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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

> Am I in the minority here?

Probably. I used to work in broadcast, so I have been conditioned to seek out the highest quality video I can find. So like you, I will accept buffering for higher quality playback.

However I still see people who force 4:3 into 16:9 because it fills the screen, and people who still have motion smoothing on their TV so everything looks like 60fps until the stream breaks.

however on mobile, and I just want to see the shitty politician say the shitty thing.

I think most people want decent audio with mostly moving pictures. Most people can't see HD at TV distances anyway, so I suspect so long as it sounds good, most people don't notice too much.

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While the sentiment in this comment is generally correct, I don't think this extends to 360p (or even 480p). Most people will generally tolerate much lower quality than the current state of the art at any given time, but there's still a kind of "overton window" of acceptability where the floor of what's acceptable raises with time too.

I'd be fairly sure 360p is well below it today.

But streams don't drop from 4K down to 360p. That's YouTube's low end. Most streaming services bottom out at 540p (quarter of full HD) or 720p. Keep in mind a lot of over the air and cable broadcasts are still 720p, so streaming low end looks as good/bad as over the air TV.

I think its funny because we have error correction with retransmission on the link then quality drop if the buffer is empty, in order packets with retransmission, etc. just to have motion smoothing (or "buffering..." waiting screens)...

It would be interesting to "see" the packets on screen arriving and decoded with no error correction or buffering (maybe with reconstruction of missing squares...) , like an analog kind of signal : no latency, full available bandwidth, no waiting (but sometimes... less than ideal quality).

TV without motion smoothing is absurdly terrible. Might as well watch the movie in Google Slides. Once they get with the times and record the movies in 120 fps, we can get rid of it.

24 fps panning shots give me headaches. A small amount of smoothing is essential.

Yes, this is the exact issue. My eyes can't even interpret this as motion sometimes, so it just looks like a juddering mess and I can't really see anything.

I think it’s very subjective as I personally find injected frames makes things look “odd”.

It’s also worth mentioning that Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit was shot at double FPS (48 if I recall correctly), and was regarded by many as looking “off”. Based on the fact Hollywood has not made any high FPS movies since, it seems that it was generally regarded as a failed experiment.

Some of the interpolated frames do indeed look odd, but that is much preferable to the horrible sideways judder when watching 24fps content on a modern OLED tv with near-instant pixel response.

I wonder if new display tech is contributing to this becoming ever worse of an experience? With the tv snapping to the new frames practically instantly and then waiting for 50ms with no visible changes, motion blur baked into the movie can no longer hide the judder effectively.

I haven't seen The Hobbit in cinema, so I can't comment on that experience. Maybe they just did it wrong somehow, which would be a shame.

For those interested in learning more: https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/

LCD/OLED follows a "Sample and Hold" paradigm, whereas CRT/Plasma don't have the same limitations.

> With the tv snapping to the new frames practically instantly and then waiting for 50ms with no visible changes, motion blur baked into the movie can no longer hide the judder effectively.

Film projectors would close the shutter while the film moved, and might open the shutter two or three times per frame; I wonder if you'd do well with black frame insertion than some of the modern displays do? Personally, it seemed pretty awful for me on a samsung qled, maybe it's more useful on OLED; but I also dislike motion smoothing, so clearly we have different taste.

I will agree with you that panning shots in 24 fps aren't great. I think there's some rules of thumb for cinematography to reduce audience discomfort, but not everyone follows those.

I tried the black frame insertion, but it seems unusable. I can see it flimmering. Very uncomfortable to look at the screen with it on.

People said the same thing about Avatar 2. I think the criticism in the media comes from "film purists" who are bothered that the smoothness catches their eye in a certain way, and instead of trying to get used to it over time will proclaim that 24 fps is some magical golden ratio of cinema perfection.

The jarring part in Avatar 2 is that for some completely inexplicable reason it had sections with low fps. I noticed every single one of them instantly and it was very off putting.

And while 48 fps is a major improvement from the prehistoric 24 (apparently it was chosen because of the power grid a hundred years ago??), it's still a far cry from actually smooth motion at 144 and above fps.

If rendering the whole movie at this frame rate is too difficult, it would be quite interesting to explore exporting the additional buffers (velocity, depth, etc) that allow DLSS 3 frame generation to work near perfectly in games. Can cameras even capture these?

To capture depth the cameras would need to be augmented with LIDAR. LIDAR is insanely more expensive than a regular camera. Budget friendly LIDAR systems that I've seen will have "refresh rates" in the realm of 2Hz or 8Hz and are absolutely nowhere near what we would consider 4k resolution.

