Mariana Afonso - Delivering better video encodes for legacy devices

Описание: At Netflix, we aim to deliver the best possible experience for all our members around the globe, no matter how or where they watch our content. For this reason, we support a wide variety of streaming devices, from lower end set-top-boxes to higher-end smart TVs, and maintain a variety of encode families. Over the years, we have introduced multiple innovations to adaptive streaming strategies and have constantly moved towards adopting more efficient codecs, such as AV1, the latest royalty-free standard. However, due to performance and decoder limitations of legacy devices, not all members are able to benefit from these quality and efficiency improvements. Instead, they often fall back to less efficient encodes, most notably our per-title H.264/AVC Main profile encode family. As a result, these encodes still represent a substantial portion of the streaming hours and network traffic

In this talk, we will provide an overview of changes to our encodes for legacy devices that have been recently rolled out. Compared to our per-title encodes, this approach lowers the bits streamed by over 20%, on average, while maintaining a similar level of perceived quality. This results in significant benefits across the entire delivery infrastructure and to the final experience for our members.

Presented at Demuxed 2020.