[ReactiveJelly]

Yeah. And that's why TV stores really like slow-motion shots or static landscapes to show off the TV. Any motion will cause "HDTV blur" as the encoder struggles to describe complex motion with the limited number of bits it's allowed to use.

Stuff like static, film grain, particles like snow or rain, those all suck up bits from the same encoding budget.

"Why Snow and Confetti Ruin YouTube Video Quality" by Tom Scott probably explains it nicer than I can https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI&pp=ygUaYnJlYWtpb...

This could be a problem for video game streaming, and it could affect the artistic decisions a game studio makes - Drawing a billion tiny particles on a local GPU will look crisp and cool, but asking a hardware encoder to encode those for consumer Internet (or phone Internet) might be too much. I think streamers have run into this problem already.

[jimbobthrowawy]

I think there are certain presets that work slightly better depending on what you're encoding. x264 has a "touhou" preset that should work slightly better for confetti and things like it.

Many streaming services sidestep this by generating grain on the client device rather than encoding it in the video though, but that may just be to make screen recording more annoying.

[Dalewyn]

>asking a hardware encoder to encode

Also the case for software encoders. Hardware encoders do it faster with the caveat of only encoding in pre-determined ways, but whether hardware or software what happens and what you get are fundamentally the same.