Piracy
How does Hulu expect people to pay for this shit? This is their maximum bitrate version.
This is ridiculous. I've seen better videos taken on a flip phone.
Discussion
4k 1mbps is peak Hulu. "You don't notice once it started playing"
1 mbps is insane lol. Are you sure it’s not at least 8 or 10?
I don't remember this scene in the minecraft movie..
Steve yearns for the divine
Burn 🔥
Why are you getting downvoted for reinforcing a comment that got upvoted? Reddit is weird 😂
The official reason for the downvote button is comments that "are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion". Stupid shit like "burn", "this", etc are literally exactly what that button is for.
Yet far too many people use it as a dislike button.
I'm not saying it's the case here, but where else can I say this at all.
Thanks for the explanation. I've been on Reddit for some years and didn't know this. First time I see downvotes for this reason, but maybe this sub is stricter than other with keeping comment threads relevant—which is totally fine!
Because it is pointless shit.
Probably angered someone somewhere else and they paid for botted dislikes.
This is good. In my time they hired killers.
Got the same issue with Netflix. A movie is supposed to be UHD and it looks grainy af (EDIT: I don't mean the regular film grain aspect)
Netflix lowers bitrate for almost no reason sometimes. Also I've noticed if you watch the SDR 4k version instead of the Dolby Vision HDR 4k version of something, you might get a lower bitrate. I've been experimenting with it recently because I have a projector that looks much better with SDR content and Apple TV does a great job of it. Netflix app knows which version it is sending you and adjusts.
Or depends on the player/device?
Disney plus goes 4K on supported device like Fire TV, but your pc browser? Shitty 720p
Why can’t any streaming service make a working desktop site? I pay for this shit and can’t even use it to the extent I pay for. It’s absurd
it's not incompetence. they can make a better desktop stream. They limit it intentionally both to discourage piracy and to push their sponsored devices (also to just save money, technically). The reason that FireTV gets better quality is because they're in a contract with netflix to incentivize users to buy FireTV products, not because the devices are inherently more capable of high quality streams
I shouldn’t have to spend a grand on a tv just to get the most out of the services I pay for if I already have a capable computer
yeah, I agree but like I said, it's greed and corporate collusion, not incompetence.
Yeah. Fuck corpos
If you have a recent-enough Nvidia card, you can use its video enhancement feature to cheat the limitation
I keep hardware acceleration disabled so I can stream stuff to my friends over discord though
Does it make a difference? I have it enabled and never noticed an issue with steaming.
Hardware acceleration prevents you from being able to record streaming sites. It just makes the screen black in your recording software discord/whatever stream
bro been streaming black picture all these years and thinks his buddies been watching gives wild 💀
You actually need the right hardware now. I don't get UHD when I watch shows on my secondary monitor, only when I watch shows on my high end monitor that has all the HDR and higher resolution shit in it.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but a movie being grainy doesn't mean it's not UHD.
I know what film grain is, this is not what I'm talking about
If you're referring to the image that OP posted, that's compression artifacts, due to a poor bitrate.
People confuse film grain (the word and actual phenomenon) with all kinds of artifacts, though
Maybe the art style? Is it an old movie?
Nah, Netflix is known for having a relatively low bitrate.
+ They have different bitrates depending on the content, they have a system that estimates the 'lowest good-looking bitrate' for the type of content. It saves them millions, but results in a lot of movies looking garbage and pirating giving you a considerably better bitrate.
Thanks for the explanation
Grain comes from the actual film used; higher bitrate will actually result in more of the grain being visible. If it's actually film grain and not something else.
It's funny. i only have hulu because it's part of a package i get with my mobile provider. but i still pirate most shit that gets released on there lol
You just reminded me that I also have Hulu in a package deal. The last time I watched it not only were there multiple ads but they started a count down to an ad at the end like absurdly early and then the last 500 seconds of the show were minimized to a small corner of the TV so a full screen ad could play. Shits ridiculous.
I finally canceled our Hulu recently to go full pirate when I tried to watch Futureman and Reprisal, 2 Hulu originals. Only to find out they removed them off their platform and I had to pirate them if I wanted to watch them at all.
Like, doesn't that mean you're paying for it in some fashion lol?! I always refuse any of that completely unrelated to my cell phone service add-on bullshit, I thought everyone did lol?!
