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I occasionally write long posts but you should assume I'm talking out of my ass until proved otherwise. I do like writing shit sometimes.  

 

50/50 chance of suit pictures end up here or on the Art Directory account. Good luck.

 

Be 18+ or be gone you kids act fuckin' weird.

 

pfp by wackyanimal


 

I tag all of my posts complaining about stuff #complaining, feel free to muffle that if you'd like a more positive cohost experience.

 


 
Art and suit stuff: @PlumPanAD

 


 
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I considered making this an effortpost but I've not got it in me today. I'm going to try and condense this down.

I think 4k video is a waste of bandwidth. You may not care about bandwidth, but it uses a lot of power at scale. 4k does NOT mean any standard of quality, because that's determined by bitrate, not resolution. The context here is specifically for watching normal things, not storing for future use or shooting. And yes, sometimes it's nice to watch some things in fancy quality.

I feel like some places, but especially Youtube, overegg the importance of 4k because they refuse to use higher bitrates at lower resolutions. For most videos this doesn't make a big difference, but at times it can.

Pictured above is the video that actually prompted me wanting to make a post: a video of Daytona USA 2. It was uploaded at "4K 60" but it's unknown what the original quality was, or what the emulator was set to. This is a very bad use case for a 4K video and any video encoder for a number of reasons. It looked like ass in Youtube's "1080p" settings (via Freetube), and I was frustrated about that.

Three of the frames are directly from Youtube's 720p qualities. One each of H264, AV1, and VP9. The H264 and VP9 videos were at around 3,500k bitrate during that portion of the video, AV1 was a bit under 5,000k. The fourth frame is a downscale I did from one of the 4K uploads whose bitrate was almost 30,000k. I encoded that down with libx264 at crf 23, which ended up being around 11,000k bitrate.

To put that all in perspective, for a ~15 minute video, Youtube's H264, VP9, and AV1 copies were roughly 350, 400, and 500MiB respectively. My 720p copy was 1.1GiB, and Youtube's 4K was 3.0GiB. For what it's worth, all of Youtube's 720p copies look like ass in motion. It's not worth picking out the differences between them, they're all bad.

The problem is this really is a worst case, and using Constant Rate Factor makes this obvious. I did the same with what I'd call a "normal" video, a shorter CRD episode, and my copy came out to 182MiB whereas Youtube's were more like 150-170MiB. But, the 4K VP9 of that upload was 3.6GiB, which shows just how much extra data the resolution takes up, even for a video with relatively low motion. Quality wise all of the 720s looked mostly fine, his shirt had a texture that kind of fuzzed up a bit in motion and I'm sure maybe a higher CRF would have sorted that out at the expense of another 50-100MiB of data.

I think most people aren't taught about the difference between resolution and bandwidth, which is very important nowadays what with basically all video delivery involving high compression codecs where such things matter a lot. I'd be very happy with higher bitrate 720p for most things I watch, but no one will give that to me. The closest you get are twitch streams, sometimes, but only because the streamer is setting that. And as we saw here, the "wrong" video content will still eat up all of that bitrate and still demand more.

Anyway the point here is that watching everything in 4k is a fucking waste but you kind of have to because a lot of CDNs make lower resolution streams look artificially bad imo.

The flip side of this are when things are ONLY broadcasted in an inadequate bitrate. Like most motorsports. That one is frustrating.


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in reply to @plumpan's post:

I started watching YouTube at 720p to get around a weird antifeature where mpv and FreeTube were being forced to stream at the video's average bitrate, so videos with lots of wildly different scenes would stutter in the high motion sections even if I had tons of unused bandwidth. I didn't notice the lower resolution per se, rather the bitrate is way too low for the kinds of videos I watch and I get a lot of smearing, but at least the original problem I was working around went away.