34764170 (banned)
join:2007-09-06
Etobicoke, ON |
to TOPDAWG
Re: Netflix Super HD/Open Connectsaid by TOPDAWG:ah thanks man I'd be a bit pissed as a owner with them already dropping support for it. At least the hackers can do some good stuff with it now. I mean if it was a $100 box it's one thing to get a year or two out of it but the thing was near 200 bucks.
That's not really a whole lot for what it is. |
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to El Quintron
said by El Quintron:said by TOPDAWG:what really? so netflix is not HD at all on boxee? Man that sucks I'd be pissed a paid for that thing. For near 200 bucks that company should have done more.
It plays Netflix in HD... but it's probably 720 Yes, it is 720p. Personally I'm upset about not being provided 5.1 sound. |
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 El QuintronCancel Culture Ambassador
Premium Member
join:2008-04-28
Tronna |
said by 34764170:Yes, it is 720p. Personally I'm upset about not being provided 5.1 sound.
How do you have it connected to your sound system? I've had the sound connected with both an Optical Cable and HDMI and I was getting 5.1 with my amp. The audio setting would show as dolby digital, but the five speakers were active. I guess my question for you is were you getting not getting 5.1 on the the selections that display HD 5.1, or are you not getting 5.1 on the selections that display HD only? |
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34764170 (banned)
join:2007-09-06
Etobicoke, ON |
34764170 (banned)
Member
2013-Jan-10 3:57 pm
said by El Quintron:said by 34764170:Yes, it is 720p. Personally I'm upset about not being provided 5.1 sound.
How do you have it connected to your sound system? I've had the sound connected with both an Optical Cable and HDMI and I was getting 5.1 with my amp. The audio setting would show as dolby digital, but the five speakers were active. I guess my question for you is were you getting not getting 5.1 on the the selections that display HD 5.1, or are you not getting 5.1 on the selections that display HD only? Netflix does not provide 5.1 sound to the Boxee. |
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El QuintronCancel Culture Ambassador
Premium Member
join:2008-04-28
Tronna |
said by 34764170:Netflix does not provide 5.1 sound to the Boxee.
You could be right about that... I flip back and forth between the Boxee and the PS3 so I could be confusing the two... |
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34764170 (banned)
join:2007-09-06
Etobicoke, ON |
34764170 (banned)
Member
2013-Jan-10 5:01 pm
It is annoying as I watch tons of local content via the Boxee which pretty much all of it has DTS or AC3 sound but Netflix only has stereo sound. |
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 GuspazGuspaz
MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC |
to El Quintron
Unless it's changed since their announcement in 2010, Netflix uses Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3) for 5.1 and 7.1 audio. Dolby Digital Plus is not backwards compatible with Dolby Digital (AC-3). The Boxee does not list support for DD+, and it's unlikely to have enough processing power to decode such things in software like the PS3 could (the PS3's CPU is very slow for general-purpose stuff by today's standards, but it's still pretty fast at raw math stuff). |
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El QuintronCancel Culture Ambassador
Premium Member
join:2008-04-28
Tronna |
said by Guspaz:The Boxee does not list support for DD+, and it's unlikely to have enough processing power to decode such things in software like the PS3 could (the PS3's CPU is very slow for general-purpose stuff by today's standards, but it's still pretty fast at raw math stuff).
Which is pretty sad, because when I load a backed up blu-ray with DTS-HD audio the Boxee runs it like a champ and it sounds glorious. Is it a matter of decoding the stream on the fly that makes it so resource intensive? |
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GuspazGuspaz
MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC |
to El Quintron
If it has dedicated hardware that supports DTS-HD, it requires little CPU resources. If it doesn't have hardware that supports DD+, then it would require large CPU resources. I don't know why Netflix chose DD+, hardware support for it is far less common than Dolby Digital or DTS. |
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El QuintronCancel Culture Ambassador
Premium Member
join:2008-04-28
Tronna |
said by Guspaz:If it has dedicated hardware that supports DTS-HD, it requires little CPU resources. If it doesn't have hardware that supports DD+, then it would require large CPU resources. I don't know why Netflix chose DD+, hardware support for it is far less common than Dolby Digital or DTS.
Agreed... could've been a licensing cost issue, also when Boxee originally shipped it didn't support Netflix, so its hardware might have been designed with other purposes in mind. |
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TheMG
Premium Member
join:2007-09-04
Canada MikroTik RB450G
Cisco DPC3008
Cisco SPA112
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to stevey_frac
I was finally about to consider getting a Netflix subscription.
However.... I'm not spending money on getting Windows 8 so I can get full functionality ("Super HD") from Netflix. Screw that.
If you can make a Windows 8 "app", then why can't you also make a Windows program that works on earlier versions of Windows? Is it really that difficult?
Sorry Netflix, you've lost a potential subscriber. |
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Amandapanda
Anon
2013-Jan-10 8:12 pm
Get AppleTV |
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to El Quintron
So, Super HD through UnoTelly is a bust during peak hours.
