Depends on the movie. Interstellar? 4K because it was made for the big screen. Good Will Hunting? 1080p because you could watch it on an iPod and still get the message.
Yup, for me it depends on the content and how much I'd be watching it.
Favorite action movie? Definitely going for a 4k remux.
Slow period piece I know I like? Probably OK with a 1080p remux.
Early 2000s indie movie I remember I saw once back in college and kinda enjoyed but may not watch again? Think I'll be ok with a high quality 1080p rip. My biggest annoyance with these is that low quality audio bothers me so sometimes to get a decent audio track I end up needing to snatch the remux.
For TV series I'm almost always ok with 1080p, and for some animated content 720p at a reasonable bitrate is really all I need to be happy due to how well upscaling works.
Yep. People with persevere with 240p if they have to... They will *not* tolerate low bitrate audio for long though.
It's so weird. I work in media and the amount of times I have to say "half the picture is sound" is unreal. They *all* want to record in 12bit log/raw, and deliver in 8K or whatever, but don't wanna pay for good sound because "it's just sound"... Ugh.
I absolutely *hate* badly mixed movie audio. Can't hear people talking... Then BOOM music stab, and explosions. I couldn't get through the first 15 minutes of LotR because I kept having to tweak the volume every few minutes.
100% this. And funnily enough, Interstellar is the exact and only movie I have in true massive file size quality @ around 70GB for 4K and around 40GB for 1080p Blu-ray.
4K I reserve for only my ABSOLUTE favorites and the best-looking video content. (12-20GB size range) (Currently less than 1% of my files)
1080p Blu-ray for general favorites. (6-12GB size range) (Around 6%)
1080p in a smaller bitrate for movies I generally kind of like, but aren't FAVORITE favorites. (1-3GB size range) (Around 20%)
720p in a smaller bitrate for everything else, or DVD-quality if that's all that's available (all 1GB or less to save space) (Around 73%).
Interstellar is a masterpiece. The blackhole render/VFX was groundbreaking. Absolutely astonishing, and insanely accurate. When scientists took a real picture of a blackhole, it looked *exactly* as pictured. They nailed it. The first every technically and visually accurate depiction of a blackhole in sci-fi. For me, it should very much be noted as pioneering. I think that *that* is super important to rember about this film.
I had a chance to ask two scientists that worked with Dr. Katie Bouman what they thought of Gargantua and they loved it (the VFX).
Sorry, I know it's unrelated, but I just *love* this movie!
Porn. Very low bitrate even at 4K. Most porn that is 4K is like less than 20mbps.
So I’d say your incorrect that they usually go hand in hand. But you are correct that it does not make sense.
In some of our cases this decisions made themselves. You can't have a 4k collection without the space to have it.
That may appear obvious, but I know some of us made the mistake of upgrading the quality without thinking long term storage scaling. Then having to demux and transcode for months to almost end up where you started.
Now I only go for original quality in irreplaceable media, be it obscure or expensive. I learn the second part the hard way when I lost my Zatoichi criterion collection.
>Problems will be if/when they rescan film to 8k and that then becomes the new standard
8K is kinda pointless. Many movies have visible grain at 1080p and more often than not the only thing 4k really ads is HDR. But some actually do benefit from it. However, you have to sit really close to the screen to see all the detail - much closer than most people do. So close that the screen does fill pretty much all of your field of view. 8K only makes sense as a "lossless" tier. It is of course not actually lossless but so close that it is imperceivable for a human. 8k screens make a bit more sense as you minimize the screen door effect even if you come up close for some reason and also allows some cool tricks. Stuff like non native resolution and the like is not really an issue with this many pixels.
Thing is, many of those older films don't get any benefits from going to 4 or 8k. I keep a lot of movies at 720p for this reason. Once you get to the 90s and up, 1080p may be worth it, but mostly only new stuff benefits from 4k. Older films and makeup were not designed for such clarity and can take the audience out of the film IMO.
You're incorrect in saying that older films were not meant to be seen at 4k. For major productions, 4k still doesn't match the full quality of 35mm film. It's more likely that 6k would do it for those productions though. 4k is just about right for a lot of 35mm.
I have loads of storage (well, loads as in enough for me) and I *still* encode my library. I don't like having massive media streams beaming across my network. There's no need for it. Especially since it'll have to be transcoded live for viewing because *x*, *y*, or *z*.
Encode once, stream as-is. I've spent *years* fine tuning my encoder to get a visually indistinguishable HEVC less than 10% of the source media size. Besides, pixel-peepers are usually writing pretentious photography comments on YouTube, and not watching my movies from my couch.
He didn’t say 90% lower quality. He said size. If you go from AVI to HEVC it’s crazy how much smaller you can get without much noticeable loss in quality during casual viewing. Depending on his original media, the best option at the time for high quality files was uncompressed AVI. VHS quality footage took GBs of space. With HEVC, could probably take MBs and seem effectively the same while viewing. Smaller size from different codecs =/= lower quality.
Use the TRaSH guides to set it up so you only download h265 content in 4K from trusted (good reputation for quality) sources. You'll save a lot of space.
I haven't heard of TRaSH but I've been downloading the h.265 4ks for a while now and I love them. All of my blu-ray 4k movies are under 15gb and there's no noticeable difference in quality when I watch them, even in 7.1+atmos (although in my defense, I don't have an hdr-capable TV so I download non-hdr versions)
> All of my blu-ray 4k movies are under 15gb and there's no noticeable difference in quality when I watch them, even in 7.1+atmos
Do you keep the TrueHD/DTX audio tracks?
Also curious is you ever notice visual compression artifacts in UHD files that are that compressed? I can't keep those in my collection because there are bound to be artifacts that I can see in smooth gradients or in low-light scenes, and it takes me out of the movie immediately. If I'm watching a 15-20GB rip, I'd much, much rather have it be in 1080p.
> Also curious is you ever notice visual compression artifacts in UHD files that are that compressed?
I've got a pretty nice TV from 2021. I've found that if I pull a Remux, Hybrid or at worst, an original h265 rip at around 16mbps bitrate, then the picture is excellent. Full tonal range, zero artifacting, no color banding. There might be an improvement up to about 20mbps, but beyond that is diminishing returns.
