Posted by Amir Mazzarella on March 26, 2018
It's been a month since my last blog post, and I thought I'd post a small update to show that I'm still alive. Netflix recently posted on their tech blog that they're now streaming more optimized encodes. You can check it out right here: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/optimized-shot-based-encodes-now-streaming-4b9464204830. Netflix hasn't been the leader in quality based streaming; in my opinion, Amazon outperforms them with encodes having a maximum bitrate of 15Mbps. However, this new blog post might show that Netflix is getting better. If you don't want to read it, the gist of it is that they're using the high AVC profile with some extra setting tweaks rather than the main profile. On their main encodes I know for a fact that they used to use a decade old version of x264 (x264 core 118 to be exact), but have now upgraded x264 core 148. I haven't checked what they're using for the high encodes, but I would suspect it's also x264: I just hope it's a newer version. If you want to download the encrypted MP4s for their new encodes (they don't stream on PC, only on mobile and consoles), you can use the profile playready-h264hpl40-dash with my pymsl module to download 1080p AVC high encodes. Please note that these MP4s are encrypted and won't serve an end-user any use. The profile naming pattern for the high encodes don't really differ from the main ones, it's just that the mpl has been replaced with hpl. If you're unaware, the H264 profile naming scheme for Netflix follows the pattern of [DRM]-[CODEC][ENCODING_PROFILE]p[AVC_LEVEL]-[STREAMING_TECHNOLOGY]. So for playready-h264hpl40-dash, according to the template, the DRM is playready, the codec is H264, the encoding profile is h (high), the AVC level is level 4.0, and the streaming technology is MPEG-DASH. Simple, right? That's all for this blog post, have fun experimenting!