Colin, I agree with your comments. Where do the 3 - 8 sec pauses in my video experience fit this discussion? An occasional pause (once an evening) pause might be overlooked. Several times in a program suggest a systemic problem.
Gene
----------------------------------------------
Eugene Chang
IEEE Life Senior Member
IEEE Communications Society & Signal Processing Society,
Hawaii Chapter Chair
IEEE Life Member Affinity Group Hawaii Chair
IEEE Entrepreneurship, Mentor
[email protected]
m 781-799-0233 (in Honolulu)
> On Apr 30, 2024, at 9:12 AM, Colin_Higbie via Starlink
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>>> Spotify lower quality than CD and still usable: one would check not
>>>> Spotify, but other services for audiophiles; some of these use 'DSD'
>>>> formats which go way beyond the so called high-def audio of 384khz
>>>> sampling freqs. They dont 'stream' but download. It is these
>>>> higher-than-384khz sampling rates equivalent (e.g. DSD1024 is the
>>>> equivalent of, I think of something like 10 times CD quality, I think).
>>>> If Spotify is the king of streamers, in the future other companies might
>>>> become the kings of something else than 'streaming', a name yet to be
>>>> invented.
>>>> For each of them, it is true, normal use will not expose any more
>>>> advantage than the previous version (no advantage of 8K over 4K, no
>>>> advantage of 88KHz DVD audio over CD, etc) - yet the progress is ongoing
>>>> on and on, and nobody comes back to CD or to DVD audio or to SD (standard
>>>> definition video).
>>>> Finally, 8K and DSD per se are requirements of just bandwidth. The need
>>>> of latency should be exposed there, and that is not straightforward. But
>>>> higher bandwidths will come with lower latencies anyways.
>
> Sorry, not sure if that's Alexandre or Sebastion, but to those points:
>
> Spotify is absolutely the correct metric because it's the commercial leader
> (and roughly aligned from a quality perspective with Amazon Music, Apple,
> iHeart Radio, and the others popular services). The fact that it's lower
> quality than what audiophiles (myself included) would prefer only proves the
> point: most users (AKA the "market") don't care enough about the audio
> quality to want to go beyond CD quality. This is how the market establishes a
> "sufficient" level of quality. It's not a fixed figure and can change over
> time. If some musical artist creates some popular music that sounds
> meaningfully different to most listeners between 44.1kHz CD quality and the
> newer higher quality 96kHz 7.1 surround sound AND if the cost in equipment
> and connections to hear that difference were attainable to the mass market,
> then that could move the standard, but that's what it would take.
>
> If it's only we few audiophiles who hear the difference, then the market
> won't care and will continue to say, "CD Quality is good enough. Now leave me
> alone with my music." :-)
>
> If Spotify were in mono and sounded fuzzy like old AM radio, because that's
> clearly much worse even to the untrained ear, there would be an ongoing push
> for better quality audio. But that's not the situation.
>
> Same logic with video. Is 12K better than 8K better than 4K? Yes. Is that a
> commercially important distinction? No, not in 2024, and the video quality
> change vectors would suggest it won't be in the next 10 years either (maybe
> will be after that). This is because at that quality level (like CD quality
> for audio), the digital quality achieves a level where either original
> recording equipment or the average human eye, brain, and ear can no longer
> distinguish between further advances. This is not an argument against
> over-provisioning bandwidth capacity to plan for the future, just laying out
> that a future with greater bandwidth needs per video stream is nothing that's
> coming soon.
>
> (As a LAN aside and parallel to show there is a common precedent with
> networking equipment for these growth rates, home and small business routers
> have had a max bandwidth of 1Gbps at mass market pricing for over a decade.
> Arguably, that's still the upper limit today. 10Gbps is still extremely rare
> and expensive for routers with more than a single 10Gbps uplink port, with
> 2.5Gbps being the more common upgrade both on PC motherboards and in the
> router ports.)
>
> SD -> HD is a HUGE improvement. SD is fuzzy (like mono AM radio). Facial
> expressions are hard to see without filling the screen with the person's
> face. HD -> 4K is noticeable, but much less significant. 4K with compression
> artifacts looks WORSE than a high quality 1080p stream. 4K -> 8K is literally
> imperceptible to typical people on typical sized TV's. While there are video
> cameras that can record at 8K in good lighting (even good reasonably priced
> studio digital cameras cannot record quality above 4K without excellent
> lighting), the picture quality limits are defined more by the optics and
> what's in focus than by the number of pixels. Further, for displaying an
> image even on an 83" TV, when viewed from more than a few feet away, must
> humans can't tell the difference between 4K and 8K even if the 8K image truly
> is sharper (and remember, they're usually not due to camera limitations).