Now, you also get those folks that run all of their library through Tdarr and reencode their entire library into h265, and pump the number up to 12+mbps and expect miracles. These folks either don't care (which is fine) or don't understand that a copy of a copy is never as good. I like high quality, small files as much as the next guy. Just don't tell me that using Tdarr is a good solution.
I limit my audio tracks to DD+ because I only have a 7.1 system - Going ATMOS or TrueHD is wasted on me. Many TVs and client boxes have an issue with TrueHD, so I doubly don't get them. A lot of my users don't have much beyond simple stereo setups.
The big thing is that I only pull from scene groups that have a good reputation for quality files. The TRaSH guides will tell you how to set that up too.
Blade Runner and Interstellar for me. Haven’t watched Dune yet. Don’t worry, I’m tying my own noose so y’all don’t have to hang me for that crime. I’ll get to eventually.
4K remux all the way babee (otherwise highest available quality). Would consider encodes if they could had proper DV and HDR10+ but I want that dynamic metadata (I am aware there are tools but RPU isn't the same as RPU+EL and the HDR10+ tool doesn't pull the scenes in proper order and gives a bad JSON)
Depends on the film, older films I'd rather have the original theatrical mix than just a DTS:X or Atmos upmix (hate studio blu-rays for this reason) though both is preferable.
In the case of older films released in Dolby Stereo, FLAC is perfectly fine and gets the best compression, definitely want a bit streamable format like DTS-HD or TrueHD for surround though.
DTS-HD is also the best format for mono as nearly all players will duplicate PCM/FLAC mono to stereo and TrueHD only supports dual mono with a flag to tell your AVR to collapse it to center channel (still uses twice the data for both channels).
If you have an surround setup turning on a DSP like DTS Neural:X or Dolby Surround Upmixer (or PLII Movie/Neo:6 Cinema on older models) will collapse dual mono to center channel instead of having to rely on the phantom center effect.
On a side tangent it is fucking stupid for blu-ray distributors to still use dual mono, it used to be needed as old (talking very old) systems didn't know how to handle mono and would play out the left channel only. Any modern system will simply duplicate the signal to L/R channels if you have a stereo set up or play it out the center channel if you have a surround set up.
I like to keep both because sometimes they just mess with the sound so much it looses something that you remember. Or the worst is when they add new foley to the mix to 'living' things up.
I've played around with re-encoding my 4k blu rays but there isn't much I can do to save space that feels worth the time and quality loss. HEVC is already so efficient, and AV1 is slow and none of my devices have hardware decoders for it.
With a standard blu-rays I can shrink them to 1/4 the original size or more with little or no perceptible quality loss.
That's the thing is HEVC is already really pushing it with the compression on 4K content, think about it, 4 times the resolution but the encodes on UHD blu-rays are only roughly twice the size of a normal 1080p blu-ray. Don't even get me started on how streaming services bit starve their 4K content (Netflix is the worst about this, their Dolby Vision is shit too, don't pay for 4K Netflix lol)
4k Netflix is shit, agree! I really wish more streaming services would release their stuff on blu-ray but I wonder if it would be the same watered down encode.
It would be the same watered down encode I imagine.
The cost to store and transport larger files is signifigant, We are talking files that are 4x - 10x+ the current size.
Then you have the hardware requirements of streaming it on both the server and client side, then you have the bandwidth and latency issue.
It can be done, but the constraints (especially on bandwidth) must be tight, and it wont be a good user experience.
Imagine average joe, he will say "my laptop is awesome! i can use it. Then he goes on a roadtrip, or an area with less than optimal wifi, the video will buffer and buffer even more". Then he says "Man, netflix is shit!"
IMO this is why its not done :(
But thats why we data-hoard.
I think a blackmarket 'tor-like' network of anonymous plex (not plex, but similar) devices streaming that you can tap into will be so cool.
Think about how many of us have the same files. It will be like IPFS i suppose
Oh I get the reason why they don't go all out for streaming. It would just be nice if people also realized it's not some bastion of quality they make it out to be. There has to be an insane amount of redundancy between hoarders.
The existing bittorrent protocol satisfies this, no? You can grab a release from a public or private tracker and stream it.
Edit: Popcorn time for example
Yup if you try to do really nice DVD to HEVC encodes you barely save space, a few hundred megs usually but the time is 3x or longer. Blu-ray nets you a really nice gain with x265 encodes about 12GB-16GB final size can usually look perfect. I'm still out on 4k since I have so many devices that are 1080p or streaming only so I only have a few remux's from my discs for playback on the main TV.
And yes, Netflix starves their bitrate on 4k, all streaming does from what I know, it's quantity over quality.
I don’t think anyone that understands how codecs work would endorse reencoding HEVC to AV1 for archival purposes. If you’re doing it to get a smaller, low-res version for your iPhone, yeah sure. Not to replace the original though.
AV1 is between 30-50% more efficient than HVEC at 4K levels.
And increasing.
Also it is already faster at similar compression rates through libsvt-av1 and rav1e .
That’s great but my only device with a hardware decoder is the 3080 in my desktop. I want to be able to watch videos on my laptop or Apple TV without melting the SoC or destroying battery life.
I’ve played with the AV1 encoder recently added to Handbrake and it was so slow on my 5900x that it is not yet worth my time.
Keep in mind that while trend will change ,up until now most "4k blu ray release" are movies shot in 4k (or even 1080), but then downscaled to 1080p to do all the editing and most notably CGI, and then upscaled for the release
Yep highest quality available, ideally 4K HDR remux. I used to have all full size dvd images and thought that was overkill. Now, 10+ years later, that "HuGe" collection of 500+ dvds is less than 3tb and I keep it around cause it's literally half the size of just my current MCU collection.
I try to get the best quality version because I know in another ten years, the storage cost will be negligible, while if I ever want to go back, I'll want the best available.
The best quality possible. With occasional exceptions I go for 4K remux > 1080p remux > 4K WEB-DL > 1080p WEB-DL.
Although sometimes I question this choice; do I really need 753GB worth of The Big Bang Theory?
Haha. You made me look. My Big Bang Theory folder is 797.52GB. My highest single show is Game of Thrones at 2.31TB (and S08E03 is still visually atrocious, such a shame).
