sure it will come.

> The biggest problem holding back adoption for 4k media is vendor lock in.

That's where that government regulation and ten years of drafting standards mentioned above come into the picture.

No legit technical reason? How about 'user experience'? To my understanding this sort of pilot program is limited to proven-good configurations to keep the kvetching to a minimum before they generalize it for launch.

This is great and all, but what are we gonna do with 4K streams when Comcast can't even deliver a low-quality stream?

Don't stream it? Buffer it in advance.

But Comcast rates highly in googles ISP test, so I think they'd be fine.

That's the whole point.

(Warning: conspiracy theory ahead)

Netflix is rolling this out to illustrate to consumers how internet providers are failing to fulfill their contractual obligation for high-speed, unlimited internet at a set price.

How many GB/min of footage is this? I can't imagine ever being able to stream that here, where our high-end quotas are measured in 100s of GB/month.

15Mbps [1], which will consume around 6.8Gb/hr [2]

[1] http://bgr.com/2013/09/26/netflix-4k-streaming/ [2] http://web.forret.com/tools/filesize.asp?speed=15&unit=Mbps&...

It's actually ~6.6GB/hr. Note: Actually GiB, but who writes GiB...

Checking out the top google results for "netflix 4K bitrate" seems to suggest a 15.6 Mbps bitrate rate for these streams.

Netflix; I dont need that, we already watched it. It was great.

Please add more shows to the EU/Dutch region.. the US and UK catalog are interesting.. why cant we see this?

Also, i'd pay extra if i could watch ANY movie as soon as it got out of the theatre.

Wait, my back of the envelope says you'll need to pull down around 650mb a second to stream 4K. That's uncompressed, sure, but anything in that power of ten isn't feasible.

Can't it be buffered?

Typical compression of 4k video ends up being more than a factor of 10 smaller.

Yikes you're right. Looks like 2 powers of 10.

Wait, only on select smart TVs? So I can't watch this on netflix.com with my 4k monitor? (not that I have the connection to stream it anyway)

Apparently not.

Nope. See 'proprietary DRM' and 'vendor lock-in'. You can basically use specific Sony/LG/Samsung TVs and that's it.

Or pirate it after it's released and watch it the way you want to.

In what resolution are the original negatives?

It was almost certainly shot with 35mm film. Film is analog so it doesn't have a well-defined resolution, but modern 35mm is pretty comparable to 4k (maybe a little less, depending on the quality of the camera/printing/etc)

AMC still shoots their originals on film.

For practical purposes, the better question is what resolution is the digital intermediate. That's effectively the highest resolution you are going to get without spending a lot of money to redo work. And for a decent chunk of recent history, that's going to be 2K.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_intermediate

Too bad their 4k content has bitrates that should only be acceptable for 1080p or less. Downscaling their 4k to 1080p would almost look as good as if they just had proper 1080p to begin with. And a proper 1080p upscale to 4k would look better than this poor excuse for 4k.

How do I know what quality stream I'm getting?

Smurfs 2, really?

Sponsored by Comcast. It's one way of reducing the bandwidth demands ;)

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