1080 vs 4k | SDR vs HDR in 1 video
Is there a video which compares 1080 and 4k and another one comparing HDR vs SDR?
When I watch 4k content I think, wow, this is great detail. But when I watch 1080 this is very good, but the tiny people in the background wouldn't be blurred in 4k.
And when I watch a dark SDR video I hate that the movie companies didn't release HDR quality although it's a recent movie/ series. But how would I know if it would be better?
I always think that the grass is greener on the other side, but how would I know?
Would it be hard to create such a video file? I guess with ffmpeg. But all else would need to be kept constant which is the difficult part
Not really possible. A 1080p video smashed into a 4k container (so it can actually represent the 4k part) would look worse than a true 1080p video file since that would get up scaled by your TV or monitor in most situations.
Best comparison would be making a playlist of the same video first in 1080p and then 4k.
Thanks, that's great advice!
Correct me if im wrong, but if you play a 1080p video on a 4k screen, that would be upscaled. If you put a 1080p video in a 4K stream, then play that 4k stream on the 4k screen, no post-processing would be applied to the video on the screen. All the upscaling happens during encoding, where you have far more control over the upscaler quality.
Yes, which is exactly what I'm stating. Showing a forcibly non-upscaled video (or one where you've manually tweaked the upscaling for that matter) is likely not what you want because there are no circumstances where that is what you'd watch on that particular screen. It could perhaps work as an example of how that video would look if you had a 1080p monitor of the same size instead of the 4k one you have, since it scales in a linear fashion, a pixel of 1080p is 4 pixels in a square on a 4k screen. But that's likely not what you want to test. Instead the thing you do want to test is "does it matter if I download X content in 1080p or 4k? How big is the difference really?" And if that is the question you need to let it upscale.
Start with a 4K screen. Play a 4K video in VLC. Keep it in windowed mode but make it as big as you possibly can on your screen. Fire up the same video but at 1080p quality. Force that window to be 1920 x 1080 in size. There will be some overlap of the windows, but you can look at the non-overlapped parts and directly compare the video. You can also alt-tab back and forth. Not perfect, but it should give you a pretty good idea. Others - feel free to chime in if this is a good idea or not. I think that so long as the 1080p window is locked in at 1920 x 1080 then it won't be up-scaled.
Don't we have the problem described by ninjans then? https://lemmy.mildgrim.com/comment/1906112
I don't think so because you're not forcing the 1080p video to be upscaled since it's stuck with 1920 x 1080 pixels in my example.
Not the 4 pixel problem. Sorry, I should've elaborated.
The problem that I actually want to compare how both, 4k and 1080 looks on that TV screen to answer the question: is 4k worth the extra space?
To answer that question, you have to take a 1080 and a 4k video and play both under real world conditions, i.e. the TV upscales the 1080 content to 4k.
Ah, I see. No problem. You'd have to switch back and forth in that case or have two of the exact same TVs to compare at the same time. (Some sets do a better or worse job of up-scaling). You'd also have to take into account viewing distance from the TV. At a certain distance it won't matter, but as you get closer, it matters more and more. There are view distance calculators available online to help with that.
On second thought, If you use the same source 1080p video and lock one in at 1920 x 1080 window and expand the other one to as full screen as possible. The full screen video will be up-scaled so you should be able to compare directly on one set.