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

Dreyns , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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.

NoneYa , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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

kylian0087 , 5 days ago

Oppenheimer 80+ GB 😅

Lettuceeatlettuce , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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.

buffysummers , 5 days ago

576p for life.

veniasilente , 5 days ago

Where do you find such downloads? Most torrent sites I’ve seen barely give you anythng under 720p that is not 480p (or 144p 3gp for the lulz value, I guess?) these days.

xiao , 5 days ago

Same here I use to watch videos at 720p (sometimes even at 480p) 👍

cmnybo , 5 days ago

I typically look for 1080p X265 encodes around 2-4 mbps to save disk space. I will download higher bitrates for anything with a lot of film grain since it will get very blocky at lower bitrates.

I can’t tell much difference between 1080p and 4K unless I’m very close to a large screen. Also, most 4K files are HDR and I don’t have anything that supports HDR.

TheHobbyist , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

.

TheHobbyist , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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 , 5 days ago

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.

mp3 , 5 days ago

I usually stick to 1080p medium for movies and TV shows I want to rewatch, 720p for the stuff I’ll watch once.

For movies I try to stick to a 2-5GB filesize, and TV shows between 200-400MB per episode.

umami_wasbi , 5 days ago

I usually take BDRAW, transcode by myself. Or the best quality I can find. Does it look better? Not really. Just the data hoarder inside kicked in. 720p is totally fine.

frightful_hobgoblin , 5 days ago

720 isn’t low quality

Rai , 5 days ago

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.