>
> But all of that technical explanation is also irrelevant. The fact is that
> Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, and some of the other big streaming services only
> offer 4K + HDR streams. None of them offer or have suggested that they intend
> to offer anything higher than that. The lion's share of TVs for sale today
> are also 4K TV. Even computer monitors, which have always been a leading
> indicator for TV resolutions, mostly top at 4K. There are a few 5K monitors,
> but the price jump from 4K to 5K is substantial. 8K monitors are rarer and
> even more expensive. This gives insight into a minimum timeframe before 4K is
> supplanted by 8K or something else: it's at least many years away. I suspect
> 3D may make a comeback before 8K (or maybe together – sometimes tech advances
> because it's paired with something else, like Blu-ray and 1080p).
>
> I worry that many of the discussions here around bandwidth needs are academic
> and not market driven. Engineers and scientists know better than the market
> HOW to do something, HOW to solve the problems, but market always knows
> better than the engineers WHAT it wants. To be clear on a point dear to many
> here, the market may not know how to describe what it wants (e.g., the
> failing of ISPs to promote the importance of latency), but ignorance on
> technical matters is not the same as not knowing what it likes and wants. We
> can easily test for those distinctions via focus groups to let people
> actually experience the differences or via usage surveys to find out what
> users want to do. If you have a statistically significant sample, you will
> get a statistically significant response on what matters.
>
> One last caveat: while the market is the ONLY group that matters in
> determining what it wants, the market also may be poor in explaining what it
> wants. If you'd asked the market what it wanted improved in a VCR, the market
> never would have said, "We want a DVD player" or "We want streaming video
> over the Internet." They would just say they don't like picture quality,
> rewinding tapes, tape wear, etc. All problems solved by DVD and modern
> streaming. So it's important for marketing teams working with engineers to
> ask the right questions and truly understand the responses so that clever
> engineers can innovate the best solutions to solve the market's pain points.
>
> Hope that helps everyone here.
>
> Cheers,
> Colin
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Starlink <[email protected]> On Behalf Of
> [email protected]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2024 10:56 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Starlink Digest, Vol 37, Issue 12
>
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: It’s the Latency, FCC (Sebastian Moeller)
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 16:45:07 +0200
> From: Sebastian Moeller <[email protected]>
> To: Alexandre Petrescu <[email protected]>
> Cc: Hesham ElBakoury via Starlink <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Starlink] It’s the Latency, FCC
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Hi Alexandre,
>
>
>> On 30. Apr 2024, at 16:40, Alexandre Petrescu <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Le 30/04/2024 à 16:32, Sebastian Moeller a écrit :
>>> Hi Alexandre,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 30. Apr 2024, at 16:25, Alexandre Petrescu via Starlink
>>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Colin,
>>>> 8K usefulness over 4K: the higher the resolution the more it will be
>>>> possible to zoom in into paused images. It is one of the advantages.
>>>> People dont do that a lot these days but why not in the future.
>>> [SM] Because that is how in the past we envisioned the future, see here
>>> h++ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHwjceFcF2Q 'enhance'...
>>>
>>>> Spotify lower quality than CD and still usable: one would check not
>>>> Spotify, but other services for audiophiles; some of these use 'DSD'
>>>> formats which go way beyond the so called high-def audio of 384khz
>>>> sampling freqs. They dont 'stream' but download. It is these
>>>> higher-than-384khz sampling rates equivalent (e.g. DSD1024 is the
>>>> equivalent of, I think of something like 10 times CD quality, I think).
>>>> If Spotify is the king of streamers, in the future other companies might
>>>> become the kings of something else than 'streaming', a name yet to be
>>>> invented.
>>>> For each of them, it is true, normal use will not expose any more
>>>> advantage than the previous version (no advantage of 8K over 4K, no
>>>> advantage of 88KHz DVD audio over CD, etc) - yet the progress is ongoing
>>>> on and on, and nobody comes back to CD or to DVD audio or to SD (standard
>>>> definition video).
>>>> Finally, 8K and DSD per se are requirements of just bandwidth. The need
>>>> of latency should be exposed there, and that is not straightforward. But
>>>> higher bandwidths will come with lower latencies anyways.
>>> [SM] How that? Capacity and latency are largely independent... think a semi
>>> truck full of harddisks from NYC to LA has decent capacity/'bandwidth' but
>>> lousy latency...
>>
>> I agree with you: two distinct parameters, bandwidth and latency. But they
>> evolve simultenously, relatively bound by a constant relationship. For any
>> particular link technology (satcom is one) the bandwidth and latency are in
>> a constant relationship. One grows, the other diminishes. There are
>> exceptions too, in some details.
>>
>> (as for the truck full of harddisks, and jumbo jets full of DVDs - they are
>> just concepts: striking good examples of how enormous bandwidths are
>> possible, but still to see in practice; physicsts also talked about a train
>> transported by a train transported by a train and so on, to overcome the
>> speed of light: another striking example, but not in practice).
>
> [SM] Not any more, but Amazon did offer a a storage truck (for latency
> insensitive transfers of huge data)
> h++ps://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/17/aws-stops-selling-snowmobile-truck-for-c
> h++loud-migrations.html
> so this is more than just a concept...
