Forcing 24p from streaming services?

[Ryan Gallagher]

Does anyone have experience having the battle on the home entertainment front with streaming services and computers/tv-boxes/smart-tvs forcing it to deliver true film framerates?

At least with some hardware I read it is possible. I've only have an older AppleTV 3rd Gen, and Roku Stick to play with, neither of which seem to support 24p output.

On a entertainment front I'd love to watch movies at home at 24p. On a more practical front. Occasionally our theatre ends up in a situation booking a classic film print for 35mm that is only available in distribution in DVD form (or sometimes only in 35mm), but there are streams available at 1080p. We always run a digital backup to our film engagements, but DVD backups have fallen out of favor. I have the ability to rip from streams, for DCP generation of a backup, but the "24p" subject is my last hurdle to improving the quality of that backup.

If not direct delivery of 24p, perhaps a reliable way to de-telecine a 30fps29.97fps or 60fps/59.94fps recording back to it's 24p original? I could start from progressive or interlaced records, if there is a smoother process to try from one or the other.

Obviously playing directly from a streaming box is an option, but again still the 24p issue perhaps, and we don't like to rely on the internet in live audience situations. Rolling a DCP or playing the Blu-Ray are our two preferred backup methods.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Note I have a way to convert the 30 or 60fps output to 24p in the record path, but that converter is not "aware" of which frames to drop relative to the incoming source, and you end up with even worse motion artifacts because it just arbitrarily does it's own conversion.

Also amusing aside, I learned the other day our OPPO is not set to output 24p either (though it can), when you switch to 24p we lose our in booth monitoring (presumably because our rack monitor or the HDMI splitter before it does not support 24p). So our Blu-Ray presentations and backups have NEVER been 24p. Something to improve one day with some experimenting.

[Agnius Acus]

It's not worth your time. Difference in quality (motion smoothness, temporal resolution) would be negligible, especially in this day of age with variable refresh rate displays. I think most cinema projectors / media blocks support 23,976 input natively as well.

If you want to truly and noticeably improve quality both at home and at work, I suggest sourcing your films from UHD Blu-Rays, although in case of DCPs, it would also require color space conversion from HDR to SDR.

DVDs are absolute last resort for us. Streams are better, but still not good enough for proper theatrical presentation.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Getting most of those streaming boxes to output 24p is a mess, I'm not sure if the AppleTV box even supports it. I do know that the Nvidia Shield does support 24p and "free sync/G-sync" output. I'm not sure if Netflix does support it though. I'm pretty sure Disney+ on Android doesn't really bother, or they recently fixed stuff.

What I do know though is that I agree with Agnius on this one... I generally don't see the difference between a 3:2 pulldown of 24p content to 60 Hz refresh rates. Maybe if you run them side-by-side and maybe, in some edge cases with lots of specific motion. What's important is that none of your devices uses any "motion enhancement" to fill in the blanks with interpolated images, those things are THE HORROR.

The reasons why I refuse to use streams for large presentations isn't just the lack of quality, but also for the sake of stability. If you know how many wheels need to keep turning between your projector and the cloud server your stream originates from, you know why for any presentation that matters, you don't want to rely on "the cloud"...

Keep in mind: The cloud is just someone else's computer...

[Ryan Gallagher]

It's definitely shaping up to be not worth the time. (Although I was successful)

For sure, we definitely avoid internet dependent stream direct to screen at all costs. Hence this whole exercise in 35mm backup creation when blu-ray is not an option.

So academically speaking anyway. I was able to accomplish 1080p24 12bit "frame timing perfect" records from the Bezos service on a PC, provided that the title is not being quality limited below 1080p on PC. With current hardware I can only get 2ch audio though, cause that service also restricts that when on PC (as does YT too now, have not tested others). "Okay" for a pure backup I suppose. Audio leaves a bit to be desired if the title came from a surround era, but often the titles we need as backups are older than that.

We are 2k house, so no reason to seek better than 1080p/Blu-Ray for 35mm backups (for now).

Flow looked like this:

• Chrome on PC
• Dr. HDMI 4K (set to 1080p24 12b 5.1 audio) acting as 2nd monitor
• Generic HDMI to 3g-SDI device (also acts as the HDCP bypass), honored 24p on the output.
• Samurai Blade
• Output: 1080p24 ProRes 6ch (only getting 2ch mixdown because of streaming service)
• DCP-o-Matic
• 24p Stereo DCP!

