
Science behind the longest night’s (game of thrones) poor quality - rayraegah
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/29/why-did-last-nights-game-of-thrones-look-so-bad-here-comes-the-science/
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bubblethink
>But neither of these are likely an option for HBO: Increasing the bandwidth
of the stream is costly, since this is being sent out to tens of millions of
people — a bitrate increase big enough to change the quality would also
massively swell their data costs.

So what are they charging $3 an episode for if they can't even push 10 GB for
those 3 bucks ?

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inflatableDodo
Saw a pirated version, then saw it on a paid service. The pirated version
looked lovely. The paid one was almost unwatchable and we had to pause it and
dick around with the TV settings until we could see something.

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Geee
What's the source of the pirated version?

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inflatableDodo
The internet.

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Geee
I don't think there are sources other than streaming services.. So it's
impossible that the quality would be better.

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inflatableDodo
I was at a friends house and we had to wait until it finished being shown in
the US and then we had to wait about 20 minutes before we could see it, I
didn't ask which service it was through, but I do know that it wasn't an
official one, could have been a torrent even. I could see people's faces in
that version and didn't notice any banding. I then saw it again that evening,
through my housemates paid account, which I think is NowTV, and couldn't see
peoples faces and banding was everywhere.

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Geee
I meant that the pirated version originates from some of the streaming
services. I just downloaded the best version I could find (Amazon 1080p) and
it didn't seem to be any better than the HBO streamed version, which I
originally watched. To me the quality is just fine, but banding is visible in
some scenes and I have to watch it in a dark room to see all the details.

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xondono
The article completely forgets that one of the greatest strengths in video
compression is temporal compression (how much a frame is similar to the
previous).

Blizzards/snow/rain tend to add randomness to the pictures, greatly reducing
compression factor and forcing the codec to decrease codification depth.

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an-allen
It looked great for me. The really subtle distortion effects that were added
into really add a dissociation effect were an amazing add. This was, and I
feel quite passionately about this, one of the most entertaining, enthralling,
stressful hours of TV I have ever seen. Wow. What a work of art.

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chomp
It looked great on my OLED. The true blacks made a large difference in
producing detail in dark scenes. I imagine a traditional backlit LED would
have looked much worse.

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baddox
I have an LG OLED. The episode looked laughably bad in many scenes. Very
interesting how some people apparently had no issue with the video quality.

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baddox
The banding was definitely the issue for me. I don’t know enough about these
codecs, but could this be a specific issue with HBO’s encoding process, rather
than simply nitrate? I would think that sections of video could be encoded
with different bitrates, allocating more bits to scenes with low overall
contrast to avoid banding. Or heck, if it’s possible, even trade resolution
for reduced banding, I suspect that would have resulted in a far less
atrocious image.

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ScottFree
Incoming conspiracy theory: Does HBO have any strategic partnerships with TV
manufacturers? This could be a clever strategy to get people to buy new TVs at
a time when they're not normally buying new TVs. The article even explicitly
mentions "Don’t worry about HDR, dynamic lighting, and all that stuff." This
immediately makes everybody who reads that article curious about what all that
stuff is, does their TV have it, how can I get it, etc.

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ecmascript
I was watching it on a projector in a completely dark room, didn't see shit.
From HBOs own shitty streaming service. I wish they just let me download the
entire episode if I have the subscription because their service sucks so bad
and the resolution is max 1080p. I would pay double the amount easily to be
able to pre-download it. Their service hasn't been updated in years on HBO
Nordic.

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innagadadavida
Amazon prime quality is definitely better than Hulu. But yeah the dark scenes
look pretty horrible.

I found a strange problem with my 4K dimming tv if using captions. The caption
text is bright white and the tv messes up dark scenes pretty badly.

Hopefully these and other video encoder/decoder issues will get fixed soon.

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dogma1138
Halo around captions is a problem with any LCD TV even those with FALD with
the exception of the high Sony ones (Z9D/Z9F) that use enough zones to
minimize it.

Pretty much for captions heavy content you need an OLED.

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jeffk_teh_haxor
I'm very confused about this comment from the article: "Don’t worry about HDR"

If HBO streamed with HDR like Netflix did, then this wouldn't have been a
problem?

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Abishek_Muthian
This applies to social networks & chat apps as well, data image/video is
compressed to a level that camera/source quality doesn't matter and hence it's
always recommended to email that important image rather WhatsApp it.

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petepete
I watched it on Sky Atlantic (satellite, not streamed) and it looked ok, there
was definite banding and other artefacts in the dark/foggy scenes. It looked
fine for the most part, though.

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mnd999
Same, and I thought it was pretty awful. Sky Atlantic is 1080i IIRC, that
can’t have helped.

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mailslot
It looked really good for me

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poisonarena
Ahh I was hoping this article was regarding the science to how bad the episode
was from a plot and writing standpoint

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kzzzznot
~~Strange thing to hope given the clear article title.~~ Edit: my apologies,
was looking at the tech crunch title. hackernews title is def more ambiguous.

What were your issues with the plot/writing?

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geoah
I really liked the episode but I can understand people's issues with the plot.

SPOILERS. SPOILERS. SPOILERS. I'll keep it abstract and speak of no names, but
still will include spoilers.

\---

Sense of danger. - Imo one of the things that Martin did right was keep you on
your toes. No one saw the red wedding coming. You were not allowed to have a
favourite character as three episodes later they would probably meet a very
gruesome end. Lately (and especially in this episode) seems the Hollywood
approach took over. The hero was triumfant in the beginning, had a lapse of
heart, he was helped to stand again, just to save the day at the literally
last couple of seconds.

