Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

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I know this thread is still active, but a small bump anyway to say that YouTube now has the red "HD" overlay back on the white cogwheel button. It wasn't there yesterday when I checked. Video quality and subs / video load time seems to be back to pre-covid.
 
Soldato
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Nope, funnily enough 25Mbps is the minimum for apple 4k, most content will easily eat 30-40Mbps+ on it.

all I can seen https://www.flatpanelshd.com/flatforums/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=12779
Apple TV+ has the highest streaming quality we’ve seen for 4K so far. It's higher than most iTunes movies. Over the weekend, I took the first batch of measurements. I'm planning to do more later. It's worth pointing out that Apple TV+ uses variable bitrate with a quite wide span from low to top, so the console must run for some time to calculate the average bitrate.
See has the highest bitrate so far. 29 Mb/s average video bitrate and 41 Mb/s video peak (I don’t know if it hits that occasionally or rarely, since the console only reports average and peak).
The Elephant Queen averages around 26 Mb/s for video bitrate.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DisneyPlus/comments/dvjvtl/some_bitrate_tests_and_comparisons/
Using His Dark Materials as test:

  • HBO Go on Apple TV 4K - Avg Bitrate Video - 3.89 Mbps / Peak Bitrate Video - 8.93 Mbps SDR natural size 1920x1080

  • Through Spectrum app - Avg Bitrate Video - 5.18 Mbps SDR 1280x720

  • Through Apple TV native app - Avg Bitrate Video - 8.65 Mbps / Peak - 14.94 Mbps SDR 1920x1080

  • Through Amazon: Avg Bitrate Video - 8.84 Mbps / Peak 13.36 Mbps SDR 1920x1080
And just for fun, Carnival Row in 4k UHD

  • Avg bitrate video: 9.90 Mbps / Peak 12.36 Mbps, HDR10, 3840x2160
For All Mankind test Apple TV+ show on Apple TV 4K


  • 22.39 Mbps Average / 30.45 Mbps Peak HDR10 (my tv limitation I am testing on - video range is DolbyVision) 3840x1920
Just booted up "Dumbo (2019)" since Mand is not available to me for whatever reason. It's coming back

  • Avg. Bitrate: 16.55 Mbps, Peak Bitrate: 27.55 Mbps, natural size: 3840x2160, video range: Dolby Vision
Mandolorian is coming in at

  • Average: 16.28 Mbps Peak: 28.02 Mbps

so, not many data points vs netflix.
64K$ question do they/Apple have some mainstream movies , versus their own shows, that do actually look better

bitrates can be misleading if you read the netflix blog posted a while back on the 'smarts' they use for their encoding
such as recognising bits of pictures people look at - eg peoples faces, and nail those exclusivley with a high bitrate.
 
Soldato
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See is probably the best looking stream I have... seen. Really is amazing quality.
Tested ‘Our Planet’ and it’s maxing out to the same bitrate it did when I first tested it months ago. 15.25, which is the Max. Seems not all shows/films are back to full blast yet though :)
 
Soldato
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can anyone refute, whether higher bitrate apple 4k movies (which may mean better pq) , applies, uniquely, for their own stuff

I don't have Apple TV+ but I have an Apple TV 4k box however I don't have a Mac to enable the bitrate monitor.


ie https://hd-report.com/list-of-apple-tv-movies-shows/
so, not
https://hd-report.com/list-of-4k-hdr-movies-on-apple-tv/

I use Apple TV for 4k mainstream movies I don't have an Apple TV+ sub
I can see the data rate using my router to a specific device using Asus Merlin and it far surpasses Netflix on the same device, yes I agree it's not all down to data rate but to my eyes the image quality of say Transformers the Last Knight on ATV 4k is stunning.

Unfortunately it's very difficult to have a comparison between the two services as most of the mainstream movie content on Netflix is 1080p, the only one I could compare is Bad Boys with Netflix having the 4k version but I only have the 1080p version on Apple TV come to think of it I also have the 4k version on Sky TV....
 
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When I screwed up my shoulder back towards the end of last year, I watched the whole of Better Call Saul on my 1080p TV and the quality was outstanding, it was amazingly good.

I've just started watching the latest series and it's abysmal. Any dark scene has terrible pixelation and banding. It's really noticeable and I'm sure it wasn't like that before.
 
Soldato
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So for the best 4K movie streaming experience, it seems you need to buy Apple TV 4K box?

