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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?

frightful_hobgoblin ,

720 isn’t low quality

Rai ,

I’m not downvoting you but I hella disagree for certain things. But only certain things. Will I notice The Office is 720p? Heck no. The Holy Mountain? Absolutely.

Cano ,

I do this with music. All of my library is stored as mp3s, which doesn’t really make a difference quality wise considering I mostly just use a cheap pair of earphones. I’m not an audiophile anyways. In addition I also store a copy of my music library in my phone for offline usage, and that’s where the compression comes in handy.

can ,

High bit rate mp3s are still good. I only really go beyond that for editing work.

minibyte ,

I can’t hear the difference between 192 and 320, but my ears are shot – the whole library is in 320 kbps because to hell with the drive space.

can ,

That’s fair. I’ll still happily take 192 if it’s all that’s available.

Rai ,

I’m an audiophile and I can only hear the difference between 192 and FLAC if I have certain headphones on. I have a full-aaa system and sub in my car with a million speakers and a 192 sounds the same as a FLAC.

mister_monster ,

Nope. I have fast internet and good displays and I still prefer 720p video. I just don’t see the benefit of multiplying the filesize by 4 to see marginally more detail. Even 4k, if I wanted to have a 4k display, I’ve seen people’s displays and after the initial disorientation and crispness, the appeal wears off. 720p is perfectly adequate.

BearOfaTime ,

I’ve tested converting DVDs at different resolutions, and playing them on a 60" screen sitting 6’ away.

720 is just fine. I really can’t tell a difference between 720 and 1080, usually. Surprisingly.

Rai ,

720p is TOTALLY fine but if it’s something beautiful or something I really enjoy (say, Climax or Baraka or even animu like Your Name) there’s zero chance I’m getting a 720p version of it. Even older stuff like THE BEST SHOW EVER MADE, Six Feet Under, I’m getting the best quality possible… even if it’s 4:3.

For regular shows and movies and things that I don’t hold dear to my heart, 720p is no problem.

Stats: gigabit, tons of storage, and 1440p

kandoh ,

Yes, if I don’t have the absolute best quality I can get it drives me crazy.

AceFuzzLord , (edited )

I don’t care what quality the things I’m downloading are so long as the file size is small enough. There are very few acceptions to that rule. Biggest one is if someone tried to edit shows using AI to enhance them by upping the resolution. Had one series I was so looking forward to watching after a long time torrenting that I had to delete because you could easily tell an AI (or someone who doesn’t have a clue what they’re doing) tried enhancing the resolution and made it unwatchable for me.

Edit: Damn, reread and I wish I could get 5mbps in the apartment complex I’m in! I’d be lucky if my download speeds spiked to 1mbps. All this with what is supposed to be the best ISP in the area, which is also an absolutely shitty company (xfinity).

Alice ,

I feel ya. I very rarely replace my devices and the internet speeds suck where I live anyway, so 720p is my go-to.

In my brain 720 is standard and 1080 is fancy, until I watch something at a friend’s house and sometimes it looks so good it’s unsettling

RisingSwell ,

My internet has been so bad for so long that 720p looks way too clear for a video. Primarily 240p life

GalaxyBrain ,
@GalaxyBrain@hexbear.net avatar

I don’t have that much hard drive space to keep the giant high quality files and there are some shows that it’s pointless. Why would I watch a 1080p version of something filmed on video for example

Dreyns ,

5mbps is high in my book, i used to download 1080p stuff and games on an adsl network and trust me I WISHED that shit could reach 5mbps ! Most of my pirate life i’d have miraculous spikes at 1mbps and i still always went for 1080p stuff or if I can’t find it in that quality 720. To me when i watch something i want to enjoy it to the fullest so i don’t even bother with lower quality, i don’t have 4k hardware so i don’t bother with that.

(I’ve enjoyed fiber connection for a year or two and i always get surprised by the speed of it lmao)

Xianshi ,

I usually opt for 720p for movies and SD for shows. They’re good enough for me and I can store way more. The other thing is the devices and screens are dated now so at some point in the future I’ll probably want to get it all again at better quality but for now it does the job.

Imgonnatrythis ,

I mean, quality is nice. But prefer the better streaming experience and faster d/l of 1080 vs 4k. Won’t go lower than that though. What really gets me is when audio quality isn’t good or not clearly listed that it’s 5.1 channel though. I don’t like to skimp on audio experience.

Faceman2K23 ,
@Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I cant say I care as much as I used to, since encoding has gotten quite good, but I have also gotten better at seeing (aka. worse at being distracted by) compression artifacts so while I am less of a perfect remux rip supremacist, I’m also more sensitive to bad encodes so its a double edged sword.

I still seek out the highest quality versions of things that I personally care about, but I don’t seek those out for absolutely everything like I used to. I recently saved 12TB running a slight compression pass on my non-4k movie library, turning (for example) a 30gb 1080p Bluray Remux into a 20gb H265 high bitrate encode, which made more room for more full fat 4K bluray files for things I care about, and the few 1080p full remuxes I want to keep for rarities and things that arent as good from the 4k releases or the ones where the 4k release was drastically different (like the LOTR 4k’s having poor dynamic range and the colours being changed for the Matrix etc), which I may encode in the future to save more space again. I know I can compress an 80gb UHD bluray file down to 60gb with zero noticeable loss, thats as far as I need to go, I don’t need to go down to 10gigs like some release groups try to do, and at that level of compression you might as well be at 1080p.

I cant go as low as a low bitrate 720p movie these days as I’m very close to a large screen so they tend to look quite poor, soft edges, banded gradients, motion artifacts, poor sound etc. but if I were on a smaller screen or watching movies on a phone like I used to, I probably wouldn’t care as much.

Another side to my choice to compress is that I have about 10 active Plex clients at the moment and previously they were mostly getting transcoded feeds (mostly from remux sources) but now most of them are getting a better quality encode (slow CPU encode VS fast GPU stream) direct to their screens, so while I’ve compressed a decent chunk of the library, my clients are getting better quality feeds from it.

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Here’s my twisted life exposed…I have no issue watching 1080p on my QLED 4K TV. I game at 1080p happily, I honestly don’t give a shit about 4K content.

1080p looks good enough for me, and I actually watch 720p on my phone screen half the time too.

And not because of lack of speed, I have a 1Gbps+ fiber line up and down.

And tbh, if it means I get to own and control my media, I would tolerate even worse quality if that’s what I needed to do.

Grunge computing ftw! Quality at the cost of your soul? Fuck that!

mynamesnotrick ,

Pretty much the same here. the storage to quality ratio isn’t a big enough difference to make it worth it to me for anything over 1080. 720p is noticable but I’ll still use it no problem.

MachineFab812 ,

Reasons why MinX versions are usually available. Whether for bandwidth purposes, just not giving a fuck about HD, or not wanting to buy larger Hard Drives to save overlarge content, there’s plenty of people with plenty of reasons to prefer smaller files.

Chronographs ,

I download everything in the best quality I can find and will sometimes replace it when there’s better quality available. I can afford storage and I don’t really care how long it takes to download as I have other stuff to watch/play anyways.

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