shouldn’t 1080p and 4k have no difference if my monitor is only capable of displaying 1080p
In: 422
Think of a swimming pool. The size of the pool is the resolution, the water level is something called bitrate. Now it feels pretty sad to swim in a pool that is half filled. And increasing the size requires more water to fill it up.
Youtube and others have done a misleading job over the years to train people to think the only metric of importance with video quality is the size of the pool. Except you’ve noticed the difference between the same pool size and the water level coming up to near full.
Thats because these online video hosting sites pay a large amount of money to send you these files. The more water they send, the more it costs them. So they try their best to ever so slightly under fill the pool(hoping you won’t notice). Except with a 4k sized pool, if they kept the same water level for a 1080p sized pool, it would be immediately noticed.
This is a major criticism of other streaming sites, like netflix, compared to disc media(like blu ray). Their incentive is to crush the bitrate to save on bandwidth costs.
The pool analogy falls over when dealing with scene complexity, as motion compression works on ‘non-motion’ but that goes above an ELI5.
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