this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Not sure what you are streaming that a DVD looks better. Any 720p stream is better, let alone higher resolution ones.
No. It's not. The bit rates tend to be lower. And compression obliterates tons of parts of images.
I would bet that a 720-upscaled dvd will look better than a low bitrate 720 stream. Hell, a 720-upscaled dvd probably looks better than a low bitrate 1080 or 4k stream. In many aspects a lower resolution video with a high bitrate will always look better than a video at higher resolution with a bitrate that's too low. Excess compression makes visual quality turn to ugly garbage. Even just a little bit of additional compression quickly starts to cause color banding, blocky artifacts, and visual noise in motion sequences.
DVDs have a maximum Bitrate of 10 Mb/s. This is like 5 Mb/s with H264 or 2.5 Mb/s with H265, since the compression back then was MPEG2. Feel free to look up Bitrates of streaming services. YouTube is at roughly 15x that with 4K videos. 720p uses about the same.
Bitrate per pixel is what we're talking about. Bitrate alone tells you nothing. If you're actually receiving a full as-advertised bitrate stream with a well-implemented compression algorithm then obviously if all else is held equal then higher resolution = higher quality. But in reality many streams are overly compressed to save on their bandwidth and server costs, and often due to tech inefficiencies you won't actually receive the full bit rate, resulting in even more additional compression losses.
Again, a perfectly-implemented, perfectly-transported stream in 720p will always look better than a 480p dvd file. But in reality there are many situations where a stream is imperfectly-implemented and imperfectly-transported, sometimes to the point where visual quality worsens to below what you would get from an upscaled 480p dvd.
But anyway, neither of us are true experts on this topic. If you're always 100% happy with the quality of the streams you see, then that's great! But many of us sometimes encounter streams where the compression causes obvious visual degradations to the point of being distracting. Personally i prefer lower resolution with no obvious compression artifacts, rather than higher resolution with obvious color banding and visual noise in motion sequences.
I am not always happy. But I can also see that a DVD has lower quilted than essentially any YouTube video. Of course unless it was uploaded in lower quality to begin with. The source material has to be good enough. There are more than enough 1080p videos that are only 360p. Or 4K that is only 720p. Not due to compression, just from the source material.
I regularly see this response whenever someone mentions that home media (DVD, BlueRay) looks better.
I personally don’t know the answer, though I suspect as the other replies do also that it’s about compression and bit-depth … but I think someone really needs to do a breakdown on the technicalities here.
Either streaming has tricked everyone into thinking they haven’t lost anything, and that’s tragic, or we’re tricking ourselves into thinking our cherished home media looks better, which is somewhat sad but also interesting.
It's not that complicated. Video compression methods are well understood. If you don't understand them, there's plenty of material available. But if you don't know how video quality is measured, it's hard to talk about video quality. The notes are already up above.
For more explicit detail, DVD is extremely straight forward:
Netflix is complicated. But tends to be one of the better options. But Netflix has no standard bitrate for their raw content, and they serve lower bit rates depending on their network traffic.
4k HDR content goes as high as 18 Mbps, but they will cram it down at least as far as 4Mbps. So while at times it can be better than a DVD, it's often, in practice, lower. And that's not even a really fair comparison, as most of their SDR 4K seems to cap at 12 and DVDs are ancient. UHD BluRays cap at 128mbps. Netflix isn't going anywhere near that.
In my experience, watching content at reasonable hours plummet to 4-6mbps. It's not even close.
And all that being said, this doesn't touch compression artifacts, audio quality, etc. At the end of the day, Netflix wants to save money and doesn't want to serve you any more data than it has to. Even if you notice, they're selling you convenience, not quality. As long as they are up to par with other streaming services, it doesn't matter. So they serve you the worst they can. And you bet your ass they don't want to be serving large portions of the world individual 10mbps+ streams. It's just not worth it to them.
But yeah, if you really want an answer to your question, there's tons of coverage on this. A quick Google: https://www.howtogeek.com/872777/why-even-1080p-blu-rays-are-better-than-4k-streaming-video/
It's undeniable streaming is just worse. It's much cheaper to ship someone a physical disk of ALL the data than it is to blast it across the internet on demand. Physical media will always win that fight.
