Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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HBO should use a different bumper for streaming. (self.showerthoughts)

submitted 2 months ago by JasonDJ to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The bumper...I don't know what it's called...that little clip with the snow that fades in and reveals the logo.

It's terrible.

For one, a lot of people actually don't know what TV static is. Analog broadcasts stopped almost 16 years ago, and before that, most younger people had cable.

For another, static is really difficult to compress. It looks horrible and consumes way too much bandwidth for just a couple of seconds that won't even load right. If anything, they should cache a local copy of the bumper in-app in a format that doesn't look like ass when every pixel changes every frame.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Video codecs mostly work by tracking movement, predicting which pixels will change, and striving to only encode the pixels that actually change or change dramatically. In other words, compression looks for patterns.

All of that goes out the window when you try to compress static. There are no patterns. It simply can't be compressed. This isn't a matter of the algorithms not being good enough. It's a fundamental limit of information theory.

Anything fancier amounts to embedding the intro into the compressor as a well-known pattern. And at that point, you're better off just caching a 4K version of the intro as a standalone video file directly in the app.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Why not just have the app dynamically generate the static with random numbers every time. There is no video file of white noise, and bonus the bumper intro is never exactly the same twice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's a good idea. They could probably do something similar for the audio.

They'd have to code around the rest of the animation and audio effects, but the size of that code would certainly be smaller than the rendered audio and video.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

These are both really cool ideas and seem like a fun project.

[–] JasonDJ 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You guys are basically describing the old Demoscene.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Love that stuff, it's so cool.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Maybe we've gotten used to that very particular white noise pattern and anything else would feel wrong?

Completely pulled that out of my ass, for the record.

[–] JasonDJ 0 points 2 months ago

Do you think dynamically rendering 4k snow is something your typical FireTV stick is capable of doing?