High resolution ≠ clarity.
Plenty of so-called “4K” streams look worse than a 1080p Blu-ray—smeared shadows, mosquito noise, blocky skies. Resolution is just pixel math. Clarity is bitrate. And that’s where streaming falls flat.
Netflix 4K HDR? Around 15–17 Mbps. YouTube 4K? Maybe 12–20 Mbps if you’re lucky. Compare that to a 4K UHD Blu-ray spinning at 80–100 Mbps—with peaks past 120. That’s not a rounding error. That’s five to ten times more data flowing into your eyeballs.
Streaming services throttle because they have to. Bandwidth is limited, people watch on phones, and adaptive compression keeps everyone from buffering. It’s accessible, yes—but it’s not the “true” 4K people imagine.
Which is why even a decade-old 1080p Blu-ray often looks sharper, cleaner, more alive than the 4K stream that’s supposed to replace it. More data means more picture, every single time.
4K streaming is marketing. Blu-ray is the truth.
@movies@piefed.social
12 Comments
Ilandar@lemmy.today · 14 pts · 345d
The other problem is that many streaming services use adaptive bitrates, which are often overly sensitive to network fluctuations and preemptively tank your stream's bitrate unnecessarily.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech · 7 pts · 345d
Yeah from a customer perspective buffering is the worst thing in the world, low quality is normal. For snobs like us we'd rather have 5 min of buffering if it means a perfect picture. (No sarcasm, I am a snob when it comes to quality)
Ilandar@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 345d
I hate buffering too, the difference is my solution is to plan ahead and have the entire film ready in advance.
freamon@preferred.social · 14 pts · 345d
I suspect Netflix used Covid as an excuse to drop the bitrate, and then never actually put it back up again.
If you're a pirate, you can tell how rubbish their 4K content is just from the file sizes.
phaysis@mastodon.coffee · 12 pts · 345d
@atomicpoet @movies
Whenever I want to record something, like the Olympic opening ceremonies, I prefer to capture the terrestrial ATSC digital broadcast rather than capture it from the cable operator, because my cable operator always crunches the bitrate and it looks way worse.
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 345d
In NYC my parents cable looks horrible. I can see the blocks and color banding and they have a decent TV with Sony's amazing processing.
falidorn@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 345d
You can achieve 4K streaming from your own computer with Plex/Jellyfin. Unfortunately you’re right about streaming clarity but it doesn’t matter much of people watch on their phones with subtitles or they watch it as a second screen while scrolling.
xyzzy@lemmy.today · 7 pts · 345d
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 345d
5.1 mixes don't sound as good as a 7.1 even though the 5.1 is suppose to have the metedata for atmos or dtsx on streamers. I always wait for the non streaming version, because they always sound better with a true atmos, dtsx multi speaker setup
mikebabcock@floss.social · 0 pts · 345d
@atomicpoet @movies there's a lot more to it than that too though. Blu-ray #movies are encoded with all the extra languages and #Netflix gets to pick which one to stream. Netflix gets to use newer codecs than #Bluray so old 1080p Blu-ray discs are running #h264 (4k Blu-ray has an upgrade there) making the bit rate artificially higher. Apples and oranges.
I'm that guy who bought Oppenheimer on Blu-ray in 4k but it was for the audio. The video quality is nearly as good on #streaming TBH.
octoshrimpy@sh.itjust.works · -7 pts · 345d
This reads LLM heavy.
atomicpoet@piefed.social · 6 pts · 345d
Nope—these are my words.
You’re not a moderator here, and nobody appointed you the style police.
Ilandar@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 345d
It's interesting how the people who accuse others of using generative AI are often the ones who rarely construct anything longer than one sentence and five words.