Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs (slashgear.com) 76
Netflix announced last week that it is getting offline video downloads support. The company has since shared that it is using VP9 video compression codec to ensure that the file sizes don't weigh a lot. An anonymous reader shares an article on Slashgear (edited): For streaming content, Netflix largely relies on H.264/AVC to reduce the bandwidth, but for downloading content, it uses VP9 encoding. VP9 can allow better quality videos for the same amount of data needed to download. The challenge is that VP9 isn't supported by all streaming providers -- it is supported on Android devices and via the Chrome browser. So to get around that lack of support on iOS, Netflix is offering downloads in H.264/AVC High whereas streams are encoded in H.264/AVC Main on such devices. Netflix chooses the optimal encoding format for each title on its service after finding, for instance, that animated films are easier to encode than live-action. Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%.
what about h.265? (Score:4, Informative)
I hear it does great things for 4k, so it seems that it would be really great for HD, and even older 720 or 480 content too.
Re:what about h.265? (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody wants to pay the licensing fees for it, so it's dead in the water.
Also nothing supports it (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean the newest devices support it in hardware, but it has to be a very new chip to have H.265 support. The vast majority of devices in use don't. For computers you could do it in software but that isn't ideal, since H.265 decoding is rather heavy so you'd hit the CPU pretty hard, whereas hardware accelerated H.264 would hit it almost not at all. For mobile/embedded devices though it just won't work. Too CPU intensive to do in software, so people need a new device.
IOS supports it (Score:2)
Re: IOS supports it (Score:2)
All the new high end ARM CPUs do (Score:2)
My phone (LG G5) supports it because it has a Snapdragon 820. That's great and all, but there aren't a lot of devices out there that are so new. So no real point in Netflix supporting it. They'd need to wait a few years for enough people to replace their hardware with new units.
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I can play H.265 1080p content on my 3 year old laptop without any issue. VLC barely budges a single core on the cpu. My Nexus 7 2013 can handle H.265 720p files just fine with VLC, but it does hit the CPU really hard. (1080p on it plays audio, but the video is jerky) Almost all ARM chips that were produced in the last year or two support H.265 .
The only thing I have that probably couldn't handle H.265 is a 6 year old smart TV... but, I could easily get a Roku or something for that.
I'd say it won't b
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Re:what about h.265? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just about money, either. The licensing situation for H.265 a cluster-fuck, with patent holders having split into 2 licensing pools and several other patent holders that aren't participating in either pool. So even if companies were content with paying the licensing fees (which are significantly higher than H.264), they don't have any easy way of doing so that will cover all the patent holders. Most big players would prefer to pay and use H.265, but the patent holders have gotten too greedy and too splintered.
Most of the major players have gotten fed up with this shit, and committed to pool their patents and expertise create a royalty free format AV1, in place of H.265. Alliance for Open Media includes: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Netfix, Amazon, BBC, ARM, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Broadcom, Cisco, Polycom, and more. The only companies that haven't signed on yet and are big enough to prevent wide adoption are Apple and Qualcomm, and Qualcomm has previously supported VP9, so I don't know why they wouldn't support AV1 once it is ready.
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It's not just a matter of money. h.264 caught on specifically because the entire patent portfolio for is pooled and licensed as a single entity from a single organization. h.265 is not only patent encumbered, but the patent holders have not agreed on terms to form a pool for licensing. If you want to license h.265, you literally need to negotiate with a half dozen different organizations.
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The software you use to play it has to decide whether they want to support it. If they do, THEY pay the licensing fee which is either passed on to you by charging for the application, asking for donations, or absorbed by them.
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VP9 still seems better, overall, compared to HEVC.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-Great-UHD-Codec-Debate-Googles-VP9-Vs.-HEVC-H.265-103577.aspx
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I hear it does great things for 4k, so it seems that it would be really great for HD, and even older 720 or 480 content too.
It's supposed to be better than VP9; but is there any hardware support for h.265 yet, though?
I think of all these codecs, h.264 is the only one where there's any phone hardware available for decoding. I'd be curious to see how the choice of VP9 affects battery life on Android devices (do any of them have h.264 chips, or would that be handled in software too)?
