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Netflix has been the worst performing and lowest quality video stream of any of the streaming services. Fuzzy video, lots of visual noise and artifacts. Just plan bad and this is on the 4k plan on 1GB fiber on a 4k Apple TV. I can literally tell when someone is watching Netflix without knowing because it looks like shit.

It's not AV1's fault though, I'm pretty sure it's that they cheap out on the bitrate. Apple is among the highest bitrates (other than Sony's weird hardware locked streaming service).

I actually blamed AV1 for the macro-blocking and generally awful experience of watching horror films on Netflix for a long time. Then I realized other sources using AV1 were better.

If you press ctl-alt-shift-d while the video is playing you'll note that most of the time that the bitrate is appallingly low, and also that Netflix plays their own original content using higher bitrate HEVC rather than AV1.

That's because they actually want it to look good. For partner content they often default back to lower bitrate AV1, because they just don't care.


This is actually their DRM speaking. If you watch it on a Linux device or basically anything that isn’t a smart TV on the latest OS, they limit you to a 720p low bitrate stream, even if you pay for 4k. (See Louis Rossman’s video on the topic)

OP said they're using an Apple TV, which most definitely supports the 4K DRM.

The bit rate is unfortunately crushed to hell and back, leading to blockiness on 4K.

Oh oops

Have same experience as OP on newest ATV 4k. Good it's not only me who wonders how is it possible that they describe such great approaches to encoding, but final result is just so bad.

Good that the OCAs really work and are very inspiring in content delivery domain.


Yep, and they also silently downgrade resolution and audio channels on an ever changing and hidden list of browsers/OS/device overtime.

Meanwhile pirated movies are in Blu-ray quality, with all audio and language options you can dream of.


I also find Netflix video quality shockingly bad and oddly inconsistent. I think they just don’t prioritize video quality in the same way as say apple or Disney does.

I cancelled Netflix for this exact reason. 4K Netflix looks worse than 720 YouTube, yet I pay(paid) for Netflix 4K, and at roughly 2x what I paid for Netflix when it launched. It's genuinely a disgrace how they can even claim with a straight face that you're actually watching 4K. The last price rise was the tipping point and I tapped out after 11 years.

Netflix on Apple TV has an issue if "Match Content" is "off" where it will constantly downgrade the video stream to a lower bitrate unnecessarily.

Even fixing that issue the video quality is never great compared to other services.


I was able to improve things somewhat by going to https://www.netflix.com/settings/playback/<myprofileid> and changing "Data usage per screen" from Auto to High

Probably some function of your location to data centers. I find hbo max to be aysmal these days. But I've learned to just stop caring about this stuff since no one else in my life does

https://xkcd.com/1015/

Now you can be mad about two things nobody else notices.


Oddly enough, I observe something to the opposite effect.

I wonder if it has more to do with proximity to edge delivery nodes than anything else.


If I am unique every time I reload the page in a new private window, that means the fingerprint is not the same as the last time I visited right?


I run Redis across dozens of applications. So when Valkey became available for a discounted price on AWS I was excited. We finally got around to trying it out about 2 months ago and all was going well. No noticeable difference in performance. Until Valkey just died. It died in such a way that AWS still thought it was running happily but it was completely offline. It took 12+ hours for it to come up again and then it happened again... AWS researched the issue for 2 weeks and couldn't figure it out. It will be a long time before we attempt to use Valkey for anything critical in the future. We since have replace that Valkey with Redis under the same workload and have no issues.


Probably AWS issue. Our production RDS postgres cluster did that a few months back. Just stopped responding on the network. Health checks were fine. AWS support was mostly useless and couldn't work it out in an hour, despite having their top tier enterprise support, so with customers down we had to create a whole new cluster and do a restore from backup which took 4 hours.

RDS is now gone. It's on a couple of EC2 instances with replication, hourly EBS snapshots and daily shipping to S3.

I'm loathed to use AWS's "encapsulated" services for anything since.


I think these are isolated incidents though. We’ve ran several tens of RDS clusters for 6 years running, and nothing has ever gone wrong. Maybe the ap-northeast-1 region is well maintained?


Could that be an AWS operational issue, and not related to Valkey?

I only run redis myself but wouldn't immediately place blame on Valkey if that happened.


Yeah I don't understand how something could be "completely offline" and still have health checks passing.


"completely offline" also doesn't sound like a problem with a software project. At best it's a particular managed service experiencing downtime. Would Linux be to blame if my power supply goes up in smoke?