Right now, i'm struggling to pull the 3 mbit video profile through them.
However, using Tek's DNS, I can immediately buffer up a Super HD stream, albeit only with Canadian selection.
--Steve |
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34764170 (banned)
join:2007-09-06
Etobicoke, ON |
to Guspaz
said by Guspaz:Unless it's changed since their announcement in 2010, Netflix uses Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3) for 5.1 and 7.1 audio. Dolby Digital Plus is not backwards compatible with Dolby Digital (AC-3). The Boxee does not list support for DD+, and it's unlikely to have enough processing power to decode such things in software like the PS3 could (the PS3's CPU is very slow for general-purpose stuff by today's standards, but it's still pretty fast at raw math stuff).
The Boxee Box supports AC3, E-AC3, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, and DTS-HD. |
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to El Quintron
is there differece between this and bluray? because the regular hd streams seem like a blueray rip at 6mbps so would I be right its still just a bluray rip but at a higher bitrate? |
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The difference it's bitrate. 5.8 mbit vs 20 mbit. Bluray is quite a bit higher quality.  -Steve |
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GuspazGuspaz
MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC |
to 34764170
said by 34764170:The Boxee Box supports AC3, E-AC3, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, and DTS-HD. That list does not match the one on Boxee's official website. You list two codecs which are not on Boxee's official list, and are missing multiple ones that are: » support.boxee.tv/entries ··· -formats |
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El QuintronCancel Culture Ambassador
Premium Member
join:2008-04-28
Tronna |
said by Guspaz:said by 34764170:The Boxee Box supports AC3, E-AC3, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, and DTS-HD. That list does not match the one on Boxee's official website. You list two codecs which are not on Boxee's official list, and are missing multiple ones that are: » support.boxee.tv/entries ··· -formats That's intersting, because I can confirm all the codecs he listed play on my boxee. Maybe, in some cases the sound system is decoding it, and it's just being passed through by the HDMI or optical cable? |
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to El Quintron
Has anyone found any 3-d movies on Netflix yet? or is it "we will do this, but not yet" statement? |
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EcHoMaN
Member
2013-Jan-14 10:13 pm
said by bdoyledimou:Has anyone found any 3-d movies on Netflix yet? or is it "we will do this, but not yet" statement?
The United States selection has about 60 3D movies. The Canadian has one Piranha 3d |
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to El Quintron
Just watched The Fifth Element in Super-HD using a borrowed Sony Google TV appliance.
Wow.
While it may not be absolutely perfect (sub-SD quality for the first 15 to 30 seconds), I can definitely see casual viewers with modest to moderate set-ups ditch both their cable subscription and their Blu-Ray player for this. |
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EcHoMaN
Member
2013-Jan-16 12:43 pm
said by milnoc:Just watched The Fifth Element in Super-HD using a borrowed Sony Google TV appliance.
Wow.
While it may not be absolutely perfect (sub-SD quality for the first 15 to 30 seconds), I can definitely see casual viewers with modest to moderate set-ups ditch both their cable subscription and their Blu-Ray player for this.
There's not a whole lot on standard TV anyways besides a worrying amount of reality TV shows which are junk. Half of the other stuff can be seen and streamed from the broadcasters own website, at least in Canada where all you need to do is wait 24 hours after it airs for them to upload onto their site. I still don't understand why anyone pays 100$+ for a subscription to TV services. Most sports now have an app and you can subscribe to them for alot less than paying cable+packages. |
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milnoc
Member
2013-Jan-16 1:39 pm
Careful. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe TSN allows you to watch their live sports broadcasts online only if you're already a TSN cable/sat subscriber. |
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to milnoc
said by milnoc:While it may not be absolutely perfect (sub-SD quality for the first 15 to 30 seconds), I can definitely see casual viewers with modest to moderate set-ups ditch both their cable subscription and their Blu-Ray player for this.
On both TekSavvy's and Bell's 25Mbps VDSL service using an AppleTV gen3, connected via an Ethernet cable instead of WiFi, it plays in "SuperHD" H.264 immediately from the first second (top bitrate), after just 4-5 seconds of buffering. No low-quality rampup, no long bufferings. It is not fully Blu-Ray quality, but on non-congested 25Mbps XDSL connections, the Netflix "SuperHD" is now far better picture quality than both Rogers Cable HDTV and Bell FibeTV. The encodes are starting to get "pretty impressive for the measly bitrates they push out". A movie "Hugo" I watched, I saw no compression artifacts at all, and I can tell apart 720p vs 1080p. Certainly far beyond YouTube quality. They are using a highly efficient encoder, and are getting direct encodes from studio masters for certain movies (I believe "Hugo" is one of them). Although a 20Mbps Blu-Ray from a similiar encoder is superior, a highly efficient 5.8Mbps good multi-pass encode (Netflix seems to be throwing almost a supercomputer to encode 'certain' SuperHD movies) and they seem to be able to do it sometimes more direct from masters. Although H.264 is only twice as efficient as MPEG2, it's not the whole picture. Efficient multipass 5.8Mbps H.264 encodes from masters, can look better than a recompresses / single-pass MPEG2 compress transmitted at 3 times bandwidth (e.g. 19 Mbps ATSC over-the-air HDTV broadcasts, at least those transmitted using a single-pass real-time MPEG2 compressor) Lots of TV broadcasters are broadcasting recompresses nowadays "to fit their pipe". It ain't Blu-Ray bitrates, but the "SuperHD" streams are far better looking than many movies on Bell FibeTV or Rogers, on good non-congested 25Mbps connections (zero stall 25Mbps). |
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GuspazGuspaz
MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC |
to El Quintron
Netflix runs entirely on Amazon Web Services, and this includes all of their encoding. Not a super computer per-se. |
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resa1983
Premium Member
join:2008-03-10
North York, ON |
resa1983
Premium Member
2013-Jan-18 1:09 pm
said by Guspaz:Netflix runs entirely on Amazon Web Services, and this includes all of their encoding. Not a super computer per-se.
