Podcast #932: Home Cinema Streaming

Home Cinema Streaming

We were alerted to an article at Home Theater Review by one of our listeners, Tom Green, regarding Home Movie streaming. We link to it here: Home Cinema's Streaming Future Is Now. The author states that for reference material they still use UHD Bluerays "But for day-to-day viewing, many of us here on staff have migrated almost entirely to streaming consumption."

They note that this fact infuriates their readers:

And it only takes a quick glance at the comments section here and on our accompanying Facebook page to see that this fact infuriates the most vocal amongst our commentariat.

One commenter stated - that any given standard-definition DVD from 20 years ago is far superior to the Netflix 4K HDR today.

The author doesn't even bother replying to this but we will. This is just plane wrong. Codecs are better which means you get more actual data on lower data rates. Streaming data rates can be higher than the highest DVD data rate of 9.5 Mbps and with better codecs that should be enough, but there is more! There is higher resolution, dvd is only 480p. Plus you can get better color and HDR via streaming which is not even an option on DVD. So no DVD is not better than Netflix 4K HDR.

Then there is the "Well, UHD Blu-ray delivers generally 80 to 100 Mbps or more, and streaming is only 16 Mbps, so that makes UHD Blu-ray six times better."

To try and refute the more bits are better than less bits the author of the article asks:

What's the difference between "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1" and "1 + 3 x 4"? In reality, nothing. But functionally, the second equation is more efficient. It's also interestingly more prone to error

The issue here is that if you are not good in math you may say the second equation is equal to 16 and not 13 because you don't understand that you do multiplication before addition. So while it is more efficient it is also more prone to error. Today we have more powerful processors so we can use more efficient, and complicated codecs. That means with better compression and 10 or 12 bit color, the compressed video of today is vastly superior to that of DVD and approaching the quality of some Blurays.

"But what about the crappy low-bitrate Dolby Digital+ audio?! When we talked to Dolby more than 10 years ago we brought up that many people are saying that Dolby Digital+ is imperceptible from Dolby True HD. They would not confirm that it was the case. There statement was, and we are paraphrasing here because it was so long ago, "Isn't that a good thing that our Dolby Digital+ compression is so good!" In this article Dolby now goes on record saying that:

Dolby has done extensive listening panels and firmly established that, at the bitrates now employed by Netflix, Vudu, and Disney+ (up to 768 kbps), Dolby Digital+ is perceptually transparent.

So Audio is as good as UHD!

Conclusion

Streaming will only get better with advancements in compression. And unlike discs or over the air TV, providers like Netflix can roll out changes on their own terms. As new devices come on the market completely new compression schemes become possible. And the beauty of this system is the servers can detect what capability your streaming box can support and stream the appropriate level of compressed content. There will come a day, and it will be here sooner than later, that you won't be able to tell the difference between streamed and physical content. And that has us very excited.