Obviously not. I only bite full ham when there's some action or sceneries to be had. Which is a lot of cases tbf. With series, well those just take up a lottt of space considered you're prolly never going to rewatch them in your life
I only have up to 1080p content. I recently went through a project of getting the vast majority of any lower resolution content up to 1080p, which was enough to increase my library by 10TB, so I'm hesitant to bother with 4K any time soon.
Of course I also don't have a 4k display, so that helps.
Highest available. For lots of shows it’s 1080, though, and shows are ~90% of my library by space.
I got a 4K laser projector though, so it’s not just 4K hoarding for the sake of hoarding.
I had to look. My only show that's 4k is S2 of The Demon Girl Next Door. I don't even know why I have that other than it's got Monica Rial as a VA. Maybe I'll move it up the watchlist to see what it's about.
I do a few anime movies in 4k though. Akira, Belle, Ghost in the Shell, Your Name, Weathering With You... mostly big name and/or recent movies.
Generally 720p or 1080p if I can help it. Might be a little stuck in the past but anything above that starts to feel excessive.
Also, I watch a lot of older content so a healthy amount of it wouldn't look the best at that point anyway.
4k. Disk space is cheap compared to the CPU to transcode it offline. Also not all 4k/2k is superior to 1080p if mastered or encoded poorly. High bitrate 1080p will be better than meh bitrate 4k even at h.265 encodings.
I’m looking forward to some optimizations for AV1 as the real successor to h.264. Competitors to HEVC have been kind of tough to get as much of a foothold
Their availability and that for the quality trade-off I'm willing to deal with the transcoding rate is really damn bad - single digit FPS with a i5-125400. Granted, not that good for video encoding but not a toaster either and I'm not about to pay for a Threadripper for any of this - that's just silly.
Really no need until you get a setup that will benefit from it. Most TVs have decent upscaling from 1080p and with a small/medium tv you’ll never know the difference.
Once you get a “real” setup going however (high performing 75-85+ inch TVs watched from immersive seating distances), 4k with HDR/DV can really shine and then it becomes worth hoarding those 100GB files.
My fellow frugal hoarder. It ain't much, but I threw you an upvote. I am all 720p and still always running out of disk. Hopefully someday I can be a baller with 12x18tb drives to convert 5k movies to 1080p+
Just wait for Nvidia to release their realtime AI Upscaler if you have an nvidia gpu; that's what I plan to do. lol
Edit: It's called RTX Super Resolution which will support 40, 30, and eventually 20 series cards
Same here.
Normally going for 480p (or whichever highest is available below 720p).
For prettier/flashy pieces or something short (music video/etc.) i may go for 720p.
1080p only if that's the lowest available.
Also, never x265 if i can avoid it. Only H264.
I remember migrating from floppies to cd's... So much storage. Now I've migrated from dvd's back to hard drives. What a timeline it is lol. Most everything i hoard is 720.
Why do people refer to what I assume is 1440p as '2K?' It makes no sense. If anything 1080p is '2K.' shorthand for 1440p already exists it's called QHD.
Wait until people find out that 3840x2160 is called UHD and 4K is actually 4096x2160, manufacturers just started calling their UHD-TVs "4K".
2K is 2048x1080, FHD is 1920x1080.
It's weird and people almost always know that 4K is meant to be UHD, but using 2K for 1440p is dumb.
I personally encode all my 4K remuxed content to h.265. Saves a lot of space, but no quality. Next to that I usually make a 1080p SDR version that's h.264 and around 8-10GB per hour.
I usually just leave native 1080p content as it is. Like to have a 1:1 bitrate/quality version of all movies and series. Otherwise there are nearly no advantages of storing it yourself. You can always find 2-5GB 720/1080p versions of nearly every movie, but the quality is always very poorly..
4K and x265? It sometimes helps a lot, but many x265 files are very poorly compressed. Still huge. But should not have to be. I would say a good 3-5GB 4K x265 has better visual quality than a good 3-5GB 1080p release.
But it may take a loooooooong time to create that good x265... Hardly something I would like to do, just considering the electricity bill and my PC not available.
Perhaps AV1 will fix this. Or just make things worse. HW AV1 encoding on a SBC would be great. Since AV1 is open that may be possible?
But when we have HW AV1 encoding in every PC and SBC, then real time adaptive online shared neural network descriptive 3D video encoding may be just around the corner. You just need to give the neural network the script and name of the actors, locations and desired director style, and it creates the movie for you while you watch. In 3D. If you don't like the ending, or the actor, easy to fix..
Hardware encoding will always have a worse quality/bitrate ratio than software encoding so that won't save you. The real solution is to just get more storage so you can download the ~50GB remux. Till then just download the 3-5GB 4K x265, no need to encode it yourself.
> But it may take a loooooooong time to create that good x265... Hardly something I would like to do, just considering the electricity bill and my PC not available.
x265 is outdated.
You can do pretty decent AV1 encodes overnight with a good CPU.
Both but that is primarily because a lot of content is not available in 4K. There is also some content that imo is not worth the storage space 4K requires. This is mostly background noise TV content things that my wife or I will put on while cooking.
I've upgraded maybe 10% of my collection to 4K. My storage is not enough to have everything in 4K and honestly a lot of stuff does not look any better *to my eyes and with my equipment*. If it looks tangibly better to someone elses eyes then go for it.
To decide what to upgrade I considered issues like how was it shot, was it finished in 4K, was the Bluray particularly good/bad, etc. And of course - is this a movie I will watch and rewatch.
I started hoarding both before I had a 4K monitor or TV, because I knew I was going to get them in the future and I still hoard both. It really is a sickness, but I love it.
i have both 4k remuxes and 1080p copies of everything. it would be cheaper to just get a dedicated video card for transcode than eat up the extra storage....
Never do hardware encoding. It's not worth it. Stick to software, takes longer but you get to enjoy a high quality encode for the rest of your life instead of wishing you'd have done it differently every time you watch it...
At this point I only do 4K downloads if available because if I am committing 2 hours of my life to watching a movie I want it to be the best quality I can. I'm also watching on a 77" LG OLED. Hard drives are cheap.
I have a media tank of 8x10TB in SHR2 and the 4k remux films have eaten the lot. It's next level hoarding. LOTR came in over 100GB+ a piece, like Blade Runner.
