Are movie and show file sizes more efficient than they were years ago?
This may be a stupid question, but I just got back into pirating some shows and movies and realize that many of the QxR files are much smaller than what I downloaded in the past. Is it likely that I am sacrificing a noticeable amount of quality if I replace my files with the smaller QxR ones?
For example, I have Spirited Away from 2017 at 9.83 GB, but I see the QxR is only 6.1 GB. I also have the office from 2019 and the entire show (no bonus content) is about 442 GB, while the QxR version is only 165.7 GB. Dates are what they are dated on my hard drive, can't speak to their actual origin, but they would've been from RARBG. (Edit to add: I also can't really speak to the quality of the downloads, back then I was just grabbing whatever was available at a reasonable size, so I wasn't deliberately seeking out high quality movies and shows - a simple 1080p in the listing was enough for me).
I did some side by side on episodes of the Office (on my PC with headphones, nothing substantial), and I don't notice any differences between the two.
Thoughts on this? Are people better at ripping/compressing/whatever now that they can do so at a smaller size without sacrificing noticeable quality?
Thanks for all of the replies, they were very insightful!
The H264 to H265 appears to account for the majority of differences that I was seeing in file sizes.
lower visual noise of modern movies and series also helps a lot
Yup, people love film, but film rain can double or triple the bitrate you need for movie.
H265 has film grain mode so the encode can remove the film grain, set a bit saying there is film grain, and the player adds fake film grain back in.