Awful HD quality video

This is not a streaming problem or site video player problem. It's also not a brand new problem as such, GB has always had some issues with video compression. But the brand new Bayonetta 2 trailer really just looks like absolute shit in so many spots that I couldn't ignore it anymore.

Just look at all those beautiful blocks.

I downloaded tr_bayonetta2_021314_4000 and a random 720p Youtube video of the same trailer. Guys, your compression is worse the Youtube compression. I mean you can see compression in the Tube video as well, but yours is just a complete mess. What's funnier is that your video is about 20 megs larger and has higher bitrate but still looks like absolute butt.

I don't know enough about video compression to suggest how to fix it though, someone else will have to figure that out. Here's what MediaInfo says the commanline is, in case some video wizard from the community knows more.

Encoding settings : cabac=1 / ref=5 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x1:0x131 / me=dia / subme=6 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=0 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=1 / 8x8dct=0 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=24 / lookahead_threads=4 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=0 / weightp=0 / keyint=60 / keyint_min=25 / scenecut=0 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=40 / rc=abr / mbtree=1 / bitrate=4000 / ratetol=1.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=10 / qpmax=51 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.41 / aq=1:1.00

Paging @mr_pibb and @tsubomi

I'm currently watching their Titanfall beta video and that too is looking a little grungy at HD settings on HTLM.

I had a similar problem watching a video (Firefox, Windows 7).

But I tend to download the longer videos and those seem ok.

I think Giant Bomb does their videos at 60fps as opposed to 30fps of youtube so they would need a higher bitrate to have similar quality stills. This may end up hurting trailers that they get at 30fps as well unless they adjust for this. Clearly we just need to hold out for UHD Hi10P 60Hz. The high bitrate of 4k on youtube actually makes it look quite nice even if you only have a 1080p monitor.

It's a combination of the switch to 60fps videos and not enough encoding time. They could just double or triple the bitrate for a big bump in quality (and filesize, unfortunately) but what they should also do is encode the videos using slower and more thorough h.264 settings. The fast turnaround from when live shows air to when the archive is posted is nice, but if the quality is poor then there's really no point in doing it that quickly.

Does it affect adversely to videos when the source is 30fps like the Bayonetta trailer, but their settings expect 60fps?

Vinny, time to bump up the bitrate again!

They don't even have to do that to make the videos look nicer. I looked at some of their videos and got the encoding info with MediaInfo and ran a few tests with my own encodes. It looks to me like they're using fairly low-end settings aimed at speed and almost nothing else. Even if they kept everything the same but added a second pass (2-pass encoding) the quality would improve a fair bit and it would only slightly increase the file size.

The drawback there is that it takes roughly double the time to encode a video. But I would rather have a video with consistently nice quality a few hours later or the next day over a blurry/blocky video an hour after the stream ends.