I feel like there’s something unfortunate going on here.
Part of the premise of my comment was that focusing on a simple numerical metric like pixel resolution is a misrepresentation of the actual quality.
Here, in your response and others, there seems to me to be a continued emphasis on numerical metrics. What’s missing is a treatment of the actual visual presentation on the screen and what differences a human is perceiving. No one “sees” a bit rate, they see the video.
And if we are to keep our focus on actual visual quality and not got distracted by marketing, at some point, you’ve got to bring it down to what the human in front of the screen is actually perceiving.
In this case, I think a simple first step is to emphasise the essential effect of compression, which is that the number of pixels effectively goes down by grouping them together for certain frames in order to save on data rates. Whereas a DVD is “lossless” and lets each pixel display its part of the image freely no matter how subtle its difference from its neighbours is. The result of this is all of the increases color depth and bitrate stuff, which in a nutshell means that DVDs etc are using each of their pixels as well as possible while streaming, even if it puts more pixels on the screen, is getting them to cut corners. The additional information provided by pixels being more independent in the values they display leads to greater amounts of colors and more detail (per pixel at least) and consistently so across the whole image and video such that weird artefacts and glitches from compression won’t pollute the video.
Whether that's what you intended or not, that's not the premise of the comment you had written:
My comment answered saying that if you don't understand the basics of compression and bit depth, then there's no way to talk to you about video and you need to go learn the basics. Those are not technicalities or a deep analysis. You just need to learn the basic vocabulary of these things and that is very readily available online.
My comment then laid out how it's very clearly something lost - the video color, audio, and compression are all measurably worse. We know it has been lost. That's quantifiable. And my post quantified it.
If you don't understand the jargon, you're not looking for "someone to breakdown the technicalities", you're looking for someone to explain the basics of how digital video works and what the terms mean.
It sounds like you are actually looking for something like side by sides of uncompressed and compressed video. And high vs low color depth. But that's not what you originally asked for.
First, my comment, though directly in response to yours, was addressed to what seemed to be the general nature of these sorts of discussions. FWIW I upvoted your comment and replied to it specifically because it was the most substantial. There’s nothing personal, directed or venomous from me here. I liked your response and should have opened with “thank you!”
Second, “technicalities” are not limited to the data transfer details, or generally, IT. Visual perception is incredibly technical (more so than than the IT details involved I’d wager, FWIW). In calling for a breakdown of the technicalities, that can and should encompass all that is relevant to the issue. And that’s the point of my critique.
Data transfer rates on their own mean fairly little, and yet they seem to be the go-to description of what’s going on here with matters like color depth and spatial detail handled with a hand wavy mention. I suspect it’s because a bitrate is a single easy number to communicate, and that’s fine. But it’s not a breakdown or explanation.
We don’t need side by side comparisons for this, though that could be nice. And I think this is at a point above defining jargon terms. I think what would be helpful for many here is an explanation of what they see and why. In my particular case, and I suspect many others, you’d be surprised at how much of the components of the issue are already understood, at least to some extent. It’s the complete picture of the process that leads to the differences that is incomplete.
For example, I’d bet many find it plainly unintuitive how a higher resolution could possibly look worse and would somewhat dismiss claims of lower bitrates being important on the basis higher resolutions should just trump that. Why are they wrong, and by how much? Many probably know something of compression and bit/color depth, but don’t grasp how impactful they can be to an image compared to resolution which they’ve clearly seen demonstrated to them repeatedly over time.
Genuinely, the bitrate for streaming is much, much lower than physical media. DVDs average about 6 Mbps, HD Blu-rays average roughly 30 Mbps, and 4K Blu-rays average around 100 Mbps. From everything I've seen Netflix doesn't really go higher than 20 Mbps even at 4K. Color banding and blocking is going to generally be the most visible issue with Netflix and other streaming services
Only speaking for myself (decidedly not a videophile) I've been ripping all my DVDs that had been sitting in a box doing nothing and I'm completely happy with the quality even at 4K (the pixels really pop! 🤣 )--knowing that I own the material makes me that much happier. I even bought some more used DVDs to rip. They're practically giving them away at second-hand stores.
I second this sentiment. I would love learning more.