>
>>
>> Alex
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> The quest of latency requirements might be, in fact, a quest to see how
>>>> one could use that low latency technology that is possible and available
>>>> anyways.
>>>> Alex
>>>> Le 30/04/2024 à 16:00, Colin_Higbie via Starlink a écrit :
>>>>> David Fernández, those bitrates are safe numbers, but many streams could
>>>>> get by with less at those resolutions. H.265 compression is at a variable
>>>>> bit rate with simpler scenes requiring less bandwidth. Note that 4K with
>>>>> HDR (30 bits per pixel rather than 24) consistently also fits within
>>>>> 25Mbps.
>>>>>
>>>>> David Lang, HDR is a requirement for 4K programming. That is not to say
>>>>> that all 4K streams are in HDR, but in setting a required bandwidth,
>>>>> because 4K signals can include HDR, the required bandwidth must
>>>>> accommodate and allow for HDR. That said, I believe all modern 4K
>>>>> programming on Netflix and Amazon Prime is HDR. Note David Fernández'
>>>>> point that Spain independently reached the same conclusion as the US
>>>>> streaming services of 25Mbps requirement for 4K.
>>>>>
>>>>> Visually, to a person watching and assuming an OLED (or microLED) display
>>>>> capable of showing the full color and contrast gamut of HDR (LCD can't
>>>>> really do it justice, even with miniLED backlighting), the move to HDR
>>>>> from SDR is more meaningful in most situations than the move from 1080p
>>>>> to 4K. I don't believe going to further resolutions, scenes beyond 4K
>>>>> (e.g., 8K), will add anything meaningful to a movie or television viewer
>>>>> over 4K. Video games could benefit from the added resolution, but lens
>>>>> aberration in cameras along with focal length and limited depth of field
>>>>> render blurriness of even a sharp picture greater than the pixel size in
>>>>> most scenes beyond about 4K - 5.5K. Video games don’t suffer this problem
>>>>> because those scenes are rendered, eliminating problems from camera
>>>>> lenses. So video games may still benefit from 8K resolution, but
>>>>> streaming programming won’t.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is precedent for this in the audio streaming world: audio streaming
>>>>> bitrates have retracted from prior peaks. Even though 48kHz and higher
>>>>> bitrate audio available on DVD is superior to the audio quality of
>>>>> 44.1kHz CDs, Spotify and Apple and most other streaming services stream
>>>>> music at LOWER quality than CD. It’s good enough for most people to not
>>>>> notice the difference. I don’t see much push in the foreseeable future
>>>>> for programming beyond UHD (4K + HDR). That’s not to say never, but
>>>>> there’s no real benefit to it with current camera tech and screen sizes.
>>>>>
>>>>> Conclusion: for video streaming needs over the next decade or so, 25Mbps
>>>>> should be appropriate. As David Fernández rightly points out, H.266 and
>>>>> other future protocols will improve compression capabilities and reduce
>>>>> bandwidth needs at any given resolution and color bit depth, adding a bit
>>>>> more headroom for small improvements.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>> Colin
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Starlink <[email protected]> On Behalf
>>>>> Of [email protected]
>>>>> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2024 9:31 AM
>>>>> To: [email protected]
>>>>> Subject: Starlink Digest, Vol 37, Issue 9
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Message: 2
>>>>> Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:54:20 +0200
>>>>> From: David Fernández <[email protected]>
>>>>> To: starlink <[email protected]>
>>>>> Subject: Re: [Starlink] It’s the Latency, FCC
>>>>> Message-ID:
>>>>> <CAC=tz0rrmwjunlvgupw6k8ogadcylq-eyw7bjb209ondwgf...@mail.gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>>>>
>>>>> Last February, TV broadcasting in Spain left behind SD definitively and
>>>>> moved to HD as standard quality, also starting to regularly broadcast a
>>>>> channel with 4K quality.
>>>>>
>>>>> A 4K video (2160p) at 30 frames per second, handled with the HEVC
>>>>> compression codec (H.265), and using 24 bits per pixel, requires 25
>>>>> Mbit/s.
>>>>>
>>>>> Full HD video (1080p) requires 10 Mbit/s.
>>>>>
>>>>> For lots of 4K video encoded at < 20 Mbit/s, it may be hard to
>>>>> distinguish it visually from the HD version of the same video (this was
>>>>> also confirmed by SBTVD Forum Tests).
>>>>>
>>>>> Then, 8K will come, eventually, requiring a minimum of ~32 Mbit/s:
>>>>> https://dvb.org/news/new-generation-of-terrestrial-services-taking-
>>>>> shape-in-europe
>>>>>
>>>>> The latest codec VVC (H.266) may reduce the required data rates by at
>>>>> least 27%, at the expense of more computing power required, but somehow
>>>>> it is claimed it will be more energy efficient.
>>>>> https://dvb.org/news/dvb-prepares-the-way-for-advanced-4k-and-8k-br
>>>>> oadcast-and-broadband-television
>>>>>
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>
>>>>> David
>
>
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