H265 - Technical Overview

A nice introduction to HEVC by Fabio Sonnati.

Delivering Breaking Bad on Netflix in Ultra HD 4K

This week Netflix is pleased to begin streaming all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad in UltraHD 4K. Breaking Bad in 4K comes from Sony Pictures Entertainment’s beautiful remastering of Breaking Bad from the original film negatives. This 4K experience is available on select 4K Smart TVs.

As pleased as I am to announce Breaking Bad in 4K, this blog post is also intended to highlight the collaboration between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Netflix to modernize the digital supply chain that transports digital media from content studios, like Sony Pictures, to streaming retailers, like Netflix.

Netflix and Sony agreed on an early subset of IMF for the transfer of the video and audio files for Breaking Bad. IMF stands for Interoperable Master Format, an emerging SMPTE specification governing file formats and metadata for digital media archiving and B2B exchange.

IMF specifies fundamental building blocks like immutable objects, checksums, globally unique identifiers, and manifests (cpl). These building blocks hold promise for vastly improving the efficiency, accuracy, and scale of the global digital supply chain.

At Netflix, we are excited about IMF and we are committing significant R&D efforts towards adopting IMF for content ingestion. Netflix has an early subset of IMF in production today and we will support most of the current IMF App 2 draft by the end of 2014.

We are also developing a roadmap for IMF App 2 Extended and Extended+. We are pleased that Sony Pictures is an early innovator in this space and we are looking forward to the same collaboration with additional content studio partners.

Breaking Bad is joining House of Cards season 2 and the Moving Art documentaries in our global 4K catalog. We are also adding a few more 4K movies for our USA members. We have added Smurfs 2, Ghostbusters, and Ghostbusters 2 in the United States. All of these movies were packaged in IMF by Sony Pictures.

By Kevin McEntee, VP Digital Supply Chain, Netflix

HTML5 Video in Safari on OS X Yosemite

We're excited to announce that Netflix streaming in HTML5 video is now available in Safari on OS X Yosemite! We've been working closely with Apple to implement the Premium Video Extensions in Safari, which allow playback of premium video content in the browser without the use of plugins.

If you're in Apple's Mac Developer Program, or soon the OS X Beta Program, you can install the beta version of OS X Yosemite. With the OS X Yosemite Beta on a modern Mac, you can visit Netflix.com today in Safari and watch your favorite movies and TV shows using HTML5 video without the need to install any plugins.

We're especially excited that Apple implemented the Media Source Extensions (MSE) using their highly optimized video pipeline on OS X. This lets you watch Netflix in buttery smooth 1080p without hogging your CPU or draining your battery. In fact, this allows you to get up to 2 hours longer battery life on a MacBook Air streaming Netflix in 1080p - that’s enough time for one more movie!

Apple also implemented the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) which provides the content protection needed for premium video services like Netflix.

Finally, Apple implemented the Web Cryptography API (WebCrypto) in Safari, which allows us to encrypt and decrypt communication between our JavaScript application and the Netflix servers.

The Premium Video Extensions do away with the need for proprietary plugin technologies for streaming video. In addition to Safari on OS X Yosemite, plugin-free playback is also available in IE 11 on Windows 8.1, and we look forward to a time when these APIs are available on all browsers.

Congratulations to the Apple team for advancing premium video on the web with Yosemite! We’re looking forward to the Yosemite launch this Fall.

By Anthony Park and Mark Watson, Netflix Tech Blog