At Genbeta we have previously talked about the fact that, outside of 4K video, Netflix’s image quality can be greatly improved if we compare it with competitors such as Amazon Prime Video, Disney +, Apple TV + and now HBO Max. In all these services the superiority over Netflix is not so much in bitrate or bitrate but in the codec used, which in many cases is HEVC / H.265 versus H.264 that Netflix has been using in Full HD and lower resolutions if the content did not have a 4K version.
However, everything is going to change for users who see the platform on certain televisions and on the PS4 Pro, which are still the ideal device by size. Netflix has announced that, having started using the AV1 codec on Android smartphones to save data, it will start using it on televisions.
From VHS to STREAMING everywhere
The beginning of a huge leap in quality in and (especially) out of 4K
Getting Netflix to start using AV1 beyond mobiles is about great news for the industry, because unlike H.264, H.265 and H.266, it is an open codec that anyone can use, and that also has the support of other large technology companies such as large technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Hulu or Apple.
If Netflix was asked to use H.265, with AV1 you will meet much more than those demands, since the codec improves the efficiency of HECV up to 40%, although the normal will be 25%. That is to say, with equal bitrates, the video will look much better than with the H.264 that they use today. The only downside is that at the moment they will not use it with HDR.
These changes will not only be noticeable in sharpness, but in detail in movement, elimination of artifacts, etc.
The bad news is that few televisions are compatible with and capable of AV1 decoding at the moment. We speak of few when comparing with the majority of televisions in use, but if we go to the database of Flatpanels televisions and mark AV1 in “decoding” we will see that there are quite a few models that support it. On the Samsung specifications website we can see that it is supported by even entry models from 2020, with a bitrate of up to 40 Mbps. It is great news considering that it is the manufacturer that sells the most, and that today it continues to sell many models of 2020.
Another great news, for example, is that even if you don’t have a TV that decodes AV1, Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max already supports AV1. Presumably the next version of the Chromecast will do the same, as all televisions with Android TV have to decode AV1 if they have been on sale since March 31 of this year.
Netflix claims that using AV1 improves playback lag by 2% while simultaneously quality drops during playback are reduced by up to 38%. Using a 10-bit depth, they reduce artifacts such as banding. As encoding everything to AV1 will take a long time, at the moment the process is being done with the most popular titles, and they give the example of ‘La Casa de Papel’.