The average home broadband speed is getting higher, which might make higher quality 4K streaming video an option (though video providers still need to stream at higher speeds). There’s also some gray area when it comes to streaming if you meet the right circumstances. The visual quality on shows like that kind of isn’t the point. Put simply, you don’t need a 4K HDR stream to enjoy Friends on Netflix.
However, it’s worth pointing out the obvious: for most people and a lot of shows, streaming 4K video is perfectly fine. If you care about getting the best picture quality possible, then yes, the Blu-ray will almost always be the best version of the movie. So, You Should Always Buy the Blu-ray, Right? Not Necessarily There isn’t a 4K version of Friends, but would it really make a difference to your experience if there was? But scenes with a lot of detail or movement can end up looking pixelated or choppy because compressing the show down to a streamable size throws out a lot of data. Some scenes-especially scenes with little motion and simple images, like say a cartoon-will look perfectly fine. This is especially true of scenes with rain, snow, or confetti, which trip up compression algorithms more than usual. The result is watching a show on Netflix will sometimes look a lot worse than if you were to watch those same shows on a Blu-ray. That’s anywhere from 3-5x as fast as what Netflix recommends to watch its 4K movies. Meanwhile, a Blu-ray “streams” (through your HDMI cable to your TV) at anywhere from 82 megabits per second to a whopping 128 megabits per second.
Netflix doesn’t say exactly what the bitrate is for its 4K shows, but a help page recommends having at least an internet connection capable of streaming at least 25 megabits per second. How much more? Well, to compare, we can look at the video’s bitrate, which basically means how many bits the video contains per second. So, Netflix compresses your movies and shows a lot more than a Blu-ray would.
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If you had to download all of that for every movie and TV show-assuming your connection was fast enough to do so-you’d blow through your data cap in a matter of days. It’s also around a tenth of the data cap Comcast imposes on its home internet service. But “reasonable” can be very different depending on whether you’re streaming from Netflix or watching a disc.ĤK Blu-rays can store up to 100GB of data, which is huge. Compressing the picture quality-by tossing out very minor pixel detail, for example-gets it down to a much more reasonable size. An uncompressed 4K video would be over 5 terabytes of data per hour, which is way too much to put on a Blu-ray or even stream.
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If a shot doesn’t change much from one frame to the next, modern compression can tell a video player to only update the pixels that do change, rather than redrawing everything.Ĭompression also reduces file sizes by reducing the quality of a picture, usually imperceptibly.
To dramatically oversimplify a complex topic, compression lowers the file size of a video by tossing out redundant or unnecessary information.
While both videos will technically have a resolution of 3,840 pixels by 2,160 pixels, what’s in those pixels is determined by something called compression. Playing a 4K video from Netflix’s servers should be the same as playing it from a Blu-ray, right? Not exactly. Streaming Compression Ruins Beautiful 4K Movies Streaming will almost always look worse, but for some things it might not matter. Netflix offers 4K movies, but are they good enough to compete with the UHD Blu-ray you can find in a store? Well, no.
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