this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I'll second this. 4k at 25 mbps might be OK for a sitcom or drama without much action or on-screen movement. But as soon as there's any action, it's gonna be a pixelated mess. 25 mbps is kinda the sweet spot for full fidelity 1080p, and I'd much rather watch that than "4K".
The benefit of the 4k is that you get HDR. On a good TV, that's far more noticable than the resolution improvement and certainly worth it.
But then you're looking at 60-100 Mbps bit rate for good quality (50-80 GB file size for most movies).
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 1080p streaming is ~5 mbps. Can you show any streaming service anywhere that uses 25 mbps for 1080p content? Netflix is 15 mbps for 4k so even thats not close.
Here are the bitrates Youtube suggests for uploading content: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate
If you want full fidelity for all types of content, these are the bitrates you need. Yes, modern encodings can handle more fidelity at lower bitrates. But, I guarantee these numbers are for modern encodings. Older school encodings like UHD BluRay range anywhere from 92 to 144 Mbps.
Streaming platforms want to stream at the absolute lowest bitrate possible, and they absolutely compromise quality for lower bitrates to save on bandwidth.
It would have taken a few seconds for you to double check and see how incorrect that is. Yes, youtube absolutely accepts very high bitrate uploads to their platform, however once they process and store the video it is highly compressed, as with every single streaming platform out there.
My current laptop won't play 8k 60 due to hardware limitations but I just tested with 4k60, the highest res youtube video I could find and I went back to my firewall to restrict my global bandwidth to 25/3 mbit/sec. As you can see from the screenshot and debug information it is playing 100% fine in its native res at 60 fps. Note in the screenshot that my connection speed is currently limited to about 20k kbits/sec and that it dropped a whopping 8 entire frames. It drops just as many frames on startup streaming if I uncap the connection.
If my hardware was able to do it there is absolutely more than enough bandwidth there to stream it in 8k given that 8k should be 4x 4k streams.
Side note, I even uploaded this image in less than a second on that "too slow" 3mbps restriction.
First, let's assume we're all intelligent people here and not be condescending.
I am not saying it's not possible to view high resolution content at 25 mbps. I am saying that certain content just can't encode at full fidelity at 25 mbps. In my experience, high action scenes with tons of entropy to encode do not compress well. And those scenes degrade and become muddy or pixelated at lower bitrates. Do you need it for the entire stream? No. But sadly, to save on bandwidth many streaming services also severely limit how much buffering their clients will do.
Even all this said. We're talking about 10's of megabits of difference. Significant portions of the world have managed to offer gigabit internet to practically everyone in their jurisdiction. And yet, we're here in the dark ages with 25/3. And sure, you could say "American has significantly more rural areas, those customers are hard to serve." But, I've got family in coal-country West Virginia that have gigabit fiber. There are no technical hurdles. These companies just don't want to upgrade their infrastructure.