I'm surprised they didn't mention turning off closed captioning, because understanding the dialog is less important than experiencing the creator's intent.

I haven’t experienced issues understanding dialogue in Stranger Things, for what it’s worth.

It helps that they're mostly shouting explanations at each other.

Haha, this is very true. They really narrate what they are doing.

Incidentally, that's the reason why I love photography in Nolan's movies: he seems to love scenes with bright light in which you can actually see what's going on.

Most other movies/series instead are so dark that make my mid-range TV look like crap. And no, it's not an HW fault, as 500 nits should be enough to watch a movie.

Very ironic that it is Nolan who is widely known for consiously making movies with incomprehensible dialogue.

There is a difference between dialogue you aren't supposed to understand (Nolan) and dialogue you should understand but can't (basically everyone else)

Have you seen Tenet? Almost the entire movie is impossible to understand, and it's a film that depends heavily on exposition.

By making the exposition unintelligible, I guess he's illustrating how complicated time travel makes a story.

Except Primer did that without this crutch.

Yeah... At home we have partially solved this problem by using a BT speaker on the table, as we mostly watch movie while we have dinner. Simple and effective.

Mentioned this elsewhere but The Dark Knight Rises is one of the worst dark movie offenders. When someone says dark movie scenes it’s what comes to my mind. That one confusing backwards movie has terrible audio he did on purpose.

Oppenheimer didnt suffer from either of those issues but I’ve only watched it once on a good TV.

I've watched Silo season 2 and it is basically impossible to watch it during the day. Only at night, with brightness cranked up to 100%.

Game of Thrones S8E3.

Could barely tell what was going on, everything was so dark, and black crush killed it completely, making it look blocky and janky.

I watched it again a few years later, on max brightness, sitting in the dark, and I got more of what was going on, but it still looked terrible. One day I'll watch the 'UHD' 4k HDR version and maybe I'll be able to see what it was supposed to look like.

Problem is, you’ll have to find a high bitrate version. Whatever they streamed on HBO the day of release was really shitty bitrate which crushes detail in detail-starved scenes like these

I tried a load of different versions including blu-ray rips IIRC, and it was all just as bad.

When I last rewatched it (early pandemic), as far as I could tell at the time there was no HDR version available, which I assume would fix it by being able to represent more variation in the darker colours.

I might hunt one down at some point as it does exist now. Though it still wouldn’t make season 8 ‘good’ !!

Or all of terminal list. That show is so extremely dark that it might as well just be voices over a screen saver.

My LG oled will go darker by itself during prolonged dark scenes, its not noticeable (other than that you can't see anything and you're not sure if its correct or not) until you get to a slightly brighter scene, can get it to stop for a bit by opening a menu.

I turned off HDR. Much happier now that I can see what's going on on the screen.

See the color palettes of any 2015+ blockbuster[1] to validate your belief (save for Wes Anderson, maybe).

1: https://i.redd.it/nyrs8vsil6m41.jpg

Netflix shows in particular are ridiculously dark.

Heavily compressed.

If you check it will say the resolution is AMAZING.

Despite being a subscriber I pirate their shows to get some pixels.

I have some *arrs on my server. Anything that comes from Netflix is bitstarved to death. If the same show is available on virtually any other streaming service, it will be at the very least twice the size.

No other service does this.

And for some reason, if HDR versions of their 1080p content are even more bitstarved than SDR.

Things can be both high resolution and still low quality due to being overcompressed.

I really wish they had to advertise streams at bitrate and not resolution.

Bitrate still won’t tell you how bad the encoding is. There can be dramatic differences at the same or inverse bitrate.

This is true for amateurs encoding video files to be pirated, but for the mega corps, sending more bits costs more money.

Many years ago, I had a couple drinks with a guy from Netflix who worked on their video compression processes, and he fully convinced me they're squeezing every last drop out of every bit they send down the pipes. The quality is not great compared to some other streaming services, but it's actually kind of amazing how they're able to get away with serving such tiny files.

Anyway, I think we can expect these companies to mostly max out the resultant video quality of their bitstreams, and showing the average bitrate of their pricing tiers would be a great yardstick for consumers.

Netflix's main audience is general public who still cannot differentiate between mbps and MBps.

for us nerds there is hidden stats for nerds option.

https://blog.sayan.page/netflix-debug-mode/

millibits per second is awfully slow.

While this is true, looking at it sometimes has quality so bad that I think the displayed resolution is just a complete lie.

YouTube does this. When I open a video the quality is set to Auto by default. It'll also show the "actual" quality next to it, like "Auto 1080p". Complete lie. I see this and see the video looks like 480p, manually change to 1080p and it's instantly much better. The auto quality thing is a flat out lie.

Where do pirates get the shows from? Not from the very platform you're trying to avoid?

Which is even worse since darker gradients seem to leave more visible compression artifacts.

Flatscreen TVs have terrible speakers, especially for speech.