Force the encoding to preserve more detail, and even dark scenes become very watchable.įinally, all too many people think they have an amazing TV, but without the right settings a lot of material can look bad. Often you would actually reintroduce noise into an image before compressing it (called dithering) because the noise helps prevent the formation of those big blocks of identical color. With HDR, which is usually 10-bit, you have 1024 shades instead, so even with high compression causing big blocks of color, four of those blocks in a row can now have four slightly different colors instead of all being mashed into the same color. That means it's easier to see the difference between one shade and the next immediate shade right next to it. Now, with 8-bit color, there are only 256 variations possible to encode.
#Streaming video compression artifacts full#
So a square inch might go from full of pixels each with individual values, down to just one block where every pixel has the exact same value. You see this all the time on heavily compressed material: as the resolution and bitrate goes down, it has to encode bigger and bigger squares/blocks of the video into basically one point. The same scenes would look infinitely better with higher bitrates and better compression (less blocking in dark areas), higher color bit depth (less banding in color gradiants), and proper encoding for primarily dark scenes. The problem wasn't how darkly it was shot, it was how little differentiation between shades of dark there was in the compression. HBO please stop spending millions on shows and then streaming them in shit quality.
#Streaming video compression artifacts tv#
I saw The Long Night on this TV and it was actually viewable (its OLED so the dark wasn't an issue) BUT the compression was so bad in dark areas (which was basically everything in this episode) that it just looked awful. YouTube looks shitty, buts thats kind of to be expected given the size of the content library.Īnyway I just felt the need to put this out there in hope someone at HBO sees it and comes to their senses. I assume all of HBO's services connect to the same CDN on the back end, which is why it is consistently terrible.
I've tried HBO streaming through HBO GO, HBO Now, and DirecTV Now. I have HBO through Prime Video and the rest of Prime Video shows look just fine.
Just look at the wall in this scene from The Outsider.Īmong all the streaming services HBO is glaringly the worst about the level of compression they use. The posterization and macroblocking makes some scenes almost unwatchable. For $15/mo the quality level is pretty unacceptable.
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