It’s a bit confusing to me exactly what went wrong. I think that when you have a redis/valkey cluster with multiple nodes and you use the cluster uri, there must be some kind of load balancer or custom routing. When we would attempt to connect to valkey the connection would look good, but when we would submit commands to it they would never execute. We had written our application so that it would operate with no issue (just slower) if the cache goes down. In this case, connections looked good but no work was actually being done. AWS support suggested we restart the nodes but because they were not responding they never shut down … or at least it took a really long time. They were never able to tell us what actually happened. My guess is that valkey command execution got stuck somehow but was still able to create new connections.


“Completely offline” and passing health checks don’t typically go together…


Can’t be reached outside the network that the instance and health check are running on? Maybe available in one AZ, but not on the one that’s trying to connect.


Why you don't just run new instance with your own Valkey?


Because when you’re in production with many users, it’s not worth the risk when you’ve already been burned, especially when the downside is a small discount.


The aws managed cache offerings are not just a small premium, they're like 10x more expensive than the ec2 instance types they represent.


Its more but I doubt its 10x or even close to that.


It's not even 2x. I spot checked 2 instance types and they were 36% and 69% more.


What instance types were you using, just for reference?


I’m lost at why a DB (Cassandra) with better write performance than read performance was ever selected for a messaging system. I feel like it’s obvious that a message will be read more than it is written (once).


The fact that it has better write speed than read speed doesn't mean that it has bad read speed. It just happens to have even better write speed.

It's like how I connect my phone to my home's cable connection to send a big file. It is better at downloading than uploading, but that doesn't mean it's not the best solution for uploading.


While it’s true that messages are read more, reading can be cached so not every read necessarily results in a DB call.


Which seems something they added recently but was not part of the original design of using Cassandra


At this point just use Java instead.


The assurance you get from the examples in the article are pretty basic, but there are contracts you’ll have a lot of trouble encoding in the type system, like “arguments are integers in ascending order.”


I agree 100%


But you can do that, obviously not with this syntax. It’s non standard but I have built programs that install all dependencies as a first step. It’s pretty trivial.


I have the same laptop. I am able to run two monitors plus my internal screen without display link. The trick is to use ALT mode on one. This is dependent on at least one of the monitors supporting ALT mode.


I’ve worked on several large and prominent projects; most of which experienced a large layoff of engineers in the middle of development. As the team who regularly takes over laid off team’s work with 1 engineer to the previous 10. The top things that slows our team down is “legacy” node applications (it seems like every time you turn around, whatever JavaScript or node version you used is out of date) and figuring out why an anonymous function exists and what it does.

Also due to the multiple style choices and options in JavaScript the readability is trash.


Unless you’re using a modern IDE… Then you just command click, and it takes you right to the function.


Then why not just store the encrypted credential on the device itself?

Would that be what passkeys would be?


Theft: A $2000 laptop is an easy target for anyone with sticky fingers, and so is a $1000 smartphone. A Yubikey has essentially zero resale value, so you will not lose them due to random theft.

Durability: If you drop your smartphone, there's a pretty good chance you'll shatter the screen and buy a new one. You can play tennis with a Yubikey and it'll be fine. You can run it through the washing machine and it'll be fine.

Longevity: Laptops and smartphones generally only have a 3-5 year lifespan due to battery degradation, and many people will want to swap it for one with more storage or whatever anyways. A Yubikey will essentially last forever, and if you stay clear of the insanity that is Passkeys its Webauthn element can support an infinite number of websites.

Portability: I have a smartphone, a work laptop, a home laptop, and a home desktop. My Yubikey has USB and NFC, so it can trivially be used with all of them. Individually enrolling each device would be a nightmare, and having the credentials sync is a bad idea from a security perspective.

Security: If your device gets compromised, it's pretty much game over: the attacker can now log in to all your accounts, any time they want. With a Yubikey I have to physically insert it and tap the button for each login - which is relatively rare because active sessions don't tend to expire. This means I would have to actively participate in a mass compromise of my accounts, making it way more likely to be noticed.


Passkeys is like embedded Yubikeys, or, Yubikeys are like external passkeys.

The point of passkeys that the key is kept inside a separate secure computer running secure blobs, so user codes can't touch it. That sounds sketchy but contactless payments using similar embedded secure computer has been fine so this should be too.


A couple of other people answered you already in a lot of detail, so I don’t have much to add there.

But I do recognize that really is a legitimate question and it feels like Yubi would benefit from running more outreach / promotion programs with schools and companies. I never felt like I could justify spending $50 just to try it out(especially when it doesn’t have support in a lot of sites), but then they partnered with Cloudflare to sell up to 5 per person at $10 each. It was a no-brainer to try it at that price and I haven’t looked back


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