[rbutcher]

Netflix sends you a video that has been lossy compressed once. If you lossy compress that lossy compressed video, then you will have a video of worse quality than the video that was only lossy compressed once.

Original source video > Netflix video stream (1 level of lossy encoding) > Recompressed video stream (2 levels of lossy encoding)

[braveo]

I think you'll find if you record and compress a netflix 4k video, the resulting quality will be just fine, especially if you're recording it and compressing it later (rather than doing it realtime).

That's because, while it may have been compressed going over the wire, it's 4k and the quality is pretty stinkin' good.

what you don't do is try to simply recompress the signal that netflix is sending you, you uncompress and then compress.

At which point you're not "recompressing", what you're doing is compressing a stream that may not be as high quality as the original, uncompressed form, but it's a truckload better than sneaking into the theater and recording that way.

[rbutcher]

Nobody has said that the quality would be bad, just that some amount of generation loss [1] will occur when you use a lossily compressed [2] video (the netflix stream) as input for the creation of another lossily compressed video (the "recompressed" video file). The "recompressed" video would be slightly worse than the streamed video, which would be slightly worse than the original video.

An approximation of an approximation of a video is going to be worse than an approximation of a video.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_loss

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression

[braveo]

right, but what algesten originally said was (emphasis mine):

> _Problem is_ that grabbing the last frame buffer would mean you're doing it post decompression. To distribute something you grabbed like that you'd need to recompress it and then have a generation degradation of lossy compression.

In the context of getting a decent pirated copy, that's not really a problem due to how good those streams are.

That was my point, anyway.