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

VitabytesDev@feddit.nl to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 108 points –

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?

85

You're not alone.

On a good large screen, 1080p is a noticeable upgrade from 720p.
But the distance you'd have to sit at, to get much out of 2160p over 1080p, is just way too close.
However the High Dynamic Range that comes with 4K formats and releases IS a big difference.

On the other hand, storage is pretty cheep. A couple cents per GB really.
But you're talking more about bandwidth, which can be expensive.

But yeah. You're not alone.

the High Dynamic Range that comes with 4K formats and releases IS a big difference.

Pro-tip right here peeps

Storage is cheap if you are lucky, in my country storage is so overpricedto the point thatI don't wanna bother with it.

Spinning metal storage is cheapish now, but now a 4K movie takes up a much larger amount of space.

If you measure storage by €/1 hour media with 4k HDR vs older prices and 720p, it is likely quite similar.

You don't really prefer a lower resolution, you just work within the limitations you have.

Also, I don't notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p

Either your display is really shitty or you need (better) glasses. This isn't like the difference between 60 and 144hz where its barely visible for untrained eyes.

Completely true, but also compression can make anything bad. I've seen 480p better 1080p simply because the 480p was using more bitrate, where the 1080p is encoded without enough relatively speaking.

Yes, resolution is not the only factor. Bitrate is equally if not more important.

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...

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?

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).

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.

https://i.imgur.com/CFriCXf.png

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

That's less of an opinion and more of a hardware restriction, isn't it?

If I had a 5 Mbps connection or no display that can display 4k, I also would not download in 4k.

1 more...

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.

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

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.

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.

I like to watch TV shows in the background where I'm not going to be watching the screen obsessively, so I have several shows in 480P or sub-480P. There are also some shows where the "official" HD versions are just awful (most 90s sitcoms) or the show was made for 4:3 and has a different feel converted to 16:9 (MASH, The Wire).

Going beyond that though, I spent years on a really limited connection (2.6m down/400k up) and my instinct for saving bandwidth and storage space is still there, along with my need to pay it forward since I ain't no leech. I've become fond of making what I call "Bonsai Encodes", where the files are small enough to be sent over damn near anything. With mono Opus and VP9 video you can cram 45 minutes of perfectly watchable content into a sub-25mb file that'll play in Discord, with VTT subtitles even (though those won't play in Discord itself). Looks a bit like watching it on an old tube TV, but it's watchable.

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.

You're not alone, I definitely spent the majority of my time on 720p rips. I couldn't tell the difference between them and 1080. Though these days, actually just recently, I've switched over to 1080, and I can tell when it's lower.

But most my collection is still 720 and I feel no need to go back through and update everything. Maybe when I get arr set up I'll let it go through and do it for me 🤷‍♂️

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Nope. Most of my stuff is 720p because I won't be watching it again. My library has significantly dwindled in size. Only my absolute favorites are stored in high quality. Everything else is SD and quite a bit has been deleted.

Let's be honest, most stuff is shit and forgettable / not watching again. They are just remakes of readaptations of sequels. You know that by the time you want to watch it again, there will be a remake just as bad.

Anti Commercial-AI license

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I'm with you. 720p unless I can't find lower than 1080 — for my setup there isn't much point. The TRaSH guide parameters make my head ache thinking how much I'd be shelling out on bandwidth and storage for no discernible difference on my home theatre.

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.

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.

Not just you. Low(er) quality downloads are still a huge part of the torrent scene, see how popular most 720p YIFY uploads are even though their encoder quality is pretty garbage. Most people in general want a fast download and are viewing on a small laptop or even phone screen and don't give a rats ass about fidelity, LQ works perfectly fine for this. Even I'll grab a LQ once in a while if it's something my girl and I want to watch that night and I didn't plan ahead.

The desire for high quality uploads is more for people running home setups like Plex, where it's better to keep a HQ source file and have it transcoded to lower resolutions by your home server setup as necessary. They generally aren't storage constrained as an 8tb hard drive for a normal PC is fairly cheap these days. I'd wager maybe <30% of torrenters actually go after ultra HQ uploads based off seeder numbers.

Personally I stick to stuff that is at least 1080p with HDR and H265 encode preferred, because I archive most everything I download due to similar problems with internet speed. Over maybe 12 years of torrents I've amassed a hair over 5tb of content, and that's a LOT of movies l, it all fits on a single $120 external HDD.

720 isn't low quality

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.

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.

576p for life.

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.

I prefer 720, both for file/bandwidth reasons and for quality reasons. Once you start getting into higher quality, it starts looking like you're actually there in the room with the actors, and I don't like that. It's unsettling. I want my TV and movies to look like TV and movies.

Depends on the media.
Minimum it has to be web-dl and 1080p.

For media that needs it or I want to (e.g. Interstellar), I will search high bitrate web-dl/bluray or a remux.
If it's something I will for certain only watch once, I'll be fine with a regular 1080p mid bitrate file.

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.

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.

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

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.

I usually go for 720p to 1080p, as my monitor is at 1080p. I wouldn't really compromise quality further. But even if I had a 4k screen, I probably wouldn't go for 4k cuz downloads take too long. What I'm saying is I like balance

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I don't often go for the full 4K Blu-ray Remux releases, since they're massive and I can't really tell the difference over a 10-15GB rip, at least visually. Just a webrip is fine, depending on the source. Plus even my nVidia Shield Pro struggles with them at times.

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.

Maybe you're not noticing the difference between 720p to 1080p is due to the decoding used. The rips with a lower file size often get there by means of compression, and some uploaders (such as YIFY) heavily compress the videos to where I don't even notice much of a difference, however I'm going to assume you're not downloading the 3GB (average size for HQ) 1080p film.
Then again eyesight plays a role along with display.

I wouldn't bother with 4K usually, however once I upgraded to a 1440 monitor downscaling from 4K actually provides a fair bump in overall sharpness and detail (some films more than others), however the file size is usually over 10GB per film.

After like 5-10 years of ripping 4K Blu-rays without re-encoding, I just can’t go back. The only time I’ll go back to anything less is if the source material was shot in it.

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)

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.

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.

I have cheap tv and slow internet, so I am completely comfortable with 720P or 1080P (depends which streams faster). I am also and grew up with 420P, so that helps.

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.

@VitabytesDev

You aren't alone. I prefer 360 or 480 p
Because:

  1. It's faster and not much difference I still get the content/knowledge
  2. It reduces my carbon footprint

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

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