Hey, as promised, here are our findings.
We tested few ways:
- comparing stills like some posted:
- in cases where most of the frame is BG there was no major differences, maybe different artifacts
- in scenes with more going on, you can notice a drop in quality
- rendered videos where it switches the bitrate while its playing - we found it impossible to notice the switch (I will prepare few samples with watermark so you can all participate in this)
What is important to note here, we focused on what's noticeable when watching on headset, not zoomed in photoshop.
Now to the good stuff. There were cases where we found room for improvement (like harem - where you have a full frame of girls). So we are revising our transcoding practice as we speak, where instead of using very high quality with a limiter, we will try adapting the quality and let the variable bitrate pick up where it has to (up to 45Mbits). We plan to do only on original (max) resolution, other resolutions will stay the same.
As many have assumed correctly, this is more of a business decision then anything else. And being a streaming service first, this is and will stay our primary focus.