Re:what about h.265? (Score:5, Informative)
Most modern mid-to-high end phones and tablets have hardware h.265 already. See the SnapDragon video specs [qualcomm.com].
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Most modern mid-to-high end phones and tablets have hardware h.265 already. See the SnapDragon video specs [qualcomm.com].
Even my older phone, a galaxy s5, has h.265 support.
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And?
Phones and Tablets is a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of devices that have h264 hardware decoding.
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For Nvidia (Support for 10-bit and up to 8k video):
https://developer.nvidia.com/n... [nvidia.com]
For Intel:
https://software.intel.com/en-... [intel.com]
"4th Generation Intel Core processors (Haswell CPU 2- 3.5GHz, 4 Cores): Includes an HEVC Software Decoder capable of real time decode of HEVC 4K streams.
5th Generation Intel Core processors (Broadwell): Supports HEVC 8-bit software/hybrid encode.
6th Generation Intel Core processors (Skylake) Supports hardware accelerated HEVC 8-bit decode and encode."
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Not to mention that MPEG-2 is baked into the ATSC broadcast television standard. OTA reception will continue to use it until when and if ATSC 3.0 is adopted. The ATSC 3.0 standard is still being finalized but it will certainly include more advanced video encoding. The proposed standards include standard H.265 and scalable H.265 (HEVC). The latter is linked to the fact that ATSC 3.0 also provides for sending relatively low bit rate data in a robust form that can handle weak reception, while also sending high
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The H.265 licensing is expensive (both in terms of each download, in terms of there not being per-organization caps, like with H.264) and complex (there are two patent pools you need to negotiate with separately).
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Perhaps VP10?
http://www.techtimes.com/artic... [techtimes.com]
Re:what about h.265? (Score:4, Interesting)
> I hear it does great things
Only because it has a well funded marketing campaign and VP9 doesn't. At this point VP9 is ahead but perhaps only because they had a bit of a head start as H.265 was delayed due to the member companies squabbling over who's patent protected tech got premier submarine status.
We'll have to wait for H.265 to be properly tuned before we can make a real comparison between it and VP9. VP9 has already won on the licensing front. H.265 might be faster at the initial encode but as mentioned it isn't entirely finished yet and new features could easily make the final product bloatier.
You do not want to use either of these codecs without dedicated hardware support. They aren't too different from H.264 and VP8, the primary change is trading disk space now for CPU cycles later. Think gzip vs. bzip2 - each has their place but different compromises are made.
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Re:what about h.265? (Score:4, Interesting)
H.265 would have easily dominated the market already
But it hasn't and it won't. H.265 has no future in web video. AV1 [wikipedia.org] from the Alliance for Open Media [aomedia.org] is the future of web video. Netflix will use VP9 for now and transition to AV1 when it's ready.
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I hear it does great things for 4k, so it seems that it would be really great for HD, and even older 720 or 480 content too.
The main reason it does great on 4k/UHD is that the fixed 16x16 macroblocks in H.264 are too small, HEVC brings flexible coding tree units (CTUs) that vary from 64x64 to 16x16 which obviously has the most effect for the highest resolutions. If you restrict it to 16x16 CTUs you get a ~37% penalty on 2160p, ~19% on 1080p and ~9% penalty on 480p. So not as big a deal for older content as you might think.
Re: what about h.265? (Score:2)
h.264 doesn't have fixed macroblock sizes, but it's true that 16x16 is the largest.
TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS (Score:1)
netflix uses multiple codecs and depending on the platform you are requesting content on, netflix will send content encoded with the best codec and best compression profile for that said platform... The rest of this article only concerns use of the high profile vs main with h264 for downloads and that android devices receive vp9 files since the codec is supported by the android os. The rest of the entire article seems to be filler much like its inclusion on slashdot.....
Sorry, I'm British, we point out suc
Re: TLDR VERSION FOLLOWS (Score:1)
Being British, he speaks The Queen's English, where "sorry" means "fuck off."
