Decoding Netflix's Av1 Streams

While the percentages look scary, it's only a slight difference (60kbps!) and still around 1mbps average, but with a significant quality boost (very crisp lines and near perfect quality). I bet Netflix could encode at nearly half that bitrate and stay similar to HEVC in quality, but I'm pleased they seem to have made a good tradeoff here.

It's actually quite amazing the quality that AV1 delivers at such low bitrates across the board. I've said it before, but AV1 is almost magical. Which I think is behind the lack of enthusiasm for VVC/h266; is anyone even using that? I've yet to actually see it in the wild.

I keep getting a paragraph or two into something, read one of the terrible "It's not just word - it's massive hyperbole!" sentences, see that there are several more in subsequent paragraphs and can't continue.

However bad the author's original writing that generate this output was, it can't be as awful as this.

Rather than this inflated slop that look like I am trying to reach word count in a paper and one sentence becomes 15 useless ones

Edit: This is not so much commentary on AI than it is the core of your post is a few tables. Just post the tables and one or two sentence of conclusion and that is all ! It is so tedious to read through dozens of paragraph of autogenerated unnecessary nonsense -- that contribute nothing of value to the data

I think what stands out to me is this cartoonishly punchy, faux-dramatic framing.

That, and specialist terms that seem to be thrown in there in an empty way, just to signal subject-matter expertise that’s not even expected of a DIYer’s experiment report:

> It’s a multi-decade, billion-dollar street fight over bytes and pixels, waged in the esoteric battlegrounds of DCT blocks and entropy coding

> uses slopbot 9000 to explode his point into ten times the "prose"

> mfw

To be transparent, I was experimenting with a more "punchy," narrative style to weave in some wit and humor. I didn't want the writing to feel dry and was aiming for a flow that was more entertaining. In retrospect, I clearly overshot the mark and ended up with something that feels inauthentic and distracts from the main point.

The experiment and the data are what I was most excited to share, and the writing shouldn't obscure that. Based on this feedback, I'll revise the article to be more direct, cut the fluff, and let the numbers do the talking.

Seriously, I appreciate the reality check! This is a great lesson in "know your audience." :)

… and so I'll continue to stick with AVC, thanks! :-)

One of the quite expensive paid plans, as the free one has to have "Created with Datawrapper" attribution at the bottom. I would guess they've vibe-coded their way to a premium version without paying, as the alternative is definitely outside individual people's budgets (>$500/month).

I was really impressed with my setup, but after disabling content blockers (Firefox Focus), and turning off using Mullvad's free DNS proxy service, still nothing!

Perhaps the author turned the ads off since you visited?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446589

For mobile, I don't know who outside of Netflix is delivering AV1. If they are, I expect them to be leveraging the hardware AV1 decoders for battery life instead of employing a software only solution like dav1d. Saying that, I think Netflix was using dav1d solution where it had a benefit (e.g. low quality cellular networks)

https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-and...

>Those bit rate numbers are appalling! 2-4Mbps average bitrate?

While those may sound low, what I'm thinking is Netflix didn't see any benefit in perceptual quality (or VMAF scores) but sending more bits down the pipe and increasing their bandwidth bill.