I get it for free right now
What file is this?
lego movie apparently
EVERYTHING IS NOT AWESOME
EVERYTHING IS BAD WITH THIS LOW ASS BITRATE
EVERYTHING IS BAD WHEN YOU'RE PART OF A STREAM
EVERYTHING IS BAAAAAAD WHEN YOU'RE SUBSCRIBED TO THIS SHIIIII
"nah, looks like a problem with your internet service to me. Call your ISP." -fucking Hulu probably
There's only 4 ways to get high bitrate content.
Sony Pictures Core (Originally called Bravia Core) - High bitrate video if played back on any Sony product that isn't a PS5 or PS4. Have to enable super bitrate mode in the app settings. But still has lossy Audio. Rarely gets ripped, as it's device support is very limited. Some movies (Like Spideman No Way Home) have a higher bitrate and file size than the 4K Bluray.
4K Blurays/ 2K Blurays - The best option. Lossless high res audio. High bitrate. Even 2KBDs look better than their streaming counterparts. Easy to rip, so it's uploaded often. I've only had 1 or 2 very obscure BD-Rips not show up on trackers.
Kaleidescape - Lossless audio, high bitrate. Have to buy into their expensive equipment. Videos purchased from their store can only be played back on said equipment. Movies have to be stored locally on proprietary hard drives that are more expensive. However movies like Avatar 2 (100gb on 4K Bkuray) are 200gb on Kaleidescape. Rips are impossible to find, as the encryption hasn't been broken and considering the cheapest player is $3,000 (not including the 2nd device that stores the hard drives, and the hard drives themselves) I doubt it will happen soon.
DCP - Rarely happens, but is by far the best way to watch a movie. The bitrate is insane as an actual DCP uses losslessly compressed Jpeg2000 for the video. Audio is usually FLAC.
That's really it. It sucks. If bluray dies I'm done, because I refuse to watch movies/TV that isn't in one of these formats. I've skipped out on watching movies because there isn't a Bluray available.
Movies Anywhere 4K is near Blu-ray quality.
DCP, although it has super high bit depth and fancy chroma subsampling and insane birates, uses the very inefficient JPEG2000 and almost everything available is 2K and SDR.
Kaleidescape is overhyped, see https://slow.pics/search?query=Kaleidescape&type=collections
The link is requiring a login.
JPEG2000 is inefficient how?
Remux rips of blu ray?
You can, however I prefer to download BD-rips as it is a 1:1 copy of the disc.
A BD remux gives you the movie. While a BD-rip will have bonus features, the menu system, etc.
losslessly compressed Jpeg2000 for the video
Do you mean JPEGXS here? I was under the impression that JPEG2000 isn't widely supported anymore. Super curious as I'm not familiar with DCP at all.
DCP uses JPEG2000. I misspoke earlier, It uses WAV for the audio.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package
However there's been a push to switch to another format. I haven't looked into it yet.
Oh wow ok it is JPEG2000 how interesting.
Would be super curious as to what the format change may be. Thanks for the insight!
I'm having a hard time finding info on it. There's some PDF's by SMPTE but I can't tind file formats in it. Just audio sampling rate, video resolution, frame rates.
SMPTE ST 429-2 DCP
Thanks, saving what I can find for a read on my flight next week. I appreciate it!
If you find any info on the actual formats supported let me know.
Kinda weird to say but I have a huge interest in this.
This is why Blu-rays are king. They're by far the best source of video content if you care about quality. Streaming quality sucks on any platform. It's inherently bottle-necked by bandwidth limitations; they're always as conservative as possible with bitrate.
That scene in particular looks pretty bad but I think it could partially be because of the gradient on the wall. Subtle gradients tend to expose artifacts in bitrate/bit-depth.
we dont need to revert back to physical slow ass fragile media, we can simply just put a legal requirement on the term:video /s on the last part
nah it's a temporary dip in VBR, likely an encoder bug
Skimping out on bitrate is just not an issue on Blu-ray
That's the neat part over here, you don't pay. Just enjoy your free shit without shilling corporate names
This is sad. Also audio experience is somewhat in lesser quality. Many series & movies.
These streaming companies seams to have failed with the fundamentals of providing quality content for their clients. I am happy to pay, but not for this.
They don't set quality standards then later work towards it. Must be leadership issues. Also these solurions don't have to be expensive!
There is also the AV1 (video codec) format, could be worth considering - no?
AV1 is phenomenal. But the infrastructure overhaul required to support it (let alone end user adoption) is a lot to consider.
Hopefully many companies have this on their list. Things to do.
