In what must be one of the most impressive encoding projects in recent memory, Netflix will be re-encoding their entire catalogue to try to reduce the bandwidth required to stream their content by 20%. As we mentioned last week, 70% of the downstream bandwidth on the internet is streamed content and you can expect that Netflix accounts for quite a bit of this bandwidth. The reduced traffic will help Netflix provide content to those with data caps as well as reducing the associated costs Netflix incurs when storing and sending data so the investment is well worth it.
The project itself will be quite interesting, they cannot simply switch to H.265 as most of the hardware connecting to their services still use a dedicated H.264 decoder. Another challenge is the size of their catalogue, they can't sit down and encode each video separately as a whole, instead they have to find a way to spread the tasks over multiple servers, each taking a small portion of a show. Additionally their are challenges specific to certain videos, fog and darkness suffer when they are encoded poorly and must be dealt with separately from content which does not show as much noise when encoded to a low bit rate. Check out the links from Slashdot for more information on this project but be warned, the discussions include My Little Pony references.
*****update***
Our awesome reader John Fielding provided a link to the Netflix blog which goes into far more detail.
"Netflix has spent four years developing a new and more efficient video-encoding process that can shave off 20% in terms of space and bandwidth without reducing the quality of streamed video. With streaming video accounting for 70% of broadband use, the saving is much-needed, although the advent of 4K streaming, higher frame rates and HDR are likely to account for it all soon after."
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If they botch this and reduce
If they botch this and reduce quality to much I know I will end my subscription. The quality is already bordering on bad and it cant get much worse for me before its not worth paying for.
They really need to separate
They really need to separate the low bandwidth users from the high bandwidth ones. Even the piracy scene realized the effectiveness in doing so 10 years ago. People go to Netflix for the quality, convenience, and commercial-free environment. Start messing with either of those 3 and your business will suffer.
That is exactly my thoughts
That is exactly my thoughts reading this. Cannot go to a better compression method but re-compressing anyway? Means only one thing.. worse quality. I understand the reasons.. but if anything they should start Poorflix or something and keep Netflix the same.
P.s. Poorflix.. For rich people, who live in areas with data caps or poor people with DSL.
8.99 us, translates to less
8.99 us, translates to less than 30 cents a day. i think i they are already catering to a specific demographic…. mmmkay. lower quality vids woulds suck tho, i agree. and it does appear that this move does ‘mean only one thing’. still tho. and to any1 complaining about the current ‘quality’ of content from netflix… pls.. 30 cents a day. train leaves ‘first world’ station in five mins…dont be late!
you forgot netflix is for
you forgot netflix is for peasants who cant afford cable. #cable_masterace, #prima_cinema_nasterace, #kaleidescape_masterace.
I believe it’s a great
I believe it’s a great idea.
I have unreliable network and Netflix has to be restarted at times to return at the desired quality. I am only subscribed to the HD package, so can’t tell if the UHD lacks in quality.
I did at times notice some videos to be of horrid quality that resembled cam version (I think I saw a person’s head), corrupted pixels, and some had audio cut outs. But it only occurred on 5 or so films from the long list of content that I’ve watched for the past 1.5 years.
Those mishaps could have been encoding trials to attempt to lower the bandwidth cost even more as I can’t find those films anymore.
So far, it’s better optimized than youTube. I can’t tell about their other competitors.
I do know that the quality from a SmartTV and from a Computer is different due to DRM requirements forced by those corporate studios.
The article about this on the
The article about this on the Netflix Tech Blog here goes into quite a lot more detail about what exactly they’re doing.
From the closing paragraph in
From the closing paragraph in that Netflix blog article I linked above:
“Under low-bandwidth conditions, per-title encoding will often give you better video quality as titles with “simple” content, such as BoJack Horseman, will now be streamed at a higher resolution for the same bitrate. When the available bandwidth is adequate for high bitrate encodes, per-title encoding will often give you even better video quality for complex titles, such as Marvel’s Daredevil, because we will encode at a higher maximum bitrate than our current recipe.”
Bitrates seem quite low to
Bitrates seem quite low to me. I have been working encoding some video, but watching it on a high-res computer display from a close distance makes the quality differences much more noticeable. One of the problems is that anyone who doesn’t have a blu-ray player probably hasn’t really seen good bitrate video on their devices. Most cable systems have very bad quality. It was only recently that Comcast updated their video quality in my area such that it actually looks good to me. I could get much better quality video for the local over-the-air broadcast stations. I have a fast internet connection, so for a while, netflix actually looked better than the cable TV.
Neither is any where close to blu-ray though. Netflix is talking about 3 to 6 MB for 1080p, while a blu-ray can offer, I believe, 20 to 30 MB. It varies a lot from person to person also. I am very sensitive to artifacts so I am usually going to want higher bitrate. I wonder if it would be a better solution if they add more surveys to the end of videos to determine if people are happy with the quality and what defects did they notice. They may find that some people notice the difference so they should try to deliver a higher quality solution, if available, deliverable on the users connection, and playable on the users device. I still get blu-ray copies for some movies, even when they are available for streaming. I just watched Interstellar on blu-ray recently; I would not have wanted to watch it at less than 6 MB, even if it was available for streaming.
Could not agree more. Discs
Could not agree more. Discs for quality, streaming for convenience. To me Amazon/Hulu/Netflix look awful.
