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Am I the only one preferring low quality media over high quality one?

I have a very slow Internet connection (5 Mbps down, and even less for upload). Given that, I always download movies at 720p, since they have low file size, which means I can download them more quickly. Also, I don’t notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p. As for 4K, because I don’t have a screen that can display 4K, I consider it to be one of the biggest disk space wasters.

Am I the only one who has this opinion?

keepcarrot ,

I have to ration disk space and internet here is typically not amazing

sag ,

I am in same boat

Mountain_Mike_420 ,

1080p is way better if you have a screen that is a good size. Also if you are into surround sound (I am) there is a lower chance to get it on 720p rips.

barbedbeard ,

I do have a 4k tv, and a 1080p one. But personally I don’t see big difference on 720p vs 1080p vs 4k. I have to be like 4 feet from the tv to notice it. 720p is sufficient.

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble ,

720p is fine, but I’d prefer 1080p most of the time.

It mostly just comes down to bitrate. A 4k video at 1Mbps is probably gonna look like shit. My drone and my go pro shoot 4k footage at 60Mbps h265 and that looks amazing. But if I’m acquiring a fuck ton of movies I’m not gonna download that shit at that bitrate. As long as the video is like 1080p and 5Mbps or higher I’m happy. If the file size is >6 gigs for a movie I ain’t downloading that shit even if I can, and that’s with a 1gb symmetrical internet connection and a 30TB NAS.

Ibuthyr ,

Those must be tiny screens then. 4k vs 1080p is minor in difference, even in a 77" OLED screen. There is a difference, but I can do with 1080p a lot of the times. 720p is only acceptable for older shows. Otherwise it immediately shows.

But if it’s visually appealing content, then you bet I’ll take the 4k stream at the highest Bitrate I can find.

A_Asselin ,
@A_Asselin@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I usually watch youtube (well via Freetube) on 480, maybe 720 when I am paying attention and 360 when I am laying down. I prefer these small file sizes because I can skip left and right in the video time with the arrow buttons like the file is local and not online. I haven’t pirated a movie in years (I would not want to watch anything new) but I download a lot of old racing from the 80s and 90s and it is already 480p, so as long as it is in english, not black/white I am happy.

NoneYa ,

I always go for 720 or 1080 despite having decent 4K TVs. My reasoning is file size too but because I don’t have a ton of space to spare for all the stuff I want to store. I have about 2TB left but that’s going to get used up eventually.

There are some things I’ll go for the high quality stuff like Super Mario Bros which looks amazing but that’s rare for me.

30GB for one movie is nuts.

Tregetour ,
@Tregetour@lemdro.id avatar

When the remux is 30gb and the 1080 encode is 23gb emoji ✈️🏢🏢

kylian0087 ,

Oppenheimer 80+ GB 😅

kylian0087 , (edited )

I prefer the opposite. I want the best quality I can get often 4K remux. Storage is cheap nowadays and I don’t mind waiting a few days for a movie to download. Also I do have a 500/500 connection which helps.

dRLY ,
@dRLY@lemmy.ml avatar

It really depends on the media and my level of interest in it. I was only bothering to try and get 1080p copies of stuff I liked due to only having a 1080p TV for so long. But I did make efforts to get 1080 where possible (and based on my drives at the time) even before I had a HD TV and the only thing I had to actually watch that resolution on was my laptop. And that was because I wanted to make sure I had (at the time) the best copies of torrented encodes of stuff I really loved and would want to look good later. But I got a 4K HDR TV a few months ago as my 13yo 1080p TV started just giving black screens on all inputs. And while a lot of things are fine, the limitations of the encodes are showing much more.

If I am just checking out something that I have heard about or was told to check out by a friend. I might just grab a 1080 or even 720 copy since they are often the top seeded results. Then go back and find 4k copies if I really get into it. Though my main issue today is similar to back when I was using my laptop. Storage space. I started ripping my Blu-rays and I am the worst about dealing with compression stuff. So I really really need to get on making that media server I have been “meaning to build” for years. Get some 18TB or 20TB drives and RAID the shit out of them for redundancy. lol.

nintendiator ,

I’m totally fine with something like 540p or 480p, although I guess that’s because my preference is good ol’ TV shows that aired in the 90s or 00s over TV cable, so I’m fine with SDTV quality. And honestly, there’s not much sense in downloading all seasons of, say, Ally McBeal in 4K when you can download 8 full glorious 90s shows with their entire seasons in SDTV in the same space.

Even with “modern” stuff, I’ve seldom found a movie or TV show post 2012 that merits anything higher than 720p. I don’t get why don’t movie codecs get a multi-res options so that for example you can get the action scenes in 1080p, even 60fps if you want, but the melancholic scenes and the quiet drama scenes and the credits in 480p. Would save lots of space without losing quality where it matters.

dRLY ,
@dRLY@lemmy.ml avatar

I tend to notice the drop in quality in more slow scenes since there is more time to notice it. Though very action heavy scenes do suffer if the encode is bad. It would be really nice if we did see more shit in 60fps though. I understand what lots of “but 24fps is more ‘cinematic’” mean for some kinds of shots/movies. But after being so adjusted to 60fps and higher (even if shit is interpolated due to having had a “120Hrz” TV since like 09), shit is much much cleaner. The “soap opera effect” is a real thing, but it kind of just stops being an issue after you get used to it and see the benefits of clarity and smoothness. And it is much more like how seeing shit in real life.

