A new study published in Nature by University of Cambridge researchers just dropped a pixelated bomb on the entire Ultra-HD market, but as anyone with myopia can tell you, if you take your glasses off, even SD still looks pretty good :)
A new study published in Nature by University of Cambridge researchers just dropped a pixelated bomb on the entire Ultra-HD market, but as anyone with myopia can tell you, if you take your glasses off, even SD still looks pretty good :)
Kind of a tangent, but properly encoded 1080p video with a decent bitrate actually looks pretty damn good.
A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.
Yeah I’d way rather have higher bitrate 1080 than 4k. Seeing striping in big dark or light spots on the screen is infuriating
i’d rather have proper 4k.
Stremio
For most streaming? Yeah.
Give me a good 4k Blu-ray though. High bitrate 4k
I mean yeah I’ll take higher quality. I’d just rather have less lossy compression than higher resolution
I was wondering when we’d get to the snake oil portion of the video hobby that audiophiles have been suffering. 8k vs. 4k is the new lossy vs. lossless argument.
Just recently, on this site, someone tried to tell me that there was no audible difference between 128kbps and 360kbps mp3. Insane.
YouTube is locking the good bitrates behind the premium paywall and even as a premium users you don’t get to select a high bitrate when the source video was low res.
That’s why videos should be upscaled before upload to force YouTube into offering high bitrate options at all. A good upscaler produces better results than simply stretching low-res videos.
I think the premium thing is a channel option. Some channels consistently have it, some don’t.
Regular YouTube 1080p is bad and feels like 720p. The encoding on videos with “Premium 1080p” is catastrophic. It’s significantly worse than decently encoded 480p. Creators will put a lot of time and effort in their lighting and camera gear, then the compression artifacting makes the video feel like watching a porn bootleg on a shady site. I guess there must be a strong financial incentive to nuke their video quality this way.
This. The visual difference of good vs bad 1080p is bigger than between good 1080p and good 4k. I will die on this hill. And Youtube’s 1080p is garbage on purpose so they get you to buy premium to unlock good 1080p. Assholes
The 1080p for premium users is garbage too. Youtube’s video quality in general is shockingly poor. If there is even a slight amount of noisy movement on screen (foliage, confetti, rain, snow, etc) the the video can literally become unwatchable.
I can still find 480p videos from when YouTube first started that rival the quality of the compressed crap “1080p” we get from YouTube today. It’s outrageous.
Sadly most of those older YouTube videos have been run through multiple re-compressions and look so much worse than they did at upload. It’s a major bummer.
I’ve been investing in my bluray collection again and I can’t believe how good 1080p blurays look compared to “UHD streaming” .
HEVC is damn efficient. I don’t even bother with HD because a 4K HDR encode around 5-10GB looks really good and streams well for my remote users.
I stream YouTube at 360p. Really don’t need much for that kind of video.
360p is awful, 720p is the sweet spot IMO.