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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?

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.

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.

Thorny_Insight ,

I prefer 1080p but if not available then 720p is perfectly fine as well. 4k is overkill and I don’t even have a monitor that could play it at native resolution. Where I do prefer “lower quality” though is framerate. I don’t like how 60fps looks so I force YouTube to play videos at 24fps.

pbjamm ,
@pbjamm@beehaw.org avatar

I have actually taken to downloading 1080p versions of things I have access to in 4kHDR from Disney and Amazon. Frankly I can not stand HRD/Dolby Vision versions of things. No matter how I adjust my TV they still suffer from that ghastly soap-opera effect. To me having the background bright and in focus flattens the image making everything look like a bad set. It also makes the tiny differences in lighting of digital effects elements more noticeably.

I hate it.

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.

wetnoodle ,
@wetnoodle@sopuli.xyz avatar

I downscale movies and shows I download to 480p and transfer them to my modded 3dsxl cuz they look good enough for me and I can fit a lot of stuff on it!

veniasilente ,

Huh, didn’t know the 3DSXL could do 480p well, I always thought its limits were at about 360p (or 400p if such a profile existed). Can I ask how do you perform such encoding? Like, what encoder and options are you using. Oh and the battery usage. It’s for a book.

wetnoodle , (edited )
@wetnoodle@sopuli.xyz avatar

Of course! I use handbrake with all default settings but change dimensions to 480p and then I use adapter to make it a m4v to be playable on the 3ds.

Battery usage is an absolute wreck, if it’s not plugged in you have like 15-30 minutes playtime. It definitely needs a battery bank to be truly portable but I usually use it plugged in to a wall.

Edit: it is a new 3dsxl if that changes things idk enough about the hardware.

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.

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.

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

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