Yeah.. They did a big article about how they managed to set up better loadbalancing, etc, and released the code as opensource for all AWS users. » arstechnica.com/informat ··· oftware/ |
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4 edits |
to Guspaz
I did say "almost a supercomputer".
Google "Amazon supercomputer" -- you can hire as many CPU's as you wish from Amazon and combine it. Technically, it can be a big economic incentive: Netflix can now afford to let a few amazon servers spend a few hours encoding/re-encoding one movie H.264 to try to increase quality as much as possible without reducing bitrate. Maximize quality, minimize bitrate, get more users.
They also have EyeIO tech, which normally used to lower bitrate -- can also be used to improve quality even further while keeping the same bitrate. (e.g. Getting a normally-10Mbps-quality H.264 stream that's apparently only 7Mbps). Google "Netflix EyeIO" and how it makes bitrates 20%-50% smaller while keeping the same quality. And how it can also improve quality while keeping the same bitrate.
I don't know the exact details, but it suffices to say that whatever I'm seeing is quite impressive for 5.8Mbps* rate. I can't even create 1080p this good looking at 5.8Mbps using easily downloaded tools. How Netflix does it, I don't know -- but it's probably a combination of throwing more resources at an encode, getting access to 4K masters to downconvert from, and the EyeIO technology. A combination of the above.
(For movies like "Hugo" and "Transformers 3").
I still prefer Blu-Ray, but what I'm seeing is better picture quality than both Bell FibeTV and Rogers HDTV (I've had both on the same display). Cheaper than purchasing 2 VOD movies a month on cable -- and you can get better picture quality on Netflix. This is the point where I gladly hop on the Netflix bandwagon for the first time, even just for a few movies a month.
*5.8Mbps video + 384Kbps DD5.1 audio (for "7Mbps"+ connections)
Lots of stuff on Netflix is crap though. The non-SuperHD stuff. aka 90% is still crap. |
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milnoc
Member
2013-Jan-18 1:18 pm
Now you have a choice. Purchase a single Blu-Ray title for $35, or have full access to a video collection for $8/month. An important note to any major studio who doesn't "play ball" with Netflix. If your customers can't find your material on Netflix where you'll get paid something, they'll find your material on BitTorrent where you get paid NOTHING!  |
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1 recommendation |
I still prefer Blu-Ray. I support the mom-and-pop type movie rental still operating in downtown Toronto, one block from Yonge-Wellesley. Good selection of Blu-Rays, newer releases not found on NetFlix.
That said, Netflix video quality now surpassed cable quality (if watching SuperHD streams) -- that's no longer "YouTube quality" of yesterday's Netflix. (But needs a connection-of-massive-safety-margin (like 25Mbps), be on Netflix Open Connect, and a direct wire instead of WiFi)
However, even for non-SuperHD stuff -- it is awfully convenient having access to the entire Futurama catalog before the current year (All shows of all series, and all Futurama full length movies ever made before current year), and even things like FlashForward (a cancelled TV series, that I missed the last few shows of), and other stuff I didn't expect to see on Netflix. Apparently, still even better image quality than cable, just not noticeably (as for SuperHD). And as a deaf guy, Netflix finally got serious about captioning (After being lazy on this for many years), so 90% of the stuff I want to watch is now captioned. Most VOD on Rogers/Bell do not have closed captions, and lots of competing services don't even support subtitles. |
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GuspazGuspaz
MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC |
to El Quintron
I tried watching an episode of AdventureTime on Illico On Demand (Videotron's VoD platform). The quality was absolutely horrible. It was low res (could have been regular SD), but it used nearest neighbour filtering to scale it up to the output resolution (1080i). So not only was it low res, it was chunky blocky low res. If it had outputted it at the native 480p and let my projector scale it up, or if it had actually used even bilinear filtering for the scale, it would have looked fine...
The entire VoD interface is also laughably badly designed and painfully slow to use. To be honest, I'm surprised anybody uses it at all. Maybe their "illico next gen" platform isn't so bad, but it was unusably bad for me. |
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