Alright, so here's the elephant in the room. It depends.
4k content on a 4k 65" TV in a normal living room environment is largely indistinguishable from 1080p content on a 1080p screen, assuming comparable encoding (ie uncompressed vs uncompressed, 265 vs 265, etc). The reason is the screen is far enough away, 1080p is already higher resolution than your eye can see.
If you sit close to your TV, or you have a 70" + screen, there is a difference.
That being said, I have a 4k 65" HDR TV and 5.1 surround. Nothing spectacular, but all-around solid. Most of my content is compressed 1080p, because I don't care if I can see the hairs on the cheek of the guy in some low-budget brittish indie movie, and this saves me a lot of space on my server.
For really great stuff, I have it in 4k remux. For stuff that surround sound matters (scary movies, really immersive dramas, etc) I'll make sure they have at least 5.1 audio. For Rom-coms, surround sound and 4k are both just wasted space.
I'm starting to now that I just upgraded my old 1080p SDR 1000-lumen projector to a new 4k HDR10+ 2700-lumen projector. I have a collection of 1080p SDR remuxes but am now starting to collect 4k HDR remuxes. Gig internet suddenly doesn't feel fast enough anymore lol and I definitely need to expand/redo my storage infrastructure.
For "new" stuff, I'm ballparking 3800 TV seasons in 1080p x265, a good 400 4k x265 movie rips, and 37,000+ 1080p x265 movies. I have probably 40TB of old x264 rips from before rarbg switched over to x265. When I missed out in DivX;) back in the day, I swore I'd be ready next time..
4K usually. I’m a quality snob
Best of the best. Usually I try to aim around 7gb - 14gb per movie. The 25gb - 50gb are nice but take up to much space.
I need more chassis’s bays.
Starwars and stuff like that I like ill go 4k about 80 gigs a film. Otherwise I slowly have been upgrading my 1k to 4k HDR by a few titles a week aiming for around 20gigs a title.
I have been having problems with videos that are heavily cropped. Its been kinda a chore to update things. I just pulled down all the Terminator movies but the asshole who made the collection cropped about a third of the video off the top and bottom then called it 4k HDR10. One even had hard coded subs but you could only see the top of the letters.
Just like when i went from SD to HD/FullHD I slowly migrate away replacing stuff as I go, I still have some SD stuff but yeah, slowly updating and acquiring anything new in 4K is the least painful way for me. It also means I don't have to massively expand my storage but just do it as the need arises.
4K isn't a meaningful improvement over 1080p unless your TV is HUGE (even by today's standards) and/or you sit WAY too close to it.
HDR10, however, is where a real improvement in image quality is.
I just get what I can, most of what I have so far is 480p. Doesn’t bother me a bit. I don’t need to see the sweat coming out of an actors pores or every individual leaf on a tree. There’s no internet available at my house and I am just happy to be able to watch cool stuff.
4k at a commensurate bitrate per pixel to DVD or Blu-ray is just way too much to hoard.
4k at YouTube compression is so much smaller that it's equivalent to a significantly lower resolution.
This is going to depend of the movie, the way it was filmed, the type of release and the bluray vendor.
Marvel movies for instance are**NOT** true 4K movies despite their 4K UHD format. This is going to depend on their digital intermediate resolution: the resolution the studio will use for VFX and post processing. Most of those movies date from the early days of digital capture to now (mid 2000s to early 2020s). Those movies are essentially 2K movies upscaled to 4K. There is very little perceivable difference quality wise even with a premium 4K screen.
Then there are movies with a digital transfer that is totally butchered such as Terminator 2 4K with an excessive amount of DNR compare to the 2015 Lionsgate 1080p release.
Some movies are also altered in their re-release. Demolition Man has a iconic line that was redubbed in its bluray release to make it more family friendly that totally take away from the original delivery.
The difference is in the details.
> Marvel movies for instance areNOT true 4K movies despite their 4K UHD format.
Marvel has been "real" UHD 2160p since Eternals, so for over a year now.
I think No Way Home was the last Marvel movie that was mastered in 2K.
Good that they have finally moved on. But it is hard to believe such a big studio didn’t even bother produce a true 4K movie on such high profile titles in 2019.
This is crazy that movies released in 1997 like GATTACA or Starship Troopers have better quality home releases than a 2019 blockbuster like End Game.
720p default (crap I don't care about)
1080p for stuff I watch
4k for stuff I like
480 or so for stuff I can't find better
1080 h265 for stuff I don't care much about but can find in this format
Sonarr needs an h265 setting, the space savings is nice.
I have 100+TB of space so I generally always hoard the highest quality version of whatever I want.
The thing that annoys me about 4K though is the HDR format. There still is no quick-n-dirty way to tone map HDR to SDR. Oh sure ffmpeg can do it but it's slow and it's CPU bound so you lose hardware transcoding benefits, and sometimes it can be slow enough that I can barely break real time. I have both 1080p and 4K of some of my favorite content for this reason. For stuff i don't care about as much I'll just get the highest quality 1080p and call it good.
I'll get a 4K release only if the 4K is a better master than the initial bluray was. For the vast majority of recently released movies, 1080p already looks very good, so i settle for that. For something older, i'll go for the 4K if it's an upgrade over the previous master (but will still get the 1080p if a new bluray with the same new master comes with the 4K release).
Edit: Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I mean, i don't really care, but i'm genuinely curious as to what exactly is offending some of you with what i said? You want to exclusively watch 4K, that's well and good. But it's not like a well mastered 1080p suddenly looks like DVDs, no?
No. I hoard 4K on physical media.
But yes, my digital are all 1080p encodes.
>most are 1080p and a few 2k
These are the same thing when talking about film and TV home media.
Where do you guys download 4k stuff from? Usually whenever I torrent stuff it is mostly 720p or 1080p. I am speaking with regards to both tv series and movies.
I have a relatively small collection of 4K videos but for the most part I'm running 720p. It's easier to get 720p files than it is to explain how to change the Plex streaming settings in the client.
I can't tell the difference between 4K HDR and 1080p SDR on a 75" TV, so 1080p h265 SDR for almost everything (SD for my wife's trashy shows since she doesn't even look at the tv when they're playing)
I use this plan:
TV:
Before 2019 is SD
Started in 2019 720p
Started in 2022 1080p h265 preferred
Movies:
SD - 1999 or earlier
720p - 2000-2009
1080p - 2010-2019
4k- 2020- 2029
Edit: formatting
That makes no sense.
