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?
I am in same boat
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Nah, for stuff I plan to watch on my bedroom projector especially, I don’t bother with quality that will drive up the file size.
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.
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.
Storage is cheap if you are lucky, in my country storage is so overpricedto the point thatI don’t wanna bother with it.
the High Dynamic Range that comes with 4K formats and releases IS a big difference.
Pro-tip right here peeps
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.
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.
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When the remux is 30gb and the 1080 encode is 23gb ✈️🏢🏢
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’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 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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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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.