I have been having a real hard time going back to watch movies and especially animated media. Like a panning shot in an anime just looks so damn jittery. It completely takes me out of the thing I am watching as it can make me feel a weird kind of nauseous. Lots of regular movies and shows also do this. Some of it might be due to some stuff that was shot in early digital making it worse. But it does happen with stuff shot on film too.

Just really sucks that the industries seem to go out of their way to make it hard for studios/film makers to try weird shit now that we have it. Like I would love to have the 44fps version of The Hobbit since I missed being able to see it in theatres. But the home releases are all set to traditional speeds. It isn’t a limitation of the Blu-rays themselves from what I understand. But the players tend to only allow 24/30fps for playback. Though I would love to be wrong about that. But still just artificial shit stopping potential advancements (or at least fun efforts to try shit). Those Spiderverse movies being done in layers of different fps rates is an example of trying some weird shit that was dope.

kratoz29 ,

If it is a cartoon, or even anime, I don’t mind between 720p and 1080p in most cases, but that is just about that.

swampdownloader ,

Only when the artifacts in 4k look bad - like black squares on a black background due to compression. 1080p in that case is preferable.

TheHobbyist ,

To be fair, resolution is not enough to measure quality. The bitrate plays a huge role. You can have a high resolution video looking worse than a lower resolution one if the lower one has a higher bitrate. In general, many videos online claim to be 1080p but still look like garbage because of the low bitrate (e.g. like on YouTube or so). If you go for a high bitrate video, you should be able to tell pretty easily, the hair, the fabric, the skin details, the grass, everything can be noticeably sharper and crisper.

Edit: so yeah, I agree with you, because often they are both of low bitrate…

taaz ,

Great wizard of the bitrates, grant me your wisdom…

I can’t wrap my head around bitrate - if I have a full hd monitor and the media is in full hd then how is it that the rate of bits can make so much difference?
If each frame in the media contains the exact 1920 × 1080 pixels beamed into their respective positions in the display then how can there be a difference, does it have to do something with compression?

mearce ,

.

TheHobbyist ,

Exactly, this is about compression. Just imagine a full HD image, 1920x1080, with 8 bits of colors for each of the 3 RGB channels. That would lead to 1920x1080x8x3 = 49 766 400 bits, or roughly 50Mb (or roughly 6MB). This is uncompressed. Now imagine a video, at 24 frames per second (typical for movies), that’s almost 1200 Mb/second. For a 1h30 movie, that would be an immense amount of storage, just compute it :)

To solve this, movies are compressed (encoded). There are two types, lossless (where the information is exact and no quality loss is resulted) and lossy (where quality is degraded). It is common to use lossy compression because it is what leads to the most storage savings. For a given compression algorithms, the less bandwidth you allow the algorithm, the more it has to sacrifice video quality to meet your requirements. And this is what bitrate is referring to.

Of note: different compression algorithms are more or less effective at storing data within the same file size. AV1 for instance, will allow for significantly higher video quality than h264, at the same file size (or bitrate).

Klaymore ,
@Klaymore@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yes, every video you download or stream is actually compressed quite a lot, the bitrate just determines how much compression is applied. Higher bitrate means the file is bigger and less compression is done, while low bitrate means the video has a lot less bits to store all that data and so has to do more compression.

Nyarlathotep ,

If each frame in the media contains the exact 1920 × 1080 pixels …

This image has the same number of pixels on the top and bottom half, but you can probably see the bottom half looks worse. That’s what lower bitrate does. It’s like turning up the compression on a jpg – you are not getting the exact same pixels, just the exact same image size.

i.imgur.com/CFriCXf.png

moody ,

Simple explanation, the higher the bitrate, the more data is dedicated to each frame to be displayed, so the higher the quality of each frame assuming the same resolution. This means fewer artifacts/less blocking, less color banding, etc.

Lower bitrate is the opposite, basically. The video is more compressed, and in the process it throws out as much information as possible while trying to maintain acceptable quality. The lower the bitrate, the more information is thrown out for the sake of a smaller filesize.

Resolution is the biggest factor that affects picture quality at the same bitrate. A 1080p video has a quarter of the resolution of a 2160p video, so it takes much less data to maintain a high quality picture.

dubyakay ,

Where do you live that only has 5mbps? It must be somewhere really remote.

Teknikal ,

I prefer them as well but if I want to keep something I usually encode to 576p I still don’t really see any difference on my displays and it’s just something I’ve been doing since I first tried encoding for the Sony Vita.

Vanth , (edited )
@Vanth@reddthat.com avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    Rai ,

    Oooo nice. Projectors also hide imperfections better than LCD/OLED screens.

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