

- How to watch 4k videos on youtube without beffering full#
- How to watch 4k videos on youtube without beffering license#
You can have a suuuuuuuper long signal path that accumulates 16 or 32 or 48 bits of error and nobody notices because you still have 16 good bits. Then you chop down to 16-bit at the very end and the quality is better. Instead if you do all the math at 64-bit you still have 4 bits of error but they're way over in bits 60-64 where nobody can ever hear them. And 12-bit audio is no longer outside the limit of human perception. So now you don't have 16-bit audio, you have 12-bit audio, because 4 of the bits are junk. "off by 16" is equivalent to "off by lg2(16)=4 bits". Ideally some of them will cancel out, but in the worst case it's actually off by 16. If you have 32 steps in your signal path and each is +/- 0.5 then the total is +/- 16. However if you do a lot of those back to back they accumulate.

So every device in the path rounds to the nearest 16-bit value, which has an error of +/- 0.5 per device. If you have a 16-bit signal path, then every device on the signal path gets 16 bits of input and 16-bits of output. It's worse than that the input itself is only 8-bit and they scale up, and then back down again to 8-bit on the output side.īut it works, for the same reason that audio engineers use 64-bit signal pipelines inside their DAW even though nearly all output equipment (and much input equipment) is 16-bit which is already at the limit of human perception.
How to watch 4k videos on youtube without beffering full#
So I guess what I'm asking, are these groups interested in having 10-bit because it's better and more desirable (and a placebo quality effect) or are they actively watching these in full 10-bit environments? There are some output boxes intended for video production that can get around the GPU problem, but by the time you've got a full 10-bit environment, you're at $1500 bare minimum which seems excessive for most consumer consumption. Only workstation GPU's (Quadro and FirePro) output 10-bit (consumer GPU's are intentionally crippled to 8-bit) and I can't really think of any monitors that have 10-bit panels under about $1000 (though there are many with 10-bit processing which is nice but doesn't get you to 10-bit monitoring). With that said, I have to ask why these groups are interested in 10-bit when I'm essentially certain they cannot view in 10-bit. It makes me really excited to see people who actually care about color reproduction over things like resolution. I spend all day looking at color intensely with very expensive monitors. There's some intangible value in having an alternative if the MPEG group gets greedy and it might help them negotiate more favorable rates, too, but I'm pretty sure none of that is enough to confidently say that Google's senior management won't consider cutting it the next time they need the right news for Wall Street.

How to watch 4k videos on youtube without beffering license#
This has no significant upfront costs because they can use the same tools as everyone else and get the same bandwidth savings.įrom that perspective, the question is really whether the HEVC license fees are going to be higher than the cost of funding VP9. isn't likely so they're going to need an H.265 path either way. Use the same MPEG codecs for all visitors – dropping support for interoperability with Apple, Microsoft, etc. Make a significant investment making VP9 appealing enough to produce the widespread adoption needed to see significant bandwidth savings.Ģ. So if we look at this from the perspective of a business manager:ġ. They're already using H.264 for everything and will need to add H.265 support for the same reason. YouTube makes money from people watching video, not from sales of any particular video codec. Meanwhile, H.264 is a mature, widely-adopted technology and H.265 is following the same path (. VP9 codec development alone has been expensive and that's not even including the significant hardware engineering costs needed to make it competitive with the MPEG group's standards on all but the highest-end desktop computers. You should look at this from a business perspective: how substantial would those savings need to be to justify a billion-dollar scale investment? If VP9 is just 5% better, bandwidth saving itself for YouTube will be substantial
