> Someone needs to tell filmmakers. They shoot dark scenes because they can…

i disagree completely. i watch a movie for the filmmakers story, i don’t watch movies to marvel at compression algorithms.

it would be ridiculous to watch movies shot with only bright scenes because streaming service accountants won’t stop abusing compression to save some pennies.

> …ends up looking like shit after compression that assumes normal lighting levels.

it’s entirely normal to have dark scenes in movies. streaming services are failing if they’re using compression algorithms untuned to do dark scenes when soooo many movies and series are absolutely full of night shots.

I feel like there are probably cinematic film-making tricks you can use to imply a very dark scene without serving #111 pixels all over the screen.

As I said, I think the streamer services have too aggressive settings there. But that doesn't change the fact that the a lot of people have their contrast settings over tuned.

It should be noted, as well, that this generally isn't a "not enough bits" problem. There are literally codec settings to tune which decide when to start smearing the darkness. On a few codecs (such as VP1) those values are pretty badly set by default. I suspect streaming services aren't far off from those defaults. The codec settings are instead prioritizing putting bits into the lit parts of a scene rather than sparing a few for the darkness like you might like.