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.
Downsampling.
On a 1080p screen, a 1080p video equals 1 to 1 on pixels to your screen.
A 4K video has to downsample and condense more pixels into one, and having the “average” of all those pixels into one instead of it’s true, single value from a 1080p.
This means the results are more rich, because your 1080p screen pixels instead of holding the single value of a 1080p video, holds an average of the values of the 4K video, having a much better representation of what should really be there, because 4K has enough information and detail to maintain even if it’s viewed in a lower resolution.
Heres an [in-depth explanation](https://youtu.be/YiU-WpXYxoc) with videogames resolution, but should apply to anything media-wise.
Well..I don’t see a single answer that’s fit for a five year old…This will hopefully help…
Playing a 1080p video on a 1080p monitor means you have only one color per pixel for the monitor to decide what color to show. Playing a 4k video on a 1080p monitor gives the monitor 4 colors it can decide to mix together to make each pixel. That helps a little, but there’s more you can do with all that extra information such as knowing where the edge of something is in the image so you can change the pixel color more accurately, making the image look crisp and clean.
Compression. Uncompressed/RAW 1080p can look better than highly compressed H.264 4k, but the bandwidth requirements would be hundreds or even thousands of GB..
Because bitrate. Your 1080p videos are stored online at around 10mbps whereas 4k videos are stored at around 30mbps.
Basically the original video has a lot of bits (aka details in the images) and would be scaled down (ie down sampled) to fit your monitor resolution. The downsampling process would make the new video have much lesser bits/information/details than the original. But the funny thing about this process is that new down samples video has much more details because the original video was super rich in info (like a 4K video) in the first place.
I think graphics cards used to have this super sampling feature where the GPU would render the images in some higher resolution and down sample it for much better quality than just rendering it once in the base resolution.
Idk if it’s still there but at least we got this totally bogus deep learning nonsense instead.
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