Help understanding cryptic sentence about the Netflix app

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SuperrSonic
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Joined: Mon May 12, 2014 8:19 pm

Help understanding cryptic sentence about the Netflix app

Post by SuperrSonic » Sun Jul 31, 2016 7:45 am

Previously Netflix used a fixed bitrate and reso ladder for every title, earlier this year they stopped using that for most titles and giving each title their own optimized version of the ladder, this change is slightly noticeable on Wii because now a title can play at say 620kbps 720x480 causing short frame drops.
I looked in the uncompressed dol and found an XML type code that let's you set what bitrate and profiles to enable, apparently you can only pick from main and/or baseline h264.
Baseline is the highest bitrate here, and is always the same bitrate and resolution, once the app switches to it no more frame drops occur.

I wonder how much more optimized can the app be than WiiMC? I've looked at the other video apps Hulu Plus, Crunchyroll they both reference one codec; MPEG4 part 2. Which made me more curious to know how they still got h264 to play so smoothly, I found one clue but it makes no sense to me.

"Migration of playback engine on Wii game console from a custom H.263 recipe to a shared H.264 stream, significantly reducing operational costs" -This comes from a Netflix dev's LinkedIn account.
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Extrems
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Re: Help understanding cryptic sentence about the Netflix app

Post by Extrems » Sun Jul 31, 2016 9:51 am

Those specs don't sound that impressive.
SuperrSonic
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Re: Help understanding cryptic sentence about the Netflix app

Post by SuperrSonic » Sun Jul 31, 2016 10:51 am

But they definitely don't work well on WiiMC at 30fps, even with VBV limits the video slows down.
tueidj
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Re: Help understanding cryptic sentence about the Netflix app

Post by tueidj » Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:24 pm

Baseline disallows cabac which has a major influence on decoding speed.
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