I'm sure many do. Where I work included. But man the infrastructure changes necessary to support such a change at scale are daunting.
Enshitification, higher price & lower quality
Some people don't even know what Bitrate is. Like me
It's basically how much bandwidth you have to send the video over the internet. Higher bitrate means more bandwidth which means you can send more data. More data means less compression and better quality.
bit+rate.
bit refers to a single 1 or 0.
rate is quantity over time.
bitrate means how many 1s or 0s are being used to encode a single second of video or audio.
more 1s and 0s, more details, more load on the server/routers/networking to supply all that data.
You see how the glare from the window has a blockiness to the gradient. thats key sign they are running on a very low bitrate, likely to save on costs for transferring it (bandwidth) and storing it.
just look those squares of light, that is a low bitrate artifact
"it's because your ISP existing" - Hulu
looks like a CAMrip from 2005
Mmmmm. Squares
I'm pretty sure Hulu only exists to snap up exclusive rights to shows in Canada, then refuse to allow access in Canada.
haha what
that's funny but is it true
Even some movies i pirated has better bitrate than this 😂😂
Every movie I pirate has a higher bitrate
Music I pirate has a higher bitrate.
My pirate has a bigger bitrate.
Cubist paintings have a higher bitrate
Me when the only good BDRip is 30 GB with 1 guy in Siberia seeding it on 10 Mbps connection so I end up downloading a fuckass 720p bdrip with single digit bitrate
Every movie I've ever pirated has had better bitrate
What do you mean "even some movies"? Every BluRay Rip or Remux will have at least double their bitrate. It's not even close. Especially Remux.
It's because now Disney wants you to have disney+ and Hulu and watch it on Disney+. The resolution and bitrate are better and things actually have HDR.
It's a really scummy move to get people to pay for both services instead of actually combing them even though they literally are combined on disney+ already.
I have netflix, prime and disney for my parents because its hard to find shows dubbed in our native language and I dont want the chore of finding them tbh. Still I pirate all movies and shows on these platforms, Im 90% sure the pirate version is higher quality.
This is a ridiculous, even when I opt to use those shitty piracy hosting streaming sites instead of just torrenting, they still somehow deliver a better quality. Sure, it's still not the best, but it's great and watchable for something I get free. This is somehow worse and you fucking pay for it
Netflix isn’t much better I’ve noticed the shows getting grainier and grainier.
One thing that radicalized me was when I was trying to watch Netflix on my computer using the web browser and it only gave me this low bitrate 720p stream despite paying for 4K. Turns out you only get that 4k when using a TV box that supports it which I did not want to do.
It drove me crazy because people's faces where mushed at a distance.
is this "the bear"?
Not just hulu... netflix and Disney too!! Almost like they want us to pirate it.
I don't even want to watch Hulu for free.
And here I am pirating fool 80gb rips lol
I hate watching Netflix content at my friend's house as you can see the pixels and it's disturbing.
the quality of video for being 2025 is so dogshit, in youtube there are so many videos, especially music videos, that were made with millions of dollars just to be 1080p with an horrible bitrate, and that is literally the only video you can find on the internet. With music you can at least find wav and flac but good look with these dogshit mp4s
I had the same problem trying to watch Netflix on my computer. It was terrible, especially in darkly lit scenes. Pixel squares everywhere.
I pay $1/month for hulu so I don’t really care if compressed 1080p. If it’s a movie I need to watch in 4k HDR, I just pirate it.
yup any sort of banding, especially on dark scenes, is a great way for me to find the 4k version and watch that instead.
Pay? What do you mean "pay"?
Please provide the name of the movie and the timestamp so we can make some comparisons.
What's up with all of those squares?
It’s called 4k @1mbps
Compression artifacts.
Why I dropped Prime, everything looked like shit. Other streaming sites had much better picture, and the fact that I'm not paying them $20 a month either sure doesn't hurt.
Prime is so bad. I wanted to watch Mr Robot a while back and it looked worse then OPs image. I watched for 5 minutes thinking maybe its buffering..
Needless to say, I pirated Mr Robot that day.
I watched Ford vs Ferrari on prime video and it looked really good on my LG OLED. It was in 4k HDR too.
It's really funny being able to stream 120-130 mbps 4k bluray remuxes with Streamio + RD for $2 a month. And the streaming services only deliver like 15mbps 4K streams that are completely bit starved.,
Thats why I downloaded it in 4k... Looks great. Just finished it last night with the wife.... This season was, meh... Hopefully next season is better
Is this a TV or a PC? What is the internet speed on it?
