On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:06:03 +0000, Invisible wrote:

>> I probably spend a couple hours a day reading my 200+ newsgroups. 
>> Again usually just skimming subjects for things that are interesting.
> 
> Damn. If I had that much stuff to look at, I'd *never* get any work
> done... Oh, wait.

Certainly if you didn't have a way of handling it more quickly, you 
wouldn't.  That's kinda my point.

>> Clearly not, as shown in my photo.  In the case of Netflix, they use a
>> dynamically adjusting algorithm so it can display lower quality if the
>> bandwidth is throttled.
> 
> So they actually offer multiple quality levels? Well, I guess that makes
> good sense. I'm not sure how you'd automatically detect which one to
> use, but I guess with the right client software it ought to be possible.

You start with the lowest quality and increase the quality until you hit 
some sort of limitation.  Buffer enough so it doesn't stutter when you 
hit the limitation, and then back off.

>>> Yes, the picture looks fine. I still don't understand how that can be
>>> possible though. The Internet isn't fast enough. I don't see how you
>>> can get the data from A to B fast enough for realtime playback.
>>
>> Compression.  We've been over this before.
> 
> Lossy compression allows you to make the file size be anything you want
> it to be. But this does not happen by magic; it happens by degrading the
> picture quality. So while it obviously /is/ possible to reduce a video
> stream to, say, 3KB per second, it wouldn't be worth watching. What I
> can't figure out is how they can shrink it down to realtime download
> speeds without it looking awful.

Measuring latency and throughput.  It's not magic.

Jim

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