HBO Max landed in Spain today with a great launch offer, and one of the great unknowns that existed regarding the platform was its image quality. Warner media had promised a new app that supports modern features like 4K UHD, HDR, and Dolby Atmos. Nevertheless, we did not know how good that 4K was going to be in Spain, and especially what would happen to the content that was not in 4K.
HBO Max comes with very few series and movies in that resolution, and between they are not, for example, ‘Game of Thrones’. We were interested, therefore, to see how the image quality of HBO Max is here, comparing it with what we knew about HBO Spain, famous for being one of the worst in this regard. We already had a clue, but let’s see what he has in store for us.
HBO Max delivers on just about everything we could hope for (and more)
Behind image quality there are many factors. One of the main ones, of which HBO Spain suffered, was bitrate. The old platform did not exceed 3.5 Mbps, compared to twice or more of its main competitors. This made content with low lighting and a lot of movement represented as an amalgam of artifacts that only made us imagine what image the creative person in charge of the work really wanted to demonstrate.
What’s more, HBO Spain was characterized by using very old technologies. Not only did it not support 4K and HDR, but in 1080p it only used the H.264 or AVC codec, which offers much worse compression than its successor, H.265 or HEVC, which is the one used in 4K Blu-Rays. , for instance. With half the bitrate, H.265 can display equally good image quality, and with fewer artifacts.
HBO finally respects its offer of content by accompanying in quality. Now we just need much more to arrive in 4K
Starting from bitrate and codec, HBO Max is everything we could hope for, and more. In content such as ‘Game of Thrones’, the bitrate indicated by the developer tool of an Amazon Fire Stick finally puts the service at the height of its competition.
But not only that, a great improvement in image quality comes thanks to the release of the aforementioned H.265 codec. More than doubling bitrate (image information every second) and with a much more efficient codec, we have a much cleaner image in any scenario. It is something that we already saw between Amazon Prime and Netflix.
Best of all, HBO Max has not only converted their newest content, but if we go to the 2000 series ‘Larry David’, we will also have 1080p with 7Mbps bitrate spikes in HEVC. In ‘Los Sopranos’, for example, the same thing happens, and already in the intro we see bitrate peaks of 8.7 Mbps. All devices are compatible with this codec, but the normal thing is that all those compatible with HBO Max are, because for example it is a requirement of all 4K televisions, and its list of devices is not very large either.
We observe up to triple the bitrate in 1080p content, and all this with a codec that respects the original content much better
With content available in Dolby Vision such as ‘Matrix’, the improvement in perceived image quality and bitrate is impressive. In 1080p, we see bitrate spikes of 10 Mbps, and in 4K, of 27 Mbps, at the height of the best.
You can subscribe to HBO Max with a temporary offer of 4.49 euros per month for life from this link.