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 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.
I have to ration disk space and internet here is typically not amazing
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the remux is 30gb and the 1080 encode is 23gb ✈️🏢🏢
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.
Yes, if I don’t have the absolute best quality I can get it drives me crazy.
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 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.
Where do you live that only has 5mbps? It must be somewhere really remote.
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 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.
Only when the artifacts in 4k look bad - like black squares on a black background due to compression. 1080p in that case is preferable.
