Quality between Playon vs Audials

#1

I am posting this as partially just a comment on what I have noticed but inviting anyone who may have knowledge about why I am seeing this phenomenon.

So, I recently recorded some episodes of Devil In Ohio on both the Playon Cloud recorder and Audials 2023 on my PC (I have been using Audials for a while and not Playon, so just tried it today). I had Channels import them from Playon initially and watched episode 2. Several scenes would do that annoying stutter that I have seen in the past, especially on action or panning camera shots.

I removed the Playon recording from it's folder and replaced it with the one I recorded using Audials. I then started the episode again and skipped forward to the same scene where it was so bad on the Playon version. It played back as smooth as could be.

Out of curiosity I loading each file in VLC so that I could look at the codec information to see what could be so different. There were only very minor differences in the fps in each file. Playon was 23.957 and the file from Audials was 23.970. Both are H264 MPEG 4-AVC and resolution 1920x1080.

So, why does the Playon version look so much worse on playback when all the numbers look pretty much the same?

#2

What was the bit rate? I've noticed 24fps content with motion looks horrible on my LED tv if the bit rate is low. If I get a high bit rate, the video file looks great.

#3

I thought all PlayOn 1080p cloud recordings were HEVC (H.265) Variable Frame Rate?

Check one using mediainfo

#4

From Mediainfo: Overall bit rate mode: Variable
Overall bit rate: 1925 kb/s
SourceFps: 23.99
Codec is H264

The Audials version shows almost 3000 kb/s bitrate.

That must be the difference

#5

And your PlayOn cloud recording is 1080p?
If so, they must have changed it from H.265 to H.264
I was staying away from the cloud Full HD 1080p/H.265 since my video editor doesn't support Variable Frame Rate.

#6

Hmm...

I just double checked and those episodes were all 720p. The setting on my app for Playon was set for that somehow. I used to have it set for 1080p when I was using it earlier this year.

I just changed the setting and will try another episode and see if there is any change.

1 Like
#7

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