Sorry, I'm Canadian. We have long experience with translating The Queen's English to 'Murrican.
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Sorry, I'm Canadian.
Canadians...always apologizing for something, eh?
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No, I think he was using the "Queen's English" he spoke of.
In the South in the USA we have the phrase "Bless your heart" which means the same thing.
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We should all be using VP9 video compression, because it doesn't "weigh a lot". Must be it uses mostly zeros with empty centres. Although this does make it particularly ideal for android phones. Who wants heavy videos weighing down their pockets?
Obviously you didn't read TFS carefully. It's the file SIZES that don't weigh a lot, not the files themselves. Sheesh.
Banding (Score:2)
Bad luck if you're watching a film that has a sand storm or fog in it. The banding artifacts caused by compression make those scenes nearly unwatchable
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This seems like all streamed content. A night scene at the ocean in last night's Westworld finale looked awful, full of banding artifacts. What's the point of a panel with good black levels when the content looks like a VideoCD?
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Bad luck if you're watching a film that has a sand storm or fog in it. The banding artifacts caused by compression make those scenes nearly unwatchable
This. I'm not sure whether it's the fault of Netflix or the ISP (throttle much?) but any scene that has a background with a smooth gradient of intensity or color shows those banding artifacts. It's incredibly distracting and annoying.
Welcome to 2008! (Score:3)
h.265 is where it's at, excerpt a lot of devices don't support it yet.
Still, at a quarter the bandwidth for the same quality, it should be the target, if supported.
As for savings using h.264... what the hell were they using as a codec before?
Check Available Codecs (Score:2)
Couldn't the Netflix app check the available hardware accelerated codecs, and choose the best one?
What compression efficiency means (Score:5, Interesting)
Codecs (such as H.264 or VP9) describe a bit stream, and how to decode the bit stream. They basically provide a kit of tools that can be be used by encoders.
The quality of video encoding is mainly due to the technical knowledge and artistry of the encoder manufacturer and how the use that took kit. I can show you great H.264 encoders and horrible H.264 encoders, but they both emit valid H.264 bit streams.
In particular, the biggest challenge is rate control. If you don't care about the details of a variable bit rate, almost anyone can write a great H.264 or VP9 encoder, with the bit rate jumping up and down all over the place. However if you expect a bit rate to be held within say +/- 100 kbps, only a few vendors have the expertise to make a more constant bit rate look good.
I'll also add that I've seen no good data that shows that VP9 encoders perform better over a wide range of content than H.264.
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I'll also add that I've seen no good data that shows that VP9 encoders perform better over a wide range of content than H.264.
Don't worry. Netflix has [netflix.com] and YouTube has [googleblog.com]
Awful audio (Score:2)
There is a problem with this (Score:1)
with the way these video services always adopt the newest and most bandwidth-efficient codecs, it also means nobody ever has hardware support for them; it takes longer for the market to get wide hardware support, than it takes for the next generation of codecs to become available.
The consequence is that we're doing heavier and heavier CPU decoding for online video, and never get any use of the hardware support in our video chips, because it effectively lags behind.
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How much does a byte weigh, anyway?
About a kilo
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The current ATSC 3.0 proposal includes H.265. But it's not finalized, so it is possible that AV1 will replace it or be included as an alternative.
I'm not surprised that the commercials don't compress as efficiently as the programs. They tend to use more rapid cuts and point of view changes.
Netflix DVDs (Score:2)
Because their streaming catalog still sucks.
So, by "low", they mean less 35% of all traffic? (Score:2)
The last report I saw said that they were using 36% of all Internet traffic, and that was in early 2016 before they had a bunch of 4K offerings:
http://fortune.com/2015/10/08/... [fortune.com]
Still streaming in Main in 2016. (Score:2)
Really? That's absurd. Any device they support should be able to handle High Profile.
I wonder if they're using CABAC -- it took Apple a little while to start using it.
Drining in the "slow" lanes. (Score:2)
Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%.
So the advantage is everyone in the internet "slow lanes" can currently enjoy the same experience as those in the fast lanes?