Video quality doesn't matter when you're enjoying what you're watching

Washington, Aug 13 (ANI): Video quality is not that important when you're enjoying what you're watching, a new research has revealed.

Researchers from Rice University's Department of Psychology found that if you like what you're watching, you're less likely to notice the difference in video quality of the TV show, Internet video or mobile movie clip.

Philip Kortum, Rice professor-in-the-practice has written the study 'The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings'.

"Research has been done asking if people can detect video quality differences. What we were looking at was how video quality affects viewers in a real way," Kortum said.

Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of ATnT Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. Participants viewed the two-minute clips and then were asked about the video quality of the clips and desirability of the movie content.

Kortum found a strong correlation between the desirability of movie content and subjective ratings of video quality.

"At first we were really surprised by the data. We were seeing that low- quality movies were being rated higher in quality than some of the high-quality videos. But after we started analyzing the data, we determined what was driving this was the actual desirability of the content," Kortum said.

"If you're at home watching and enjoying a movie, we found that you're probably not going to notice or even concern yourself with how many pixels the video is or if the data is being compressed," he added.

"This strong relationship holds across a wide range of encoding levels and movie content when that content is viewed under longer and more naturalistic viewing conditions," he added.

The study was published in the journal Human Factors. (ANI)