shouldn’t 1080p and 4k have no difference if my monitor is only capable of displaying 1080p
In: 422
literally there’s an ltt or tech quickie or some other lmg vidya on this. it’s the fact they compress the data more on the lower res stream of the vidyas. so while the monitor can only show x amount of pixels, each pixel will look better on the higher bit rate streams. or something like that. i dunno. watch the video.
sooo, do the opposite occurs as well? if I watch HD/FHD on a 4k TV does it make it look better?
Most of it stems from chroma subsampling used to reduce the bandwidth needed – a detailed explanation is e.g. provided in [Why Does 4K Look Better on 1080p Monitors?](https://youtu.be/kIf9h2Gkm_U)
The sound is better too. They are just holding out on you because they have unsustainable businesses.
Turning 4k video into 1080p video means doing some math to figure out what color goes in each pixel. Not everyone does that math exactly the same way, so different conversions of 4k into 1080p will have different colors in some of the pixels. Apparently you like the conversion your graphics card does more than the one the video creator did.
If you’ve ever heard of multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA), that’s telling your graphics card to render some features of a game in a higher resolution and downscale it, so it can make more informed decisions about which color should go in each pixel. That’s more or less the same principle as is happening here. Your graphics card makes very good decisions about how to downscale high-resolution video into low-resolution video.
People have decent insight, but the main thing to consider is the amount of information in a video. Compression typically is proportionate to an image, and as there’s more information in 4k, assuming a full HD (1080) video and 4k video uses the same compression, you can still expect the 4k version of the video to still be larger, and this have more information in it.
Once the information is received by your computer (streaming, normal download, already saved on your PC), it’s a matter of resizing the video to fit your screen. Since the 4k has more detail simply because it’s larger and has more information, the effects of compression are less noticed when it’s shrunk down.
Similarly, if you take an HD video (720) and then take a FHD (1080) version but shrink it down, it’ll look a bit better because again, compression will typically happen before resizing.
Mind you, this was how it was explained to me a while back.
It can depend on the content. Most 4k content simply has more detail than content originally shot in 1080p. Those details will still come through to an extent even when downscaled. This effect is especially noticeable on streaming services where most 1080p content is compressed coming in. 4k content on the same service will also be compressed, but because it was larger to begin with, it’s larger and less compressed comparatively.
I tend to think of it similar to supersampling. (In short its a technique used where you render the video in higher scales, and then scale it down in native resolution).
Streaming services if they have captured 4k they compress it and downscale it to all other resolutions so they dont have to send much data. But the GPU probably does the job better when it has access to the raw video.
Also you might hear “compression”, but in reality data is thrown away in a non recoverable way
Compressed video can be scaled to whatever size screen, doesn’t have much to do with how good the video actually looks. Quality of video has everything to do with bitrate, how much data there actually is, almost no video comes in completely raw quality. 1080p at 60fps would be 3GB/s raw, that’s a bit much to stream from youtube. But not all data is of equal importance, you can throw away a lot of high frequency information without you noticing much difference so that’s what compression does, how much video is compressed ultimately determines how good the video looks. 4k or 1080p has less to do with resolution and more to do with how much information is thrown away, 4k just plain has more data in it.
You know how anti aliasing softens edges of lines by smoothing the color so the edges seem less jagged? Similar to that. 4k to 1080p is kinda the same. More information/detail means that the transition between each pixel line isn’t so harsh, giving you a better anti aliasing from the down scale processing of higher graphics.
Things look better because the edges of lines have smoother color transition from the downscale. A form of antisliasing
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