It looks like you are playing HDR on a non-HDR TV, and the darks are washed with no contrast.
The Bear WEBDLs from Hulu show the same artifacts on any platform, it happened with season 3 too.
I love how piracy shows off how shitty these services are
Yep, luckily this show was released in 4k on other services, as a pirate, you're free to download the best one.
I thought you were playing it from the Hulu app.
It is definitely Web-DL HDR/DV. Use a player which can map colours correctly to SDR or use an SDR file.
I always watch them, and all looks great on OLED TV.
GUYS I HAVE AN OLED
GUYS
GUYS I HAVE ONE REALLY
HEY GUYS! GUYSSS
LIKE ME
I've gotten worse renting movies from Prime. There are times when parts of a movie are almost impossible to watch because the video is so bad.
I mean, come on Hulu, if you're gonna charge us, at least give us some decent quality, right?
are you watching HDR in SDR? The color space is weird
no. the whole season looks like shit.
Severance on Apple TV was actually unwatchable during the dark scenes. I genuinely couldnt see what was going on until I downloaded it myself. The difference was gigantic.
Must be something wrong with their client then.
Apple uses really high bitrates for their master encodes.
App was on a samsung tv and I have a full gig download
There hasn't been a reason since Reservation Dogs ended.
What show/movie is this?
I’m pretty sure this is The Bear
I'm shocked that anyone pays for overpriced streaming services in the first place. Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?
Because some people don't want to bother with pirating. They don't know about the atrocious quality they are getting and even if they did they still wouldn't care and would still pay for it.
Hulu has been trash from day one. Nobody should be giving them money.
yes that is a murky mess, and the low bitrate is bleeding through the photo…
well at the height of WFH, and covid, netflix had similiar bitrates for Dune, (on the 4k plan!) in canada. i was livid. that was 2023?, 2022. so hulu is on autopilot, stuck in 2022…
now that is a reason to do use piracy is fir the UHD blurays, higher bitrate! (the only reason i use bittorrent for movies is to get the UHD bluray file if it looks crappy on netflix, it never does. i will not argue that UHD looks the same on netflix, it does not, especially the sound, but it is good enough, that i don’t feel the need for Deluge/rtorrent/qbittorrent…
btw, netflix stopped the bitrate limiting in the 4K plan, 6 months after that.
Probably by credit card. That's how. Has OP not paid for online services before? Don't understand how payments work?
If you’re only option is to watch on pc then the only streamers I find worth paying for are AppleTV and Netflix. Everything else is capped at 720p or lower.
cool let me watch the bear on apple
Are you just here to bitch? There are clear alternatives and yet you just complain in every single reply.
Bro this is a piracy subreddit. People are going to bitch about paid streaming services.
I have no idea what bitrate means.
What is this?
Looks like you got a shit phone tbh
Looks fine to me, and I have a collection of 9k movies that I get mainly from YTS in 1080p and watch on a 4K TV (43”). My expectations are never that high.
This is like played on browser which only supports 720p, if you have the supported devices/fast internet then you can play it in maximum resolution/bitrate. Its been like this for most streaming services because of the DRM. Even worse in Directv stream like its playing in 576p/480p resolution.
Huh? I have seen many Hulu movies that looks great.
Is this like the Walking Dead, where they intentionally opened the exposure to get more light and and create a grainy film effect?
Seriously, watch Walking Dead in 1080P or 4K. It was an intentional choice by that show for.....reasons. I never liked that aspect.
Does it look like that if you select the HDR version? HDR should be 10 bit
Imagine getting so mad over a subscription platform
My brother, do you know what sub reddit you are on?
Could this be a resolution issue caused by slow internet speed?
Watching a YTS movie on a 4k TV doesn't have this issue.
[deleted]
look at the blockiness homie
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." - Gabe Newell
Both. Both is good.
(Lord please Bless Gabe Newell. He has done so much for us.)
(Edit: i spelled please wrong)
Your pfp got me feeling all romantical
You better finish that computer call
Gabe was right when he said that but it is heavily outdated by now. Modern AAA games cost 70 bucks when they release now. In ten years they could cost 80 or 90. There is definitely a pricing issue there.
Even more with the “premium editions” and season passes mumbled together. And yet some sell a ridiculous amount still.
