Comment by bscphil

5 years ago

> It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate

Yep. I see a good example of this when I watch gameplay videos on Youtube in the highest available 1080p bitrate, and regularly see results that look far worse than playing the game in 720p, maybe even 480p. For example, it's obviously very common to pan the camera through a high-detail scene, which is trivial for a GPU to do, but incredibly information dense for a video encoder. So anything with a lot of detail blurs (in a very ugly way, not like motion blur) when there's movement.

And Youtube has the advantage that the video has as much time to record as Youtube will allow it, it doesn't need to be done with low-latency settings as Stadia does.

Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.

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bscphil

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Tijdreiziger  5 years ago

YouTube's bitrates are atrocious. I don't understand why they can't at least offer a higher bitrate to their paying Premium customers.

> Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.

According to Wikipedia, a DVB-C stream can be between 6-65 Mb/s [1], certainly higher than YouTube's 3-9 Mb/s (assuming 1080p video). The situation for resolutions above 1080p seems to be a bit better [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-C

[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-...

  • bscphil  5 years ago

    I'm not sure about Europe, but in the US it's very rare to see bitrates even a large fraction of that. (I don't see a minimum bitrate on the ATSC Wikipedia page, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it's often lower than 6 Mbps.) Worse still, in a bunch of places the cable companies still deliver MPEG-2 video, which is going to look pretty atrocious at anything other than an extremely high bitrate. It's a big disadvantage compared to Youtube. Plus a whole bunch of programs are in 60 fps, which need a higher bitrate anyway.

    I plugged in my cable box for the first time in months to watch the Super Bowl, and was shocked at how terrible the video was. I could see obvious artifacts without glasses on, and I can't even tell 720p from 1080p at that distance. Some of my relatives have those MPEG-2 channels, and I remember them being significantly worse.

    Not trying to say that cable TV can never be better than Youtube's quality, of course, just trying to give a general impression of my experience with various American cable companies.