| In the era of x264, we ( the user or the enthusiast communities ) and x264 developers deeply cared about preserving the original content as much as possible, even the noise and artefacts. That was in the 00s. It is not the encoder's job to remove or filter out all the details. Background or not. There are some caveat to that but that was comparatively speaking at the time, say RMVB from Real Media or WMV. Worth remembering it wasn't really the internet era back then. People encode so they could fit more things into CD and DVDs. At least that was how it started. Somewhere along the line Internet, or mobile internet aka iPhone happened. Now everyone watches on a small screen. With all details washed out, people just want to consume. None of the details mattered. What we would only used to do in AVISyth Filter are now done automatically with Encoder. The 10 min Youtube video doesn't care about any of that. And then the 3 min, now the attention span is basically 30s TikTok or Instagram Reels. Worst of all a lot of these attention to details are also gone when doing Netflix or other long from of movie streaming. VMAF 90 is good enough, lets try to minimise the bit rate as much as possible. We need higher / best quality at minimal bitrate, instead of having bare minimum / good enough quality at lowest possible bitrate. The two are very different. While the march of internet / tech giant on video codec means someday we may lose out. Somewhat fortunately we still have a small group of old people in the movie production, broadcast industry, and private torrents release group still cares about these. Hopefully, someday, especially the west, could move back to celebrate greatness rather than mediocre. |