NETFLIX has introduced a new way to help you stop any judder that’s disrupting your viewing experience, engineers at the streaming giant have revealed.
Judder is when the motion on the telly is not moving smoothly, it stutters and can feel like it’s putting a strain on your eyes.
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The phenomenon is caused when there are not enough extra frames in a TV show or movie, so the picture jolts slightly on the screen.
But Netflix engineers David Zheng, Akshay Garg and Roger Quero have figured out a new way to stop this.
Fixes will rely on motion interpolation, and depending on which TV you have, this process will be called something different.
For example, LG TVs call its TruMotion, Sony says Motionflow, Samsung refers to it as Auto Motion Plus.
So, when Netflix creates a show, it makes it in a specific frame rate which your TV then has to decode to make sure you can watch it as intended.
When this technology works well, you don’t notice any issues and you can watch TV shows and movies seamlessly.
But if motion isn’t smoothed out, you get judder.
Motion interpolation means that Netflix adds extra frames to match the content up with what your TV can handle.
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It might sound all a bit technical, but the Netflix app on your TV can adapt to whichever solution you choose to use.
However, first you need to make sure that in your TV settings, you haven’t flicked the Match Content Frame Rate button to Never.
If you have, simply change it to Allow or Seamless – whichever option (or the equivalent of) comes up on your device.
Solution #1: Match HDMI frame rate to content Native Frame Rate
This is the oldest solution, and can easily be done by heading into your TV’s settings.
However, it can cause a blank screen to display just after you hit play – which some viewers might find annoying.
“Once this feature is enabled in the system settings, devices will match the HDMI output frame rate with the content frame rate, either exactly or an integer multiple, without user intervention,” the Netflix experts wrote in a Medium blog post.
“While this sounds like the perfect solution, devices that support older HDMI technologies e.g. HDMI v<2.1, can’t change the frame rate without also changing the HDMI data rate.
“This results in what is often referred as an ‘HDMI bonk’ which causes the TV to display a blank screen momentarily.”
Solution #2: Match HDMI frame rate to content Native Frame Rate w/o screen blanking
This second solution is still fairly new and only works on Apple TV 4K, which was released last year.
“Improvements in the recent HDMI standards (HDMI 2.1+) now allow a source device to send the video content at its native frame rate without needing an HDMI resynchronisation,” they added.
“This is possible through an innovative technology called Quick Media Switching (QMS) which is an extension of Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) targeted for content playback scenarios.
“QMS allows a source device to maintain a constant data rate on the HDMI link even during transmission of content with different frame rates.
“It does so by adjusting the amount of non-visible padding data while keeping the amount of visible video data constant.
“Unfortunately, at present, this technology is relatively new and adoption into source and sink devices will take time.”
The new solution #3: Frame Rate Conversion within Netflix Application
This third solution was thought up by Zheng himself, and relies on Netflix more than your TVs settings.
“It is possible for an application like Netflix to manipulate the presentation time stamp value of each video frame to minimise the effect of judder,” they wrote.
For example, the app can present video frames to the TV that helps it minimise the judder associated with an HDMI output link.
The best thing about Netflix’s solution is that it’s all done inside the Netflix app itself, so it doesn’t matter what TV is being used.
Netflix is still perfecting this, and is set to release more details on how this works in the coming weeks.
But with any luck, users should begin to notice that content will be being replayed much more smoothly than before.
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