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Comment by danielparks | Hacker News Reader

I see.

That seems to be mostly solved with high speed links and better encoding technology.

No, it got worse. Try H265, compression artifacts are pretty bad in certain scenarios, even with high bitrate. Same with h264 - but it can be solved with high bitrate - but your file size also gets much much bigger. Which means you will need very low latency, high-speed internet.

I think youtube is the only streaming service that does it very well without any issues for the end-user, anywhere in the world. Mostly because of their free peering service that is extremely ubiquitous. https://peering.google.com/#/

He meant better encoder technology at the same bitrate.

H265 encoding/compression tech is the best in the world right now - unless I missed something.

How you encode something goes beyond the standard. You can encode the same source at the same bitrate and with the same standard in different ways.

For example, there were noticeable quality differences between MP3 coders.

I’m having trouble finding good examples of confetti or fireworks on Netflix. I’ve noticed fewer problems as time goes on, but anecdata and all that.

Different encoders and standards will have different problematic scenarios. It seems like the number of problematic scenarios is decreasing.

I can encode DVD video (MPEG2) as h.264 at a huge bitrate decrease with no apparent quality loss.

Certainly streaming real time is harder with digital formats, but it’s generally good enough.

You can't find good examples because people actively avoid recording and uploading videos containing things that are hard to encode.

I find this hard to believe. Netflix is going to avoid certain titles because they aren’t going to look perfect?

Noone's producing titles that can't look good on most platforms.

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