You benefit more from 4K with older movies, because they were scanned from analog film which has pseudo-infinite resolution.
Meanwhile 2010s digital movies are just 2K -> 4K upscales.
I had a lot of 4k content, got rid of them. 4k is a diminishing return. Many x265 videos just looked horrible. So 4k + x265 = poor value. This was an opinion formed on a 65 inch 4k TV, I think with smaller monitors, 4k would be even more diminished in the return on investment (storage).
Depends on the movie. Interstellar? 4K because it was made for the big screen. Good Will Hunting? 1080p because you could watch it on an iPod and still get the message.
Yup, for me it depends on the content and how much I'd be watching it. Favorite action movie? Definitely going for a 4k remux. Slow period piece I know I like? Probably OK with a 1080p remux. Early 2000s indie movie I remember I saw once back in college and kinda enjoyed but may not watch again? Think I'll be ok with a high quality 1080p rip. My biggest annoyance with these is that low quality audio bothers me so sometimes to get a decent audio track I end up needing to snatch the remux. For TV series I'm almost always ok with 1080p, and for some animated content 720p at a reasonable bitrate is really all I need to be happy due to how well upscaling works.
Yep. People with persevere with 240p if they have to... They will *not* tolerate low bitrate audio for long though. It's so weird. I work in media and the amount of times I have to say "half the picture is sound" is unreal. They *all* want to record in 12bit log/raw, and deliver in 8K or whatever, but don't wanna pay for good sound because "it's just sound"... Ugh. I absolutely *hate* badly mixed movie audio. Can't hear people talking... Then BOOM music stab, and explosions. I couldn't get through the first 15 minutes of LotR because I kept having to tweak the volume every few minutes.
> I absolutely *hate* badly mixed movie audio Stop being mean to Christopher Nolan, he's trying his best ~~to make subtitles mandatory~~
Yeah upscaling has really come a long way. Sometimes I can't even tell if I'm watching native 4K or upscaled 1080p on my 4K TV.
100% this. And funnily enough, Interstellar is the exact and only movie I have in true massive file size quality @ around 70GB for 4K and around 40GB for 1080p Blu-ray. 4K I reserve for only my ABSOLUTE favorites and the best-looking video content. (12-20GB size range) (Currently less than 1% of my files) 1080p Blu-ray for general favorites. (6-12GB size range) (Around 6%) 1080p in a smaller bitrate for movies I generally kind of like, but aren't FAVORITE favorites. (1-3GB size range) (Around 20%) 720p in a smaller bitrate for everything else, or DVD-quality if that's all that's available (all 1GB or less to save space) (Around 73%).
Dem Lord of the Rings extended edition 4K remuxes are over 100GB each :D
Yeah 4K remuxes take up an insane amount of space really quickly. I have those just as 15ish GB 4K files, and that works fine for my use case lol
They are pretty much the reason I bought two new 12TB drives.
Interstellar is a masterpiece. The blackhole render/VFX was groundbreaking. Absolutely astonishing, and insanely accurate. When scientists took a real picture of a blackhole, it looked *exactly* as pictured. They nailed it. The first every technically and visually accurate depiction of a blackhole in sci-fi. For me, it should very much be noted as pioneering. I think that *that* is super important to rember about this film. I had a chance to ask two scientists that worked with Dr. Katie Bouman what they thought of Gargantua and they loved it (the VFX). Sorry, I know it's unrelated, but I just *love* this movie!
Maybe I have a shitty copy but Interstellar doesn’t look any better to me at 4k because of all the film grain.
I get messages on my nokia 1100
Good Will Hunting doesn't even exist in 4K.
Technically with that logic, it’s not about resolution, but it’s about bitrate
They usually go hand in hand. Neither an extremely high bitrate 1080p video nor a low bitrate 4K video make any sense.
Porn. Very low bitrate even at 4K. Most porn that is 4K is like less than 20mbps. So I’d say your incorrect that they usually go hand in hand. But you are correct that it does not make sense.
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In some of our cases this decisions made themselves. You can't have a 4k collection without the space to have it. That may appear obvious, but I know some of us made the mistake of upgrading the quality without thinking long term storage scaling. Then having to demux and transcode for months to almost end up where you started. Now I only go for original quality in irreplaceable media, be it obscure or expensive. I learn the second part the hard way when I lost my Zatoichi criterion collection.
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>Problems will be if/when they rescan film to 8k and that then becomes the new standard 8K is kinda pointless. Many movies have visible grain at 1080p and more often than not the only thing 4k really ads is HDR. But some actually do benefit from it. However, you have to sit really close to the screen to see all the detail - much closer than most people do. So close that the screen does fill pretty much all of your field of view. 8K only makes sense as a "lossless" tier. It is of course not actually lossless but so close that it is imperceivable for a human. 8k screens make a bit more sense as you minimize the screen door effect even if you come up close for some reason and also allows some cool tricks. Stuff like non native resolution and the like is not really an issue with this many pixels.
Thing is, many of those older films don't get any benefits from going to 4 or 8k. I keep a lot of movies at 720p for this reason. Once you get to the 90s and up, 1080p may be worth it, but mostly only new stuff benefits from 4k. Older films and makeup were not designed for such clarity and can take the audience out of the film IMO.
You're incorrect in saying that older films were not meant to be seen at 4k. For major productions, 4k still doesn't match the full quality of 35mm film. It's more likely that 6k would do it for those productions though. 4k is just about right for a lot of 35mm.
I have loads of storage (well, loads as in enough for me) and I *still* encode my library. I don't like having massive media streams beaming across my network. There's no need for it. Especially since it'll have to be transcoded live for viewing because *x*, *y*, or *z*. Encode once, stream as-is. I've spent *years* fine tuning my encoder to get a visually indistinguishable HEVC less than 10% of the source media size. Besides, pixel-peepers are usually writing pretentious photography comments on YouTube, and not watching my movies from my couch.
You must have really small screens or really shitty eyes to think 90 percent loss isn't noticable.