Creating depth maps of existing images/videos is one of the interests of the field of Computer Vision, it is not a solved problem.

When I watched Avatar 2 in IMAX 3D I didn't notice the drop to 24, was that during talking/low motion scenes only? I'm sure if I looked for it I could see it, but I went into the movie not knowing that refresh rate switch occured.

We have 8k/120Hz cameras now, although I'm not too well versed in how increasing the refresh rate affects how the camera captures light, and what effects that has artistically.

In VFX generally they don't bother capturing depth because its much noisier than the alternative: replacing the subject with a 3D rendered object. Using markers to track motion, and marrying them up to model marker points is allows artistic interpretation of the actor's movements. (or static object's )

Lidar is noisy, and doesn't have a 1:1 pixel mapping between image pixel and depth pixel.

Even when we had stereosopic recordings for 3D the depth map we could generate was always a bit shit. Granted things have moved on in the last few years.

> We have 8k/120Hz cameras now, although I'm not too well versed in how increasing the refresh rate affects how the camera captures light, and what effects that has artistically.

If its a RED it has shit colour sensitivity. however, generally running cameras at higher framerates require more light. but the shutter angle is generally faster than the frame rate (when you record video on your phone outside in the sun, the shutter speed is 1/1000th of a second, even though its doing 60fps)

I don’t think it’s “film purists”. I remember seeing the Hobbit at a time where I knew basically nothing about common film framerates and thinking it looked really weird. I also remember the first time my family got a motion-smoothing TV and I tried to watch a DVD of The Matrix, and about 2 minutes in (when Trinity is fighing the cops) I (a college student who regularly watched 360p rips of movies on my laptop) blurted out “why does it look like garbage?!”

Well, it's been decades since DVDs were used. Have you tried it again on a modern TV, for example a LG G3? The motion smoothing tech improved massively over time like everything else.

Hrm. Since I've only seen this in 720p, encoded according to 'scene release' standards, that can't be the reason why I disliked it :-)

The same way I disliked the remakes of Dune and Bladerunner. I don't know exactly how to put it, but despite the gorgeous graphics they felt rather empty to me, like a facade in theme park, with not much behind it.

OR like Nina Hagen once screamed: 'TV, Teeh-Vau, Ich glotz Teeeh-Vaauuuuu... (<-imagine german pronounciation there) ...Alles so schön bunt hier...'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWzPcDtZZZo

Avatar 2 had HFR showings, I saw the 3D HFR version and thought it looked great

Also doesn't help that a lot of TVs have screen tearing or uneven frame timing.

You would think that a device whose sole purpose is to divine a picture from wagging pixies in the air and make the little lamps twinkle in a convincing way would be able to do it by now.

But I have yet to find a "smart" TV that can handle it decently, even well into the mid range it's still a bit hit and miss. Get a cheap decoder and plug it into any mid range laptop and the pacing is leagues better.

Do they just use the absolutely worst SoC that still turns enough product to pay the bills, or what?

Hmm. I don't think I've ever seen screen tearing or something similar on my LG G3, or any of the previous generations that came before.

To be fair, it sounds like you purchase the best of the best in TVs.

> Once they get with the times and record the movies in 120 fps, we can get rid of it.

SuperHighDef (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-definition_televisi...) is absolutely brilliant. I saw it live at a broadcast show in 2012.

However motion smoothing is an aberration, as is the stupid saturation and "artifact removal AI" that basically applies a box blur to everything, then applies sharpening to make up for the slow LCD response.

The thing that fucks me off about motion smoothing is that its so unreliable, its smooth for 8 frames, then breaks and comes back.

However, I think the reason why most people hate high framerate video is that is associated with cheap TV. If you're young and have never seen crappy low budget TV, I could see that you don't have that association.

The reason why 24FPS feel "expensive" is because its associated with high budget movies(so does high colour kodak feel).

> its so unreliable, its smooth for 8 frames, then breaks and comes back

That's unfortunately true, even on the best TVs. But for me that is merely slightly jarring, while panning cameras at 24 fps are completely unwatchable. So I begrudgingly use it and hope that some day they will realize movies in 2023 should not be using the same frame rate they had due to technical limitations 100 years ago.

A true 120 fps movie would be so, so much better. Just like how I am playing all games at 4k / 120 fps on the TV.

Something I've been meaning to explore is pre-processing a movie with RIFE, which produces a much better result than the builtin motion smoothing since it doesn't have to run in real time on a subpar processor. Though it takes quite a while even with an RTX 4090 and you need the actual frames so can only do it with pirated movies from blu-ray rips, which is annoying.

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