Netflix Quality Issues

[netstrider]

I don't watch much on desktop, so that wouldn't help very often. I'll try it out of interest though sometime to see if it makes a difference.



Yeah I'm speaking about noise and not pixelation. The quality is pretty good, but I really wish the noise wasn't present. It's only Netflix that has it.

Then I suspect you have a keen eye for quality that most users do not readily notice unless presented with the true uncorrupted image side-by-side.

As such we may presume Netflix's compression methodology compromises the quality of video for the sake of comfort to the average user.

Their resolutions do tend to stream better on the same connection than other services like Youtube for example.

Netflix attempts to scale the bitrate according to the complexity of the video so cartoons will require less bandwidth to stream at Full HD compared to complex scenes since cartoons use relatively static and flat imagery.

They seem to neither use constant bit rate or variable bit rate, but rather what we have been accustomed to in the CCTV space as Constrained Variable Bit-Rate. Where they'd rather say said video is perhaps of 7200Kbps quality, but it is possible to stream well relatively unbeknownst to the average user at 5300Kbps and thus the minimum would be 5300 and the max 7200 for example, but we'll constrain the max to 6100Kbps. So your quality may vary between 5300Kbps and 6100Kbps on the very same resolution.

Remember that they have masses to serve, so it serves them to lower the quality of the video in order to serve more for more revenue as their systems are capable of x amount.

 

[Nihonto]

Am using both Netflix USA and Hulu, and find Netflix far better at streaming without buffering. Hulu will buffer even when set on the lowest setting occasionally, while Netflix hardly ever does for me.