Jack Ryan S3 E3
Man... Im watching Stargate sg1 with my kiddo. My Plex server is down for a bit.. so I switched over to prime for an episode or two..
It's dark, it's audio is horrible, it's 4:3 formatted it's horribly compressed and it has commercials.
Talk about a poor viewing experience.
Not watching is better than watching...
"it's a strange game. The only way to win is not to play."
You shoukd consider cancelling prime, bezos doesn't need more moneys ^^
That's super tempting honestly. Idk that it benefits is at this point.
Stargate was 4:3, so there's that....
Yeah I really doubt streaming would change anything to 4:3.
Disney+ famously changed classic Simpsons to 16:9 and in the process, cropped enough to make some visual gags not work, but I can't imagine them preferring 4:3 over 16:9.
i've watched more than a few shows that have been brutally hacked into wide format from the original 4:3. the practice is horrible. they need to stop pulling that shit and let the viewer decide whether to crop the frame or not--or put a proper pan & scan up instead of a blind hack job and leave the original format available, too.
The worst part is that even buying SG1 on Bluray gives a bad experience, because they fucked up the 5.1 audio.
So what did the pirates do? Combined the Bluray video with the better DVD 5.1 audio! Best of both worlds.
SG1 was shot in 4:3 until like season 8 or so.
SG-1 was shot in widescreen from day one, on cameras that had framing marks for 4:3 and 16:9. A 4:3 cut was sent to TV networks and a 16:9 cut was canned until the show was released on DVD.
SG1 was shot in film and mastered in 16:9. 16mm in the first 3 seasons, 35mm 3-7, and then they moved to digital HD cameras season 8 onwards.
Many shows from the 90s were [edit: shot on film]. That's why you can get a widescreen HD release of Seinfeld, among others.
That's not always a good thing. If it was meant to be 4:3 the extra space on the frame can have set rigging, lights, microphone booms, and in case of stunts even crash pads.
It's one of the reasons the HD rescan of Buffy:TVS sucks. That still needs a proper 4:3 HD remaster.
Right, but the general public only ever saw the broadcast versions, which were predominantly in 4:3. Also, Seinfeld was only shot in 4:3 as it's a multi cam sitcom. The widescreen version you've seen is a crop of the original 4:3 picture.
The tradeoff kinda made sense at the dawn of streaming, when the transaction was basically trading quality for better pricing and convenience.
Nowadays? Yeaaaaah I don't know about that chief
Crazy to think that we lost all the advantages that streaming offered, kept all the disadvantages, piled on a few more disadvantages on top of that, and people went "sure that makes sense 24 bucks a month worth it bro"
All these companies play the frogs in a pot game. Slowly make things shittier and shittier in tiny increments and everyone's sitting there in boiling water eventually like "this is fine." I mean there's still people with cable TV in 2024. And Netflix has done nothing but get worse for the last 3-4 years and their subscriber count just had a decent boost last year so they were like "lol sweet, we're canceling basic ad free tier in 2024, eat shit"
It's felt pretty damn nice to finally give all these companies the boot. They got too greedy. But there'll still be hordes of people just happily paying an ever rising price for this stuff I guess.
Most people would not be able to discern the difference between the top 2 images. Chroma subsampling? Aliasing? Bitrate? These are words that we understand but your average TV watcher has never heard uttered.
You don't need to be an expert to say "that's blurry and looks like shit in comparison".
Even understanding all this, a 2 hour movie in a 2.5gb hevc file is still a very tempting thing. Every movie I could ever want, at acceptable quality, all in under 8tb of space is really amazing.
streaming just has godawful UX now as well. the apps play you commercials while in the menu, you have to worry about buffering, you aren't allowed to take screenshots (which is the most numbskulled DRM i've ever seen; they allowed it in the old days and everything was fine AND either way people have ALREADY managed to rip and share the raw footage. what's the point??), 75% of the fucking content on amazon you have to pay an extra fee for, media appears and disappears at the whim of pigheaded suits, prices go up every 6 months because fuck you, the blindingly stupid netflix 'single family home' restriction....
watching tv is meant to be fun, not introduce a whole other layer of bureaucratic bullshit into our lives
And don't forget that Amazon Prime doesn't just make you pay extra, they make you subscribe to additional subscriptions. I think there's like 3 extra sunscriptions for anime alone.
IIRC the screenshot thing was the tipping point for me. Tried taking a screenshot in the Crunchyroll app for Android, and it came out black...
Looked into plex, and it's all been better ever since
Maybe I'm blind, maybe it's me viewing this on a phone, but I legitimately can't tell the difference.
Zoom in on the guy’s face. The one on the right is crystal clear in comparison to the left.
I can see the difference around the actor's skin and the environment, its less fuzzy. It's hard to tell the difference, definitely. It's compression quality.
What you have to understand about lossy compression is:
If you're using an app, you may need to adjust image quality in the settings. I thought the same thing until I tapped the HD button in Boost.
Yeah, if the streaming providers ever switch over to AV1 that would be an interesting comparison.
AV1? that's a codec, right? I see in the preferences section for Piped. Is better than AVC (h.2640)?
It's also better than H.265/HEVC. Plus, it's open-source and royalty free.
Sweet!
Yes, AV1 is the next big deal. You can compress the hell out of the video and it still looks near original. I've re-encode some of my locally ripped movies for fun to see how it looks and it's really impressive.
it still looks near original.
Presumably you know, but for anyone else: the word for this is "transparent." It's when the codec leaves no noticeable artifacts.
I wonder if the apple vision pro is able to play AV1 files 🤔 i guess, would be really bad if not
Sorry, doesn't look like it supports AV1:
Video Playback
Supported formats include HEVC, MV‑HEVC, H.264, HDR with Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HLG
Depends where you get your alternatively-sourced shows from. Downloaded a torrent yesterday that was so dark that I could barely see anything even with my screen's brightness turned all the way up. Downloaded another torrent of the same episode, and it was much easier to see everything.
The big difference for me is the audio quality.
Hard to tell a difference on my phone, so I'm assuming most people won't care.
But isn't the "alternatively sourced" a rip from Amazon prime?
But indeed on my Android tv if I use Amazon prime most of times it decides to use 720p with a low bitrate
A lot of "alternative sources" are BluRay or even 4K Bluray rips. Of course there oftentimes also are Prime Video or Netflix rips but that just depends on availability. Usually there’s a choice. You can also download rips that are more compressed than Netflix would ever be but if you’re out for quality you just don’t download those unless there’s nothing better available.
I have a story, so I get wanting great video quality and why people get remuxes, but I have a friend who is borderline legally blind. His vision is so poor that he has to wear contacts and glasses at the same time. He has to get the remux version of things and complains about minor encoding artificacts from versions of things with smaller file sizes that I feel wouldn't bother 99.9% of the population. Hell years ago, before he got an updated prescription, he was driving and he mentioned how bad his vision was getting and I asked him if he could read the license plate for the car stopped in front of us and he laughed and said no. Anyway, I feel like the extra quality is wasted on him. He's like an audiophile who is hard of hearing. I just find this funny and wanted to share.
Yup.
Canceled my Prime sub a month ago when they announced they were going to make people pay more to stay add free.
It's the high seas for me.
It's wider?
Wow that is absolutely ridiculous, thanks for sharing
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