Or is it possible to get an app on say an Xbox One?

Sorry, only really use Netflix and Prime, so I don't know a thing about Apple
 
Soldato
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Any dark scene has terrible pixelation and banding.
nothing I can see, from companies to say they lifted bitrate embargo .. just unsubstantiated forbes article.

Unfortunately it's very difficult to have a comparison between the two services
comparison on atv itunes 4k vs blu-ray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2wCeKk-QjA looks good
unfortunately he didn't do netflix too, but, you have to pay apple ~£200, to see if you concur, and,
they maybe reserving the good bitrate for itunes running on their hardware, can see any comments on the new samsung tv itunes app.
 
Soldato
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When I screwed up my shoulder back towards the end of last year, I watched the whole of Better Call Saul on my 1080p TV and the quality was outstanding, it was amazingly good.

I've just started watching the latest series and it's abysmal. Any dark scene has terrible pixelation and banding. It's really noticeable and I'm sure it wasn't like that before.

that is odd, it looked fantastic on my 4k tv via an apple tv box.
 
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nothing I can see, from companies to say they lifted bitrate embargo .. just unsubstantiated forbes article.


comparison on atv itunes 4k vs blu-ray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2wCeKk-QjA looks good
unfortunately he didn't do netflix too, but, you have to pay apple ~£200, to see if you concur, and,
they maybe reserving the good bitrate for itunes running on their hardware, can see any comments on the new samsung tv itunes app.

HDtvtest did a side by side comparison of ATV4k and UHD Blu-ray on Oled TVs a while back it's partially why I forked out for the box and the fact I can get movies cheaply.

I also have Apple TV on a firestick I could check the bandwidth usage whilst streaming through it to see if it comes close.
 
Soldato
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Not tested in a while but when I first got my Panasonic GZ950 I found the Apple TV retained a bit more shadow detail than the TV’s own Netflix app. Will test again at the weekend with both Netflix and a few UHD movies :)
 
Soldato
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yes would be interesting to see some average bitrate comparisons, and if apple have restricted bit rate on their apps.

I'll have to look at the capabilities of my router to isolate/give-stats on the traffic going to my tv/roku IP address
 
Soldato
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I'll have to look at the capabilities of my router to isolate/give-stats on the traffic going to my tv/roku IP address

I'll try this. https://community.roku.com/t5/Roku-Developer-Program/Roku-device-charles-set-up/td-p/439030

Another way to do this if you're running a Windows PC is to set up an ad-hoc network (or "hostednetwork" as they call it now on Windows 8 ), along with ICS (Internet Connection Sharing). Configure your Roku to connect to this network. Now all your Roku traffic will be going through your PC's wireless card, and you can use Wireshark to examine it. As long as your network adapter supports hosted networks this may be the way to go, since you don't need any additional hardware or proxies or APIs. You can capture any traffic going to/from your Roku, not just your own development channel, but other channels as well.

I'm not sure how you'd do this on a Mac or Linux system, but if you have Windows (I've been using it under Windows 8.1), then here are the steps involved:

First, set up the ad-hoc network:

- Start a Windows command prompt (as Administrator!!)
- Type: netsh wlan show drivers
- Find the entry for your wireless interface and look for something that says "Hosted Network Supported: Yes". If it says "Yes" then this should work, otherwise your wireless adapter does not support hosted networks.
- Type: netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=Allow ssid="my-ssid" key="my-password"
where my-ssid is the name of the new network's ssid and my-password is the password
- Type: netsh wlan start hostednetwork

[Note that each time you restart your computer, or resume from Sleep state, you'll have to reissue the above start hostednetwork command]

Next, set up Internet Connection Sharing:

- Right-click on the wi-fi network icon in the system tray, then select 'Open Network and Sharing Center'
- Click on 'Change Adapter Settings'
- Right-click on the entry for your Wi-Fi adapter (NOT the new ad-hoc network), then click on 'Properties'
- If you successfully started the ad-hoc network you will see a 'Sharing' tab. Click the 'Sharing' tab
- Check the box labelled 'Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection', then click 'OK'

Next, configure your Roku to connect to the new ad-hoc network:
- Settings>Network>Wireless (Wi-Fi)>Set up new Wi-Fi connection
- Select the ssid you specified above (my-ssid) for the new ad-hoc network, enter the password (my-password), then select Connect

