4K stream better quality than blu Ray disc?

[Zu Nim]

Originally Posted by alchav21

With Stats you can discredit anything, but your Engineer Posts are a year old and you know how Technology moves so fast. The BitRate at 9.5Mbps is the Average, but it can go much higher depending on the connection set up. Two or three years ago it was going up to 20Mbps, so by now it should be up to 40Mbps just like Blu-ray. I have FTTH, and I know other Posters who have said they see no difference between Blu-ray Disc and HDX. BitRate is all determined by the size of the File, and if you have Direct Access to the Vudu Server with Blu-ray Quality Files there is no reason to deny these Streaming capabilities.

No, you're simply wrong. HDX has been the same since it was released. Upgrading the infrastructure and getting their content partners to deliver new encodes would be a nontrivial effort. You've offered hand-waving about technology being fast as a refutation of what a VUDU engineer, with close knowledge of their own infrastructure, stated.

Dismissing "stats" in general and then supplying your own as a defense is absurd. Surely numbers aren't everything but they're most relevant here. There is an old aphorism about cars: There's no substitute for cubic inches. In this case there's no substitute for bitrate. I believe VUDU is the highest H.264 bitrate streamer. For comparison, Netflix SuperHD is 6Mbps. Both HDX and SuperHD look very good but neither match Blu-ray. Could some streamed content look better than some Blu-ray content? Absolutely. But that has more to do with the source/encode than the network.

The 9Mbps rate is not the average, it's the maximum. It doesn't burst higher, it's adaptive downwards. There's no 20Mbps average happening. Could you see transient spikes of 20Mbps using a network analysis tool? Sure. Then you'd see it drop to a minimal level, even 0Mbps. That has to do with network transport and buffering and isn't representative of the bitrate for the video stream contained within.

Saying that some people perceive HDX to be equivalent to Blu-ray is meaningless unless they watched the same content in the same controlled environment on the same equipment. A common rule of thumb is that you need double the bitrate to see a difference. Blu-ray is going to typically offer double the bitrate over HDX. If this was a debate between 9Mbps and 11Mbps, I would agree that many people could perceive them as being the same. But that's not the case here.