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Good enough for who? You? Sure. But not everyone watches on a small screen. Some people might actually care about the quality too. Some of us can't goto the theatre.
2GB isn't large by any stretch. There are 720p versions of pretty much everything (at least that's what I see on most Usenet Indexers). You could easily get a multiple terabyte external drive if your internal storage is full.
Yeah complaining about storage space in 2023 is a bit silly. You can go on eBay right now and get a used 4TB SATA drive for $25. Even cheaper if you get SAS drives, you just need a SAS expansion card which is also around $20 or so. 6TB SAS drives are going for $30.
ISP data caps are a bigger enemy than raw storage capacity these days. It costs me $50/mo to remove my 1TB cap. Which means it is more expensive to download 6TB than it is to buy 6TB of physical storage. And even SSDs are dirt cheap now. Storage has never been cheaper.
A family of 4 going to the theater is about 1TB of external SSD. Nowadays they are smaller than your regular phone.
This is going to be my new way of measuring "worth" how many TBs of SSD storage does thing X equate to lol.
The Chev principle
I spent about $80 for 4 people to see Oppenheimer coming up. I've also been seeing deals of 2tb m.2 drives for less than 100
Maybe try watching a 1080p HEVC or AV1 episode, 200MB for half an hour or 400MB for an hour and it looks amazing
HEVC is a great codec. Not everyone is encoding with it yet. Couple that with "fun" scene rules and we get what we get. 😅
I'd even say that going to the theater sucks balls. The picture and sound quality usually sucks compared to a high quality download on a 75" 4k TV. Even a high bit rate 1080p video looks better than the theater.
It costs ,e over $100 to take the family out for a movie. As someone on disability right now that $100 is better spent on other things (Like a years worth of Usenet service ;) )
I see usenet, I upvote. Not on Reddit anymore but still a simple man.
500mb 1080p HEVC for most shows on a 75" TV, but if it's a space sci-fi show with lots of dark scenes I need that 1GB-2GB episode.
Some shows get by on 200MB, but it depends how static the scenes are and how much lighting there is.
Surely at that size you would notice the artifacts. Just for my sake can you try a Bluray remux. I expect it's 4k so you could just grab a 4k web-DL and see if you can notice the difference.
Not on my 65" 8k OLED they aren't! You can absolutely tell the difference.
Smaller/low res screens though, sure.
That's what I'm saying; not everyone watches media on their phones. I have a Plex server at home with a projector and a mediocre 5.1 (not a HTIB). No way I'm running anything less than 1080p.
Ha, yeah. I work from home, and when I'm out the last thing I want to do is look at my phone.
So I watch films at home. I paid for a high end home cinema set up, I'm gonna make the most of it. Otherwise it's just a waste.
This may change as I'm having to downscale a bit for my new apartment...but yeah, 200mb still won't be enough.
I paid for this 4k TV, so damn it I want all the pixels!
Seriously though, resolution is only half the equation. Bitrate, HDR, and compression methods are very important as well.
I feel you, but I also have a feeling this will be blasphemy to some.
Might as well download the episode in GIF format at that point, right guys? 😅
Too much resolution is confusing for my eyes. I need dithering and a max of 256 colors to truly enjoy television as intended.
I want my colours to have names, not hexadecimals
Lmao. True. I know some people who think 1080p is still bad, and here I am content with 480 on my phone 😂
(don't kill me, guys)
Yeah, 300-350MB h265 is great for anime. The 1GB+ are fine and all, but I'd rather save storage space.
Anime encoders squeeze the most out of the h265 codec... Its astounding how they achieve great quality video for the filesize, even in scenes with fast motion or odd vignettes/filters
Even the highest quality anime isn't very complex compared to any live-action footage so it compresses incredibly well. The better groups also use vapoursynth filters to fix errors on the blu-rays like bad anti-aliasing and banding. So the best encodes will actually look better than a remux which is never going to happen with live-action.
Your best bet would be to use handbrake and transcode them down yourself. I have a relatively. I've setup for my living room and thus want to get the best quality I can. Exact opposite reasons to you but, It's easy to downgrade, basically impossible to upgrade.
But that's my two cents. Ideally, every file is uploaded with both of us in mind.
I was just going to say, handbrake is a good way to cut back a bit on file size if you get the settings right. It is very taxing on hardware tho.
The rise of HEVC and AV1 is arriving! Keeping the quality with a smaller file size. Plex and most android devices support AV1 now too!
As long as you are happy with that, all good. Fuck the people that sets a standard for you.
720p for most tv shows is fine for me. 1080p for films.
I sort by size, then seeders. I didn't buy all my hifi tv and surround sound to watch compression in action. I couldn't imagine those 200 to 300 mb episodes, but to each their own. i usually pull the 3 gb to 4 gb episodes.
A 12tb WD hard drive is like 200$ when they go on sale. That equates to about 0.015$/gb. So that 3 gb show costs all of a nickel to store.
Why not just use those streaming sites then? You don't need to download anything
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, as they say
You could transcode your downloads and store them at a lower quality if you want to save space. It is extra steps though.
my laptop, my simple 1920x1080 tv or even my phone
yeah well that's cool but I like my media big and (when appropriate) loud, with as high a quality as I can get
Yes, for you and several others that is why those exist. Doesn’t mean there are no others who like to watch it in higher resolution on larger screens.
1337x has tons of episodes that are that size. It seems to either be ~200mb or 2gb+ though. It would be cool if there were a nice middle ground.
absolutely agree. for most shows, I don't particularly care what I download, but for specific shows like GoT, I'll go for the high quality x264 copy
I usually aim for 1080p top, since all my screens resultion don't go above that.
Sometime even 720p, depends on how many seeders.
Yeah, I agree, I can understand wanting higher resolutions but there are diminishing returns and even 1 GB for a half-hour episode is pretty absurd.
Plus, you can't seed what you can't keep.
I really shot myself in the foot downloading 4k60 versions of some of my favorite movies. The quality is great, but I can really only watch them on my gaming pc.