That makes sense and helps to conceptualize the impact of the bitrate difference. I guess I was under the impression that bitrate would be set at the source and not by the release group, but seems I may have been wrong in that assumption. Thanks for the info!

Ohh, I didn't realize the release groups would set the bitrate. I figured that was set at the source. But that makes sense. Thanks for helping to clear this up! I was at a loss trying to connect the dots on the size differential here.

Gotcha. Any idea why the bitrate would be different on a WEB-DL from the same source? I figured bitrate would remain the same if the file is being downloaded and DRM stripped, with all else (source, resolution, etc...) remaining equal.

Oh, good call. I didn't even consider that!

Removed

Aah, makes sense. Thanks for the example! That really helps to put it into perspective. So REPACK on a P2P file doesn't necessarily mean somethings wrong with the original version, but the REPACK's will generally be improved in some way. That's really helpful to know.

Really appreciate you and the other commenters providing these insights.

Aah, dang - thanks for trying!

Thanks for the reply and the link! I agree, based on everything I'm learning in this thread, seems like the FLUX version is the way to go for the added bitrate.

Hi - just curious if you were able to look at the release notes for these releases (the NTb and FLUX ones) and whether or not you found out anything. If not, no worries, but I thought I'd check in.

Also, I'm particularly interested because I noticed that the FLUX version has a season REPACK out there where the REPACK size is similar to the NTb file size, which makes me all the more curious about the original FLUX versions with the increased file size / bitrate (and whether that means better quality or not in this instance).

Process, meaning like encode? Or can it be processed in other ways that doesn't alter the quality?

I noticed that the smaller file is longer, interestingly enough. So there does appear to be some level of trimming I'm assuming, but I wouldn't have expected the longer file to be the smaller one.