Blocky artifacts are the result of poor bitrates. In streaming services it’s due to over compressing the stream, which is why you see it when part of a scene is still or during dark scenes. It’s due to the service cheaping out and sending UHD video at 720p bitrates.
cogman@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Look, this is just an incorrect oversimplification of the problem. It’s popular on the internet but it’s just factually incorrect.
Here’s a thread discussing the exact problem I’m describing
www.reddit.com/r/AV1/…/av1_in_dark_scenes/
The issue at play for streaming services is they have a general pipeline for encoding. I mean, it could be described as cheaping out because they don’t have enough QA spot checking and special purposing encodes to make sure the quality isn’t trash. But it’s really not strictly a “not enough bits” problem.