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Carlito Austin
Is there a way on my Roku TV to determine the quality of the original material, i.e., 1080, 4K, etc. I understand that the path to my TV may have bandwidth limitations that determine what I actually see. I 'd just like to know what the original content was coded at.
Some apps provide quality availability tags (e.g. 4K/UHD/HDR/HDR10/DV/Atmos/5.1/etc) prior to playback, depending on system configuration - that doesnt mean you get that at playback, just whats available based upon the current system configuration in conjunction with the quality of the server content/app functionality.
But all of that can be relatively meaningless, since we dont know the source material master quality, what tools were used in the digital transfer, what codecs are used in the transmission (a highly efficient codec could use a much lower bitrate than a less efficient codec for the same or better objective/subjective visual quality), etc.
You're just not really going to know what "the original content was coded at" though you can make some educated guesses based on blu-ray transfers/releases/reported digital masters/etc - all you can ever really know (at best) is the playback output quality, such as what the current bitrate/resolution/framerate/codecs are, and thats in the best of cases (e.g. YouTube, YouTube TV with "states for nerds" enabled).
I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. I tried to create as coherent a narrative as I could. If there are any errors I'd be more than happy to fix them. Keep in mind this article is not a technical deep dive. It's a big picture type article. For example, I don't mention the word microservice even once :-)
Given our discussion in the What is Cloud Computing? chapter, you might expect Netflix to serve video using AWS. Press play in a Netflix application and video stored in S3 would be streamed from S3, over the internet, directly to your device.
Another relevant factoid is Netflix is subscription based. Members pay Netflix monthly and can cancel at any time. When you press play to chill on Netflix, it had better work. Unhappy members unsubscribe.
The client is the user interface on any device used to browse and play Netflix videos. It could be an app on your iPhone, a website on your desktop computer, or even an app on your Smart TV. Netflix controls each and every client for each and every device.
Everything that happens before you hit play happens in the backend, which runs in AWS. That includes things like preparing all new incoming video and handling requests from all apps, websites, TVs, and other devices.
In 2007 Netflix introduced their streaming video-on-demand service that allowed subscribers to stream television series and films via the Netflix website on personal computers, or the Netflix software on a variety of supported platforms, including smartphones and tablets, digital media players, video game consoles, and smart TVs.
Netflix succeeded. Netflix certainly executed well, but they were late to the game, and that helped them. By 2007 the internet was fast enough and cheap enough to support streaming video services. That was never the case before. The addition of fast, low-cost mobile bandwidth and the introduction of powerful mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, has made it easier and cheaper for anyone to stream video at any time from anywhere. Timing is everything.
Building out a datacenter is a lot of work. Ordering equipment takes a long time. Installing and getting all the equipment working takes a long time. And as soon they got everything working they would run out of capacity, and the whole process had to start over again.
The long lead times for equipment forced Netflix to adopt what is known as a vertical scaling strategy. Netflix made big programs that ran on big computers. This approach is called building a monolith. One program did everything.
What Netflix was good at was delivering video to their members. Netflix would rather concentrate on getting better at delivering video rather than getting better at building datacenters. Building datacenters was not a competitive advantage for Netflix, delivering video is.
It took more than eight years for Netflix to complete the process of moving from their own datacenters to AWS. During that period Netflix grew its number of streaming customers eightfold. Netflix now runs on several hundred thousand EC2 instances.
The advantage of having three regions is that any one region can fail, and the other regions will step in handle all the members in the failed region. When a region fails, Netflix calls this evacuating a region.
The header image is meant to intrigue you, to draw you into selecting a video. The idea is the more compelling the header image, the more likely you are to watch a video. And the more videos you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe from Netflix.
The first thing Netflix does is spend a lot of time validating the video. It looks for digital artifacts, color changes, or missing frames that may have been caused by previous transcoding attempts or data transmission problems.
A pipeline is simply a series of steps data is put through to make it ready for use, much like an assembly line in a factory. More than 70 different pieces of software have a hand in creating every video.
The idea behind a CDN is simple: put video as close as possible to users by spreading computers throughout the world. When a user wants to watch a video, find the nearest computer with the video on it and stream to the device from there.
In 2007, when Netflix debuted its new streaming service, it had 36 million members in 50 countries, watching more than a billion hours of video each month, streaming multiple terabits of content per second.
At the same time, Netflix was also devoting a lot of effort into all the AWS services we talked about earlier. Netflix calls the services in AWS its control plane. Control plane is a telecommunications term identifying the part of the system that controls everything else. In your body, your brain is the control plane; it controls everything else.
In 2011, Netflix realized at its scale it needed a dedicated CDN solution to maximize network efficiency. Video distribution is a core competency for Netflix and could be a huge competitive advantage.
The number of OCAs on a site depends on how reliable Netflix wants the site to be, the amount of Netflix traffic (bandwidth) that is delivered from that site, and the percentage of traffic a site allows to be streamed.
Within a location, a popular video like House of Cards is copied to many different OCAs. The more popular a video, the more servers it will be copied to. Why? If there was only one copy of a very popular video, streaming the video to members would overwhelm the server. As they say, many hands make light work.
Right now, up to 100% of Netflix content is being served from within ISP networks. This reduces costs by relieving internet congestion for ISPs. At the same time, Netflix members experience a high-quality viewing experience. And network performance improves for everyone.
What may not be immediately obvious is that the OCAs are independent of each other. OCAs act as self-sufficient video-serving archipelagos. Members streaming from one OCA are not affected when other OCAs fail.
The picture quality, particularly on darker scenes (in Netflix) is awful - grainy doesn't do it justice. I looked on Netflix to see if there were any resolution settings but, if they are there, they are well hidden.
You state that you did a speed test and it showed "a speed of 35 or so mbps" - this is close to the borderline of what Sky Glass needs in order to function reliably. If any other device in your household is using broadband then the loss of bandwidth to your Sky Glass TV may be sufficient enough to cause Netflix to reduce bit-rate and resolution, even if you're paying for the Premium 4K/Atmos subscription.
Broadband speed may be the problem here; outside of the Sky Glass I was only seeing around 45 mbps but oddly when I checked within Netflix it was 75 mbps so I think there's maybe a significant variation in speeds, minute by minute - I will call Sky at some point and, especially as this is a new installation, and get them to verify the speed.
@XfinityTyler Thank you for responding. According to this other thread (with message from Christina posted 4 hours ago), it appears Xfinity is aware of a known issue with its streaming website [ -stream-website/terrible-quality-xfinity-stream/615f99e0a6e13d4fb336e0d7]. In my experience this is affecting not only the website, but the app on Amazon products (Firestick and Firecube) as well.
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