At some points becomes confusing/ 'service problem' too. If I open a page for a game and I have no idea what any of the versions really have in them (without researching for 10 minutes) or what version actually contains all of the story content, missions, bosses, etc of the game, and not just bonus cosmetics, so I won't miss out. This will just push me to look elsewhere for a full package of the game.
It's all just misleading and encourages or forces you to buy the most expensive golden deluxe pre-order super edition of the game while trying to have a moral standing of selling a 'standard edition' as well as everything else (at launch) while selling the true full game at an extraordinary price.
This is a great take, there's a lot of overlap between "service" and "pricing" issues, and I usually refer to all of it as "access issues". The more barriers you put between an audience and what they want to do, the more likely the audience is to find other ways to access what they want.
imma pick up that super deluxe version during the 2029 summer sale on steam for 2 dollars and 30 peanuts
s/o to /r/patientgamers
Games are already going for $80, thank Nintendo!
And their fans who always bend over for all of their shitty practices.
PS3 and Xbox One suffered heavily with their arrogance, now Nintendo is being arrogand as hell and experiencing no consequences.
Also, in my country most AAA costs around R$350~400, which is $64~70, the problem is, the minimum wage here is R$1500, 1 game costs around 1/4 of the monthly salary, that's absurd. Piracy is a must here
10 years? Probably ps6 games will cost 80 for basic version 😂
Aren't the new Switch 2 Mario Kart and stuff selling for $100? Maybe it was a "special edition" that I saw a while back.
and 9 times out of 10 they are full of bugs and hardly playable until a patch comes out. Consumers have become free testers at this point
Consumers have become PAYING testers.
Well, thankfully Steam specifically is far more affordable once sales kick on (or via keys)
In 10 years they'll be over $100. $80 standard is around the corner.
They are already starting to cost 80 USD by the way
In Gabe's defense, they basically schedule a pricing holiday every three months.
NES games were $60 in the '80s, so pricing today is much cheaper than it was in the past.
Distribution costs have gone down dramatically since the 80s though.
But games also take teams of hundreds to make instead of a dozen guys in a small office. People's expectations are far higher.
Market size is a couple hundred times larger than it was in the 80s. The cost to develop a game per copy sold has likely dropped even with larger development costs.
Games have way more revenue streams now though, like digital downloads and DLC.
Also games in the 80's were all physical media. So they needed to produce the game cartridge along with a case and manual for it. Then all copies of the game had to be shipped. Digital games don't need any of this.
Yeah, but games on the NES were wild successes if they sold 4M copies (besides SMB 40M copies sold). But like GTA 5 has sold 200M copies. Minecraft sold 300M last I checked.
When the demand has increased so much, costs should stay low.
Those are the two highest selling games of all time, they're outliers; within the top 50 best selling games of all time, it's more like 30-40 million copies sold each, and those are still outlier, mega hits with games like Skyrim and Breath of the Wild.
High demand typically increases pricing. However, in digital markets, the price is soft-capped because of competition with alternatives like other similar games. Now, with some AAA games creeping up in price, other studios could begin to feel comfortable increasing price as well.
Examples of situations where high demand would lower prices are cases like the most popular games being sold at lower prices (unlikely, but it can happen, e.g., Expedition 33 which sold for $50), therefore theoretically other companies need to follow suit by lowering their prices or they won't sell well. Or if revenue is being made elsewhere, besides the base cost of the game, like advertising, premium features, mtx, etc.
And they have, that's the point. Games have just now started having their first price increases in over 40 years, so I'd say you've had it better than every other sector in your life. Don't even get me started on basic home PCs that cost as much as new cars back in the '80s.
Yeah and AAA games like rdr2 took yesrs and at thst price point the hours yoy get makes it reasonable. No one should pay $80 for the same Mario game with a slightly different mechanic. Same with COD people.
More like now with Nintendo pricing MK World at $80
Yet people refuse to use their wallet to make a point.
Isn't that still cheaper than 90s console titles?
I think the service problem is still spot on to this day, but the pricing problem part of that is a bit outdated. I think he said this back when it wasn't really all that expensive to get into any streaming services and there wasn't fucking 500 of them. But now that the landscape has changed and they're all trying to gouge more and more money out of their users, it definitely can be a pricing problem too. I'm definitely unwilling to spend $200 a month just to get (almost) every show I want on streaming. It's all piracy for me. That, or good old physical Blu-Rays or DVDs when I want to support a movie or show I like. No physical, no money from me.
Wow.. great quote