Comcast’s HD quality seems
Comcast’s HD quality seems pretty good to me currently. Our 65″ 1080p Samsung TV at 10′ gives a good picture quality on many shows. I personally find the motion blur of 24 fps TV/movie content much more distracting than sub-bluray bitrates. This makes content like The Tonight Show look amazing while action movies like The Avengers just look like garbage to me.
Do you mean Mb/s instead of MB?
Bitrates seem quite low to
Bitrates seem quite low to me. I have been working encoding some video, but watching it on a high-res computer display from a close distance makes the quality differences much more noticeable. One of the problems is that anyone who doesn’t have a blu-ray player probably hasn’t really seen good bitrate video on their devices. Most cable systems have very bad quality. It was only recently that Comcast updated their video quality in my area such that it actually looks good to me. I could get much better quality video for the local over-the-air broadcast stations. I have a fast internet connection, so for a while, netflix actually looked better than the cable TV.
Neither is any where close to blu-ray though. Netflix is talking about 3 to 6 MB for 1080p, while a blu-ray can offer, I believe, 20 to 30 MB. It varies a lot from person to person also. I am very sensitive to artifacts so I am usually going to want higher bitrate. I wonder if it would be a better solution if they add more surveys to the end of videos to determine if people are happy with the quality and what defects did they notice. They may find that some people notice the difference so they should try to deliver a higher quality solution, if available, deliverable on the users connection, and playable on the users device. I still get blu-ray copies for some movies, even when they are available for streaming. I just watched Interstellar on blu-ray recently; I would not have wanted to watch it at less than 6 MB, even if it was available for streaming.
nice link … would that that
nice link … would that that was the one I found first.
Still not sure why they
Still not sure why they wouldn’t use h.265 for those that have supported devices. Even if that user subset only represents 10-20%, that’s 50% bandwidth reduction for those users.
likely because they would
likely because they would double their storage costs, for not much return
I tried encoding some h.265
I tried encoding some h.265 video with handbrake a while ago. Even with DVD sources, the encode took a really long time. I don’t know if professional software packages are better. I think the iPhone 6 just got support for h.265. That is a big market, but there are still a lot of devices without supplort; anything based on Apple’s previous chips and most other mobile devices. It is significantly more computationally intensive though. I wonder if playing an h.265 video will run your battery down a lot quicke? Anyway, prior to the iPhone 6, the number of supporting devices was quite small, so supporting it with this initiative would not have been an option. Going forward, it may be a good idea to start encoding some of the higher resolution titles with h.265, since these would save the most bandwidth. The encoders could stand to mature a bit more also, if handbrake is any evidence.
AFAIK all of their current 4K
AFAIK all of their current 4K streams already use h.265 encoding.
I don’t know what their exact
I don’t know what their exact process is, but they really need to make sure that they get the highest quality out of the original source as possible. I just tried watching some of “Star Trek: Deep Space 9”. I have seen quite a bit of it, but I never watched the entire series. I have only watched the first few episodes, but the quality is terrible. It is old enough that it is in SD, but the problem is that they did not deinterlace it. I do not know if they just did a rip directly from DVDs, but the interlacing makes it look terrible on my TV (through Apple TV) and on an iPad. I have had DVD rips come out looking quite good by using the bob setting in handbrake. This constructs a progressive frame for each field which doubles the frame rate, but it preserves the original 60 fields per second. I don’t know if Netflix does 60 fps streaming. This seems like a basic thing to make sure that the video is not interlaced. I should send them a compliant, but I think I need to log n on my desktop. They don’t seem to have a complaint system on other platforms.
It is ridiculous how much TV
It is ridiculous how much TV makers are pushing higher resolution with no real way to deliver the content. I have a 60 Mbps cable connection, so I could possibly stream 4k content, but if just a few people in my building attempted to do so, the bandwidth would crash quickly. I can get full speed at off peak times but it is much lower when everyone is streaming. These bit rates seem quite low to me. They do not take into account that I may be watching these on a 1080p class screen, but with a tablet or computer, I could be watching it from a very close distance. The bit rate they are steaming at might be okay for a 1080p TV at 12 feet but it may look bad on my laptop at 1.5 feet. They could use an offline viewing option for 4k content. They are just not going to be able to deliver streaming content at 4k right now.
I have seen some 4k content showing up on forums but a lot of it is garbage. I recently saw a 4k video that someone had encoded at 6 Mbps. That is totally pointless. I consider 6 Mbps to be an okay bit rate for 720p with h.264; 3 Mbps is way to low in most cases. I have seen 6 Mbps look okay for 1080p when the source content was relatively clean or just low complexity. I would generally want 1080p to be more like 8 to 10 Mbps. 4k is 4 times the number of pixels coming from 1080, so even 20 Mbps is really only equivalent to 5 Mbps for 1080. It really should be more like 30 or 40 Mbps. I have seen a sample 4k video at 80 Mbps, but my machine couldn’t play it smoothly. It was panning through a forest though. At a lower bit rate, it would have been terrible due to the high complexity of the trees and leaves.
Why not go the full monty and
Why not go the full monty and do two-pass encodes to optimize not just per title, but per-frame as well?
Are there still devices that have problems with VBR video?
Ty netflix for reprogramming
Ty netflix for reprogramming encoder with sparse fast fourier in mind