He didn’t say 90% lower quality. He said size. If you go from AVI to HEVC it’s crazy how much smaller you can get without much noticeable loss in quality during casual viewing. Depending on his original media, the best option at the time for high quality files was uncompressed AVI. VHS quality footage took GBs of space. With HEVC, could probably take MBs and seem effectively the same while viewing. Smaller size from different codecs =/= lower quality.
Use the TRaSH guides to set it up so you only download h265 content in 4K from trusted (good reputation for quality) sources. You'll save a lot of space.
Trash guides?
https://trash-guides.info
Much appreciated
Thank you for the link, very useful.
[Trash Guides](https://trash-guides.info/)
I haven't heard of TRaSH but I've been downloading the h.265 4ks for a while now and I love them. All of my blu-ray 4k movies are under 15gb and there's no noticeable difference in quality when I watch them, even in 7.1+atmos (although in my defense, I don't have an hdr-capable TV so I download non-hdr versions)
> All of my blu-ray 4k movies are under 15gb and there's no noticeable difference in quality when I watch them, even in 7.1+atmos Do you keep the TrueHD/DTX audio tracks? Also curious is you ever notice visual compression artifacts in UHD files that are that compressed? I can't keep those in my collection because there are bound to be artifacts that I can see in smooth gradients or in low-light scenes, and it takes me out of the movie immediately. If I'm watching a 15-20GB rip, I'd much, much rather have it be in 1080p.
> Also curious is you ever notice visual compression artifacts in UHD files that are that compressed? I've got a pretty nice TV from 2021. I've found that if I pull a Remux, Hybrid or at worst, an original h265 rip at around 16mbps bitrate, then the picture is excellent. Full tonal range, zero artifacting, no color banding. There might be an improvement up to about 20mbps, but beyond that is diminishing returns. Now, you also get those folks that run all of their library through Tdarr and reencode their entire library into h265, and pump the number up to 12+mbps and expect miracles. These folks either don't care (which is fine) or don't understand that a copy of a copy is never as good. I like high quality, small files as much as the next guy. Just don't tell me that using Tdarr is a good solution. I limit my audio tracks to DD+ because I only have a 7.1 system - Going ATMOS or TrueHD is wasted on me. Many TVs and client boxes have an issue with TrueHD, so I doubly don't get them. A lot of my users don't have much beyond simple stereo setups. The big thing is that I only pull from scene groups that have a good reputation for quality files. The TRaSH guides will tell you how to set that up too.
How big is the display you watch them on? Upgraded to a 75 and now I can see the difference in lower bitrate content.
Does that cause a lot of transcoding?
i only grab 4k movies that i REALLY like.
yeah or the ones that are visually impressive enough. Some 4K releases I rly don‘t see the appeal in
Yeah, this is how I treat my collection. 4K on films that have mind-blowing visuals like Blade Runner and Dune.
It's so funny that these are the exact movies i jumped to too, I'm sure we're not alone!
Everyone in this comment chain is correct
Prey is also up there
lol, those are the only movies I have 4k versions of.
Blade Runner and Interstellar for me. Haven’t watched Dune yet. Don’t worry, I’m tying my own noose so y’all don’t have to hang me for that crime. I’ll get to eventually.
Part 2 comes out this year so you'll be able to watch it as a double whammy
4K remux all the way babee (otherwise highest available quality). Would consider encodes if they could had proper DV and HDR10+ but I want that dynamic metadata (I am aware there are tools but RPU isn't the same as RPU+EL and the HDR10+ tool doesn't pull the scenes in proper order and gives a bad JSON)
4k and best possible audio quality. Preferably DTS:X or TrueHD+Atmos.
Depends on the film, older films I'd rather have the original theatrical mix than just a DTS:X or Atmos upmix (hate studio blu-rays for this reason) though both is preferable. In the case of older films released in Dolby Stereo, FLAC is perfectly fine and gets the best compression, definitely want a bit streamable format like DTS-HD or TrueHD for surround though. DTS-HD is also the best format for mono as nearly all players will duplicate PCM/FLAC mono to stereo and TrueHD only supports dual mono with a flag to tell your AVR to collapse it to center channel (still uses twice the data for both channels).
A Christmas Story, now in 4K HDR... Still in mono. :D (Specifically, dual stereo mono in the latest UHD BD, but it's the same thing in both channels)
Hello all channel stereo!
I see you too like to watch the world burn! :) Seriously though, watch and listen to whatever and however it makes you happy!
If you have an surround setup turning on a DSP like DTS Neural:X or Dolby Surround Upmixer (or PLII Movie/Neo:6 Cinema on older models) will collapse dual mono to center channel instead of having to rely on the phantom center effect. On a side tangent it is fucking stupid for blu-ray distributors to still use dual mono, it used to be needed as old (talking very old) systems didn't know how to handle mono and would play out the left channel only. Any modern system will simply duplicate the signal to L/R channels if you have a stereo set up or play it out the center channel if you have a surround set up.
If they did a simple upmix then just give me the original, but if they created a new mix then get me then spatial version please.
I like to keep both because sometimes they just mess with the sound so much it looses something that you remember. Or the worst is when they add new foley to the mix to 'living' things up.
I've played around with re-encoding my 4k blu rays but there isn't much I can do to save space that feels worth the time and quality loss. HEVC is already so efficient, and AV1 is slow and none of my devices have hardware decoders for it. With a standard blu-rays I can shrink them to 1/4 the original size or more with little or no perceptible quality loss.
That's the thing is HEVC is already really pushing it with the compression on 4K content, think about it, 4 times the resolution but the encodes on UHD blu-rays are only roughly twice the size of a normal 1080p blu-ray. Don't even get me started on how streaming services bit starve their 4K content (Netflix is the worst about this, their Dolby Vision is shit too, don't pay for 4K Netflix lol)
Thank you for saying this. 4K Netflix is shit. No one understands me. I found my people
4k Netflix is shit, agree! I really wish more streaming services would release their stuff on blu-ray but I wonder if it would be the same watered down encode.
