Comment on HBO should use a different bumper for streaming.

paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• cbarrick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Video codecs mostly work by tracking movement, predicting which pixels will change, and striving to only encode the pixels that actually change or change dramatically. In other words, compression looks for patterns.

  All of that goes out the window when you try to compress static. There are no patterns. It simply can’t be compressed. This isn’t a matter of the algorithms not being good enough. It’s a fundamental limit of information theory.

  Anything fancier amounts to embedding the intro into the compressor as a well-known pattern. And at that point, you’re better off just caching a 4K version of the intro as a standalone video file directly in the app.

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  • mkwt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Why not just have the app dynamically generate the static with random numbers every time. There is no video file of white noise, and bonus the bumper intro is never exactly the same twice.

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    • cbarrick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      That’s a good idea. They could probably do something similar for the audio.

      They’d have to code around the rest of the animation and audio effects, but the size of that code would certainly be smaller than the rendered audio and video.

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      • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        These are both really cool ideas and seem like a fun project.

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    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Do you think dynamically rendering 4k snow is something your typical FireTV stick is capable of doing?

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    • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Maybe we’ve gotten used to that very particular white noise pattern and anything else would feel wrong?

      Completely pulled that out of my ass, for the record.

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