High resolution ≠ clarity.
Plenty of so-called “4K” streams look worse than a 1080p Blu-ray—smeared shadows, mosquito noise, blocky skies. Resolution is just pixel math. Clarity is bitrate. And that’s where streaming falls flat.
Netflix 4K HDR? Around 15–17 Mbps. YouTube 4K? Maybe 12–20 Mbps if you’re lucky. Compare that to a 4K UHD Blu-ray spinning at 80–100 Mbps—with peaks past 120. That’s not a rounding error. That’s five to ten times more data flowing into your eyeballs.
Streaming services throttle because they have to. Bandwidth is limited, people watch on phones, and adaptive compression keeps everyone from buffering. It’s accessible, yes—but it’s not the “true” 4K people imagine.
Which is why even a decade-old 1080p Blu-ray often looks sharper, cleaner, more alive than the 4K stream that’s supposed to replace it. More data means more picture, every single time.
4K streaming is marketing. Blu-ray is the truth.
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The other problem is that many streaming services use adaptive bitrates, which are often overly sensitive to network fluctuations and preemptively tank your stream’s bitrate unnecessarily.
Yeah from a customer perspective buffering is the worst thing in the world, low quality is normal. For snobs like us we’d rather have 5 min of buffering if it means a perfect picture. (No sarcasm, I am a snob when it comes to quality)
I hate buffering too, the difference is my solution is to plan ahead and have the entire film ready in advance.
I suspect Netflix used Covid as an excuse to drop the bitrate, and then never actually put it back up again.
If you’re a pirate, you can tell how rubbish their 4K content is just from the file sizes.
@atomicpoet @movies
Whenever I want to record something, like the Olympic opening ceremonies, I prefer to capture the terrestrial ATSC digital broadcast rather than capture it from the cable operator, because my cable operator always crunches the bitrate and it looks way worse.In NYC my parents cable looks horrible. I can see the blocks and color banding and they have a decent TV with Sony’s amazing processing.
You can achieve 4K streaming from your own computer with Plex/Jellyfin. Unfortunately you’re right about streaming clarity but it doesn’t matter much of people watch on their phones with subtitles or they watch it as a second screen while scrolling.
In general most people are just not intentional about what they watch and will just watch whatever’s popular, in whatever the most convenient format for that is. They wouldn’t be able to name a single favorite director. Streaming is fine for them.
I own thousands of movies and TV shows on Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray, and I have a home theater. I’m crazy enough that lately for some streaming-only movies I’ve gotten into buying Academy screener Blu-ray copies on the second-hand market. They pressed DVDs for that purpose until just a few years ago, because no one seems to care about presentation—even people trying to sway directors to vote for their film.
My mom still has the TV on a swivel up by the ceiling. I secretly turned off soap opera mode the first time I visited after she bought it. She can’t tell the difference.
5.1 mixes don’t sound as good as a 7.1 even though the 5.1 is suppose to have the metedata for atmos or dtsx on streamers. I always wait for the non streaming version, because they always sound better with a true atmos, dtsx multi speaker setup
This reads LLM heavy.
Nope—these are my words.
You’re not a moderator here, and nobody appointed you the style police.
It’s interesting how the people who accuse others of using generative AI are often the ones who rarely construct anything longer than one sentence and five words.