Next, install Wireshark if you haven't already installed it:
- Download from https://www.wireshark.org/download.html. You can use the Windows Installer 64-bit version if you have a 64-bit PC
- Run the installer selecting all default options, making sure to install WInPcap when asked

Finally, capture and examine your Roku traffic:
- Run Wireshark
- In the 'Capture' pane, select your Wi-Fi interface
- Click the green 'Start' icon to start capturing
- You can use the 'Filter' box to filter the traffic you're interested in, e.g. to capture Http traffic to/from my Roku's ip address, I'd type:
http && ip.addr==192.168.0.8
then click 'Apply'
- When you find an entry you're interested in (e.g. an Http GET command), right-click on it and select 'Follow TCP Stream'. This will bring up a window containing the entire Http dialog with options to display it in various formats, save it, etc.
 
Soldato
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Snowpiercer is streaming at 15.25 now on my TV so compared that to my Apple TV. Dolby vision dark used on the Apple TV as this matches the Netflix mode on the tv.
Very very hard to see any difference to the point of being near perfect copies, still flicking between the 2 on a few dark scenes.. thought I saw a tiny bit more banding on the Apple TV but it’s hard when having to flick from the app to the Apple TV.
The Apple TV+ show ‘See’ is a better quality stream though.
 
Soldato
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Netflix cuts 4K bitrate in half, promises same quality 4K video

So their decision to reduce quality earlier in the year appears to have been nothing more than an experiment to find out how much they could reduce bandwidth without their customers kicking off.

That's what you got from the article?


The have started to implement their variable per title/per scene bitrate encoding for 4k titles, previously this was limited to 1080p. Some titles may end up looking worse, but the vast majority will be no different or better with a reduced bitrate.

from netflix:
Netflix has an ever-expanding collection of titles which customers can enjoy in 4K resolution with a suitable device and subscription plan. Netflix creates premium bitstreams for those titles in addition to the catalog-wide 8-bit stream profiles¹. Premium features comprise a title-dependent combination of 10-bit bit-depth, 4K resolution, high frame rate (HFR) and high dynamic range (HDR) and pave the way for an extraordinary viewing experience.

The premium bitstreams, launched several years ago, were rolled out with a fixed-bitrate ladder, with fixed 4K resolution bitrates — 8, 10, 12 and 16 Mbps — regardless of content characteristics. Since then, we’ve developed algorithms such as per-title encode optimizations and per-shot dynamic optimization, but these innovations were not back-ported on these premium bitstreams. Moreover, the encoding group of pictures (GoP) duration (or keyframe period) was constant throughout the stream causing additional inefficiency due to shot boundaries not aligning with GoP boundaries.

As the number of 4K titles in our catalog continues to grow and more devices support the premium features, we expect these video streams to have an increasing impact on our members and the network. We’ve worked hard over the last year to leapfrog to our most advanced encoding innovations — shot-optimized encoding and 4K VMAF model — and applied those to the premium bitstreams. More specifically, we’ve improved the traditional 4K and 10-bit ladder by employing

In this blog post, we present benefits of applying the above-mentioned optimizations to standard dynamic range (SDR) 10-bit and 4K streams (some titles are also HFR). As for HDR, our team is currently developing an HDR extension to VMAF, Netflix’s video quality metric, which will then be used to optimize the HDR streams.

You should read the original source article from netflix (it's linked in that article you posted) - they go in to a fair amount of detail and provide some comparison shots of fixed vs optimised bitrate.


Overall, while A/B testing these new encodes, we have seen the following benefits, which are in line with the offline evaluation covered in the previous section:

  • For members with high-bandwidth connections we deliver the same great quality at half the bitrate on average.
  • For members with constrained bandwidth we deliver higher quality at the same (or even lower) bitrate — higher VMAF at the same encoding resolution and bitrate or even higher resolutions than they could stream before. For example, members who were limited by their network to 720p can now be served 1080p or higher resolution instead.
  • Most streaming sessions start with a higher initial quality.
  • The number of rebuffers per hour go down by over 65%; members also experience fewer quality drops while streaming.
  • The reduced bitrate together with some Digital Rights Management (DRM) system improvements (not covered in this blog) result in reducing the initial play delay by about 10%.
But, you know, people out there will be chewing at the bit to link this to the covid-bitrate reducing nonsense. Down with netflix!
 
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