What Codec Does Netflix Streaming Use

My colleague John Ciancutti recently posted about our use of HTML5 for Then Netflix, or any other video streaming to making video streaming in HTML5 a.

HTML5 and Video Streaming

Streaming Media East: Netflix Making the Move to HEVC, but Efficiency Gains Lag

Netflix discusses embracying HEVC slowly, pushing 4K, and embracing IMF/MXF as a high-quality input format

We re not seeing efficiency gains being claimed by HEVC encoding vendors, said David Ronca, manager of encoding technology at Netflix.

Ronca made his comments during a session at the 2014 Streaming Media East show, being held today and tomorrow at the New York Hilton. The session, titled Netflix s Video Workflow: Transcoding, Codec s and 4K Streaming, focused on those three key areas.

Ronca noted that the Netflix approach of measuring quality versus time shows that high-effiency video coding HEVC yields about the same quality as x264 with much longer encode times up to ten times longer.

Yet it appears that the limitations of HEVC today aren t deterring Netflix from making the move to HEVC. In two years, we expect about a 20-30 efficiency versus x264, he said.

We are very excited about HEVC, he said. All of our innovation is going to be shifting to HEVC. We re not pessimistic, but I m just telling what we see today.

Ronca also walked through the transcoding process, highlighting the need to be detailed in the reasons an uploaded mezzanine file asset might be rejected by Netflix.

When we reject an upload, and send it back to a content provider, we have to give a detailed reason, he said. We can t just give an FFMPEG error code.

Ronca noted parts of the transcoding workflow includes a number of inspections, including both system layer inspections and decode inspections.

We fully decode the source, with no errors allowed, said Ronca.

The Netflix team then does a decoded picture analysis, including telecine detection. In addition, tests are performed for commercial black detection allowing no more than two seconds of commercial black and crop detection.

Netflix also does audio detection tests.

Sometimes we ll be told that a particular set of audio files is a left-right mix down, and yet we ll find that it s actually side-channel audio, said Ronca, noting this would also be reported back to the content provider.

Ronca talked about the difference in the older encoding solution Netflix used, called Matrix, versus the new one called MAPLE, which stands for Massively Parallel Encoding.

MAPLE handles a video job by chunking across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. A progressive model is used to efficiently handle transient errors, eliminating the problem faced in a long encode where it may fail towards the end, requiring the entire asset to be re-transcoded.

To place these parallel encodes in proper sequential order, which are done in small chunks of video on many different machines, scene change detection information is gathered and then used to re-assemble the chunks.

We have around five nines reliability, said Ronca. We ve never had a false negative, meaning a bad encode has never made it out to our customers.

Ronca then discussed MAPLE in action, with one example being a worst-case encode: a collection of short films by a famous cinematographer. The asset was 4.95 hours in total length and took 96 hours to encode 1080p in the older Matrix system, with over 900 compute hours completed. The high number of compute hours were based in large part on various transient errors.

MAPLE handled it in less than three hours.

Ronca then shifted to talking about UltraHD 4K and preferred formats.

One of the more difficult processes for us is working with 2TB files for UltraHD, said Ronca, noting that a 2TB file being downloaded could take up to 24 hours, which causes issues around transient errors. In addition, most EC2 instances don t have enough storage space to handle a 2TB file.

The answer for us was chunked inspections, said Ronca. MAPLE allows us to do this.

We now have the ability to move 4K assets through our workflow almost as fast as 2K assets, said Ronca, adding that the almost was based on the fact that high-efficiency video coding HEVC take a bit longer than advanced video coding AVC.

Ronca said that UltraHD 4K is interesting not just because of the resolution, but also because of the high frame rate HFR that provides a different viewing experience when content is viewed at 4K60 sixty frames per second versus the slower frame rate of 4K30.

We also like the HDR and wider color gamut of UltraHD, said Ronca.

Ronca also noted formats that Netflix supports, staring with MPEG-2 Transport Streams M2TS. He said that M2TS is well supported but doesn t allow for parallel inspections like those being done for the 4K assets, due to the fact that M2TS is a series of sequential packets that must be inspected in sequence.

ProRes is a very high-quality format also supported by Netflix, but Ronca notes that it s a proprietary format that s not heavily documented as a specification. A third format, DPX, is another that Ronca says is high quality, allowing parallel and progressive processing but that it is at almost 2TB per hour and that Amazon S3 has a 5TB object limit size.