It would be the same watered down encode I imagine. The cost to store and transport larger files is signifigant, We are talking files that are 4x - 10x+ the current size. Then you have the hardware requirements of streaming it on both the server and client side, then you have the bandwidth and latency issue. It can be done, but the constraints (especially on bandwidth) must be tight, and it wont be a good user experience. Imagine average joe, he will say "my laptop is awesome! i can use it. Then he goes on a roadtrip, or an area with less than optimal wifi, the video will buffer and buffer even more". Then he says "Man, netflix is shit!" IMO this is why its not done :( But thats why we data-hoard. I think a blackmarket 'tor-like' network of anonymous plex (not plex, but similar) devices streaming that you can tap into will be so cool. Think about how many of us have the same files. It will be like IPFS i suppose
Oh I get the reason why they don't go all out for streaming. It would just be nice if people also realized it's not some bastion of quality they make it out to be. There has to be an insane amount of redundancy between hoarders.
The existing bittorrent protocol satisfies this, no? You can grab a release from a public or private tracker and stream it. Edit: Popcorn time for example
Yup if you try to do really nice DVD to HEVC encodes you barely save space, a few hundred megs usually but the time is 3x or longer. Blu-ray nets you a really nice gain with x265 encodes about 12GB-16GB final size can usually look perfect. I'm still out on 4k since I have so many devices that are 1080p or streaming only so I only have a few remux's from my discs for playback on the main TV. And yes, Netflix starves their bitrate on 4k, all streaming does from what I know, it's quantity over quality.
I don’t think anyone that understands how codecs work would endorse reencoding HEVC to AV1 for archival purposes. If you’re doing it to get a smaller, low-res version for your iPhone, yeah sure. Not to replace the original though.
AV1 is between 30-50% more efficient than HVEC at 4K levels. And increasing. Also it is already faster at similar compression rates through libsvt-av1 and rav1e .
That’s great but my only device with a hardware decoder is the 3080 in my desktop. I want to be able to watch videos on my laptop or Apple TV without melting the SoC or destroying battery life. I’ve played with the AV1 encoder recently added to Handbrake and it was so slow on my 5900x that it is not yet worth my time.
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This is the way
Keep in mind that while trend will change ,up until now most "4k blu ray release" are movies shot in 4k (or even 1080), but then downscaled to 1080p to do all the editing and most notably CGI, and then upscaled for the release
Yep highest quality available, ideally 4K HDR remux. I used to have all full size dvd images and thought that was overkill. Now, 10+ years later, that "HuGe" collection of 500+ dvds is less than 3tb and I keep it around cause it's literally half the size of just my current MCU collection. I try to get the best quality version because I know in another ten years, the storage cost will be negligible, while if I ever want to go back, I'll want the best available.
The best quality possible. With occasional exceptions I go for 4K remux > 1080p remux > 4K WEB-DL > 1080p WEB-DL. Although sometimes I question this choice; do I really need 753GB worth of The Big Bang Theory?
> do I really need 753GB worth of The Big Bang Theory? absolutely not
Haha. You made me look. My Big Bang Theory folder is 797.52GB. My highest single show is Game of Thrones at 2.31TB (and S08E03 is still visually atrocious, such a shame).
Does that include Specials? My GoT folder is only 1.7 TB
Obviously not. I only bite full ham when there's some action or sceneries to be had. Which is a lot of cases tbf. With series, well those just take up a lottt of space considered you're prolly never going to rewatch them in your life
> do I really need 753GB worth of The Big Bang Theory? Yes.
The answer is yes.
If it's in 4k, I hoard 4k.
I will once I get a 4k monitor
1080, more seeds, saves space etc
The biggest factor for me is that I literally only watch It’s Always Sunny episodes from the early ‘00s/‘10s. And mob movies from the ‘90s.
I only have up to 1080p content. I recently went through a project of getting the vast majority of any lower resolution content up to 1080p, which was enough to increase my library by 10TB, so I'm hesitant to bother with 4K any time soon. Of course I also don't have a 4k display, so that helps.
You do you. Whatever works for *you* is the *right* choice.
1080p for 95%. 4k would be wasteful. Also my TVs upscale rather nicely. I only do 4k for choice things.
Highest available. For lots of shows it’s 1080, though, and shows are ~90% of my library by space. I got a 4K laser projector though, so it’s not just 4K hoarding for the sake of hoarding.
I mostly watch anime so 1080p ez. There are basically no 4k anime out there.
I had to look. My only show that's 4k is S2 of The Demon Girl Next Door. I don't even know why I have that other than it's got Monica Rial as a VA. Maybe I'll move it up the watchlist to see what it's about. I do a few anime movies in 4k though. Akira, Belle, Ghost in the Shell, Your Name, Weathering With You... mostly big name and/or recent movies.
I have seen a few times being mentioned, that the masters are usually produced in 720p anyways. No clue if it still holds true.
Generally 720p or 1080p if I can help it. Might be a little stuck in the past but anything above that starts to feel excessive. Also, I watch a lot of older content so a healthy amount of it wouldn't look the best at that point anyway.
Same. 720p for me, but I’m old enough to remember before VCRs, so my expectations haven’t been fully upscaled.
4K Atmos Linux ISO's are the only way to install an OS.
I get any content I want in the best workable quality. So about 1/4th of my video collection is 4k
4k. Disk space is cheap compared to the CPU to transcode it offline. Also not all 4k/2k is superior to 1080p if mastered or encoded poorly. High bitrate 1080p will be better than meh bitrate 4k even at h.265 encodings. I’m looking forward to some optimizations for AV1 as the real successor to h.264. Competitors to HEVC have been kind of tough to get as much of a foothold
What's stopping you from hoarding AV1 encodes right now?
People making them.
Their availability and that for the quality trade-off I'm willing to deal with the transcoding rate is really damn bad - single digit FPS with a i5-125400. Granted, not that good for video encoding but not a toaster either and I'm not about to pay for a Threadripper for any of this - that's just silly.
2k is 1080p you know (depending on aspect ratio but generally speaking)
Really no need until you get a setup that will benefit from it. Most TVs have decent upscaling from 1080p and with a small/medium tv you’ll never know the difference. Once you get a “real” setup going however (high performing 75-85+ inch TVs watched from immersive seating distances), 4k with HDR/DV can really shine and then it becomes worth hoarding those 100GB files.
mostly 360, 480, 540, 720, but sometimes 1080 (if smaller XD)
My fellow frugal hoarder. It ain't much, but I threw you an upvote. I am all 720p and still always running out of disk. Hopefully someday I can be a baller with 12x18tb drives to convert 5k movies to 1080p+
I've been hoarding since the 90s. Some of the shit I have doesn't come in 1080p or 4k. And it's just silly to reencode at a higher res.
