The human eye is not uniformly sensitive to detail in light and dark areas of an image. With careful use of this knowledge during encoding, it is possible to exploit this sensitivity difference to improve the compression of the video and the perceived detail. The simplest forms of this have been in place for many years in digital video. For example, chroma subsampling reduces the amount of bandwidth allocated to the color channels, since the human eye is much more sensitive to luminance (brightness) than it is to chrominance (color).

VUDU’s encoder uses more advanced algorithms than used in the past by taking into consideration changes in brightness. The eye is much more sensitive to high frequency (fine texture) detail in bright areas. As a result it is possible to reallocate bits from lower-complexity parts of the image in order to noticeably boost quality. Other encoders have the tendency to overly reallocate from large flat areas which can introduce blocking artifacts to the image. The Adaptive Quantization functionality in VUDU’s encoder considers scenarios such as these and more intelligently allocates data within the frame. As a result, VUDU is able to improve overall image quality with enhanced details in dark areas of the picture while virtually removing the artifacts typically present and often noticed in other Internet-delivered or broadcast video.