We don t feel that DPX is practical for scale, said Ronca.

IMF/MXF based on JPEG 2000 is an emerging standard with the ability to deliver incremental revisions.

We are very excited about IMF/MXF, said Ronca, noting that February 2014 was the first time that Netflix deployed encodes based on IMF/MXF.

IMF/MXF is the future, said Ronca. We re investing heavily and have messaged down to our content providers that it is the preferential format, and there may eventually be a point where it is the required format.

Watch the address below and download a PDF file of the presentation.

Ronca made his comments during a session at the 2014 Streaming Media East Codec s and 4K Streaming, focused on The Netflix team then does a decoded.

Watch Netflix movies TV shows online or stream right to your smart TV, game console, PC, Mac, mobile, tablet and more. Terms of Use; Privacy/Cookies.

Mar 27, 2014  Can a New Video Format Save Netflix From Future ISP Shakedowns.

This is Christian Kaiser, VP of Engineering here at Netflix.

My colleague John Ciancutti recently posted about our use of HTML5 for user interfaces; I thought I d add a perspective on HTML5 and video streaming.

Since HTML5 includes a facility to embed video playback the tag, it seems like a natural next step for us to use it for streaming video playback within our HTML5-based user interfaces. However, as of today, there is no accepted standard for advanced streaming through the tag.

Such a standard would enable agreement between streaming video clients and services about the following:

The acceptable A/V container formats e.g. Fragmented MP4, WebM, etc. ;The acceptable audio and video codecs e.g. H.264, VP8, AAC, etc. ;The streaming protocol e.g. HTTP, RTP, etc. ;A way for the streaming protocol to adapt to available bandwidth;A way of conveying information about available streams and other parameters to the streaming player module;A way of supporting protected content e.g. with DRM systems ;A way of exposing all this functionality into HTML5.

That is a long list of complex issues. We ve resolved the first six items for ourselves with our proprietary technology. Similarly, many other companies have their own proprietary, and mutually incompatible, solutions.

But what if we could replace all these proprietary solutions with an industry-wide standard. Then Netflix, or any other video streaming service, could deliver to a standard browser as a pure HTML5 web application, both on computers and in CE devices with embedded browsers. Browser builders and CE manufacturers could support every OS and device they choose, leveraging the same implementations across multiple streaming services instead of building and integrating an one-off implementation for each service. Consumers would benefit by having a growing number of continually evolving choices available on their devices, just like how the web works today for other types of services.

We believe that this is an attractive goal.

In order to help achieve this goal, we are looking into a number of options. We are already actively participating in the MPEG committee for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP DASH to define an industry standard for adaptive streaming, together with Apple, Microsoft and a number of other companies.

The proposed DASH standard covers the first five items listed above: It defines a way to advertise a range of different streams to a player together with the information it needs to pick which ones to stream. It also defines media file formats suitable for adaptive streaming. The file formats enable efficient and seamless switching between streams, enabling a player to adapt to changing network conditions without pausing playback for re-buffering. The standard considers the differing needs of both on-demand services such as ours, and live services. And it s all based on the use of industry standard HTTP servers.

We expect to be able to publish a draft of a Netflix profile describing a limited subset of the MPEG DASH standard early next year. It will define the requirements for premium on-demand streaming services like ours and will take advantage of hooks included in the DASH standard to integrate the DRM technologies that we need to fulfill our contractual obligations to the content providers, thus covering the sixth item on our list.

What s still missing is how to address the last item - how exactly to tie advanced streaming standards MPEG DASH and others into the HTML5 tag.

To this end, we are starting to get involved in the community with the goal to help shape a great standard that will be useful to everybody involved in building browsers, CE devices and services for streaming video over the Internet.

We know that achieving this goal will take a while. In the meantime, we ll continue to evolve our own streaming technology to make sure our members have the best streaming experience possible and to get to as many platforms as we can.

Addendum: We are hiring. Specifically, this opening is for a position related to making video streaming in HTML5 a reality. We have a lot of other opportunities, too. Please visit our careers site.

Find what you re looking for: Netflix originals, press releases, blog posts, ISP speed rankings, corporate assets, premiere dates, and more.

What File Format Are Netflix Movies.. Netflix streaming movies were originally encoded using WMV3 and WMA formats WMV3 is the Windows Media 9 codec.