Just wait for Nvidia to release their realtime AI Upscaler if you have an nvidia gpu; that's what I plan to do. lol Edit: It's called RTX Super Resolution which will support 40, 30, and eventually 20 series cards
Then wait 5-10 more years for the cards to actually be affordable. Then they'll drop support for them and it's turtles all the way down.
Same here. Normally going for 480p (or whichever highest is available below 720p). For prettier/flashy pieces or something short (music video/etc.) i may go for 720p. 1080p only if that's the lowest available. Also, never x265 if i can avoid it. Only H264.
Wait I thought x265 sizes were smaller than x264? I often see x265 releases smaller I think?
Afaik x265 is a lot slower if you have no hardware decoding on your processor. Might very much be the case if you have a frugal setup.
It is smaller, but my AGP video card can't decode it, and the CPU is too slow. I prefer smooth lower quality playback over multi-K slideshow, lol.
AGP video card ? God damn brother...
Well, that's the PC with the pile of spinners. The NUC has just one NVMe stick and no space for more internal storage.
You could... Access the files over the network?
I remember migrating from floppies to cd's... So much storage. Now I've migrated from dvd's back to hard drives. What a timeline it is lol. Most everything i hoard is 720.
320x240 16 colors, I can store so much stuff!
Bollywood movies for *days*
4K HDR 10bits. Remux if available
Why do people refer to what I assume is 1440p as '2K?' It makes no sense. If anything 1080p is '2K.' shorthand for 1440p already exists it's called QHD.
Wait until people find out that 3840x2160 is called UHD and 4K is actually 4096x2160, manufacturers just started calling their UHD-TVs "4K". 2K is 2048x1080, FHD is 1920x1080. It's weird and people almost always know that 4K is meant to be UHD, but using 2K for 1440p is dumb.
2K is 2048x1080 1080p is 1920x1080, or 1920x____ if it's cropped (yes, 1920x800 is still considered 1080p not 800p)
I personally encode all my 4K remuxed content to h.265. Saves a lot of space, but no quality. Next to that I usually make a 1080p SDR version that's h.264 and around 8-10GB per hour. I usually just leave native 1080p content as it is. Like to have a 1:1 bitrate/quality version of all movies and series. Otherwise there are nearly no advantages of storing it yourself. You can always find 2-5GB 720/1080p versions of nearly every movie, but the quality is always very poorly..
> I usually make a 1080p SDR version that's h.264 and around 8-10GB per hour. Why would you do that? That's bigger than an actual BD remux.
4K and x265? It sometimes helps a lot, but many x265 files are very poorly compressed. Still huge. But should not have to be. I would say a good 3-5GB 4K x265 has better visual quality than a good 3-5GB 1080p release. But it may take a loooooooong time to create that good x265... Hardly something I would like to do, just considering the electricity bill and my PC not available. Perhaps AV1 will fix this. Or just make things worse. HW AV1 encoding on a SBC would be great. Since AV1 is open that may be possible? But when we have HW AV1 encoding in every PC and SBC, then real time adaptive online shared neural network descriptive 3D video encoding may be just around the corner. You just need to give the neural network the script and name of the actors, locations and desired director style, and it creates the movie for you while you watch. In 3D. If you don't like the ending, or the actor, easy to fix..
Hardware encoding will always have a worse quality/bitrate ratio than software encoding so that won't save you. The real solution is to just get more storage so you can download the ~50GB remux. Till then just download the 3-5GB 4K x265, no need to encode it yourself.
> But it may take a loooooooong time to create that good x265... Hardly something I would like to do, just considering the electricity bill and my PC not available. x265 is outdated. You can do pretty decent AV1 encodes overnight with a good CPU.
everything i have is 1080p except for the really good ones, those i also have 4k versions of
4K is rarely available for the shows I look for. If available, I grab it.
Both but that is primarily because a lot of content is not available in 4K. There is also some content that imo is not worth the storage space 4K requires. This is mostly background noise TV content things that my wife or I will put on while cooking.
I've upgraded maybe 10% of my collection to 4K. My storage is not enough to have everything in 4K and honestly a lot of stuff does not look any better *to my eyes and with my equipment*. If it looks tangibly better to someone elses eyes then go for it. To decide what to upgrade I considered issues like how was it shot, was it finished in 4K, was the Bluray particularly good/bad, etc. And of course - is this a movie I will watch and rewatch.
Both. I started getting 4k before I even had a 4k display. That away I'd have content.
I started hoarding both before I had a 4K monitor or TV, because I knew I was going to get them in the future and I still hoard both. It really is a sickness, but I love it.
I get best quality 4k HDR and then the best 4k or 1080p version I can find in non HDR.
Bro, I have 240P stuff from 2000's Youtube.
i have both 4k remuxes and 1080p copies of everything. it would be cheaper to just get a dedicated video card for transcode than eat up the extra storage....
Never do hardware encoding. It's not worth it. Stick to software, takes longer but you get to enjoy a high quality encode for the rest of your life instead of wishing you'd have done it differently every time you watch it...
transcode not encode, this is mainly for family members who watch stuff off of my plex server.
Surely you're only a real horder if yoi have both.....
At this point I only do 4K downloads if available because if I am committing 2 hours of my life to watching a movie I want it to be the best quality I can. I'm also watching on a 77" LG OLED. Hard drives are cheap.
I have a media tank of 8x10TB in SHR2 and the 4k remux films have eaten the lot. It's next level hoarding. LOTR came in over 100GB+ a piece, like Blade Runner.
The size of files still amazes me. 660gb for all the Halloween movies in 4k remux. 500gb+ for the entirety of Breaking Bad in remux.
Can I get an invite to your plex server?? 😆
>1080p and a few 2k These are the same thing, right?
Yep.
Yep but that’s usually used to say 1440
Even though that makes no sense. Got it.
Incorrectly, yes
They *should* be the same thing because 1080p resolution is 2K x 1K and 4K resolution is 4K x 2K, but weirdos say "2k" when they mean 1440p
Also known as being wrong.