I did confirm the Blade could see more channels from the OS and other websites... so it's not a chrome limitation. Just a per service quality kneecap for PC users.

I think I could get it working without the hardware recorder, but it is a bit more convoluted trying to get 5.1 audio from a capture device, and have to rely on different hardware for the HDCP topic (all HDMI chain).

There is also the fact that my prime account is not a MAX one yet, so subject to commercials on any non-rental/purchased content. That and they now splash the rating card on screen as the opening titles end.. in addition to having to deal with the overlay at the beginning and end.

So yeah, very NOT worth it, unless maybe dropping in a modern AppleTV, Roku, Shield, or AndroidTV solved both the framerate and audio issues and improved the overlay problem. Maybe I'll splurge one day and give it another try.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Ah, sorry, I guess a loud truck drove by when you mentioned the stuff about *THAT* way of rolling an euhm, backup from Bezos' streaming service.

Yeah, that's generally a mess. I'm somewhat surprised that your "Generic HDMI to 3g-SDI device" didn't give much about the HDCP. I guess it's one of these "generic devices". :P
I do have a bunch of Chinese "HDMI splitters", they go up to 1080p60, do support 1080p24 and also magically make HDCP disappear... I actually discovered that by accident, they were never bought for that purpose though.

There are 4K rips with all the bells and whistles, often even including 12-bit HDR, consumer Atmos in multiple languages, subtitles, etc. of most of the Amazon stuff out there... I wonder how they "backup" Bezos' favorite streaming service? I guess they somehow manage to capture the bitstream directly and decrypt and remux the stuff into some MKV container...

[Ryan Gallagher]

Ah, sorry, I guess a loud truck drove by when you mentioned the stuff about *THAT* way of rolling an euhm, backup from Bezos' streaming service.

Yeah, that's generally a mess. I'm somewhat surprised that your "Generic HDMI to 3g-SDI device" didn't give much about the HDCP. I guess it's one of these "generic devices". :P
I do have a bunch of Chinese "HDMI splitters", they go up to 1080p60, do support 1080p24 and also magically make HDCP disappear..

I have a few of that style only a couple present HDCP to the input side, apparently it was fixed in other iterations of the hardware. Also discovered by accident. Beyond that I bet my HDMI splitter might do it too, and the venue owns a 4k hdmi audio disembedder that also does it. We actually use that "feature" to show discs on the smaller projector to the summer camp kids during lunch, that "feature" is needed cause we put a blu-ray player onstage for the counselor to be able to use the remote and swap discs, but the signal goes out over SDI to the mezz rail projector. That and we don't have our cinema system in during camp, so the audio gets pulled out and sent as stereo to the house PA.

To be fair, if it exists on streaming services in 1080p or better, the blu-ray probably existed at some point. I've only encountered this need a couple times.

I've got one upcoming 35mm film that the blu-ray exists but is in the "hard to get" category. I've pitched snagging an ebay one for it as 35mm backup, but as a mono film it's a good candidate for my other method in it's current form. The amazon listing fort that blu-ray is 50$ and says delivery in December! Not helpful.

[Ryan Gallagher]

That summer camp situation is one place where I've pitched they just buy an AppleTV or Roku for that department. The counselors are always asking to show streaming films, but depending on the service it might be kneecapped to 720p or lower if played from a browser, and there is the whole getting them to use their logins etc.

I would break my "don't show directly from stream" rule for the camp kids. ;-)

[Ryan Gallagher]

In chatting with my co-worker at the other venue, realized in hindsite that both our racks were integrated with a HDMI splitter to perform that magic before the Series2 DVI inputs on the projector anyway for blu-ray playback. It only occurred to me cause he recently added a ATEM Mini Pro to his setup. I had to pause for a second, cause that technically shouldn't have worked with his blu-ray player, until I realized what the splitters were actually really there for! hah.

[Ryan Gallagher]

If anyone else runs into this need. I can now say 1080p24 5.1 is doable on at least two platforms without a set top streaming device. I got past the audio delivery limitations by switching to a Mac.

the C and Lfe have to be swapped in the DCP mapping it seems, or at least it did on the one platform that worked on PC. Have not checked the mac yet, doing a feature length test.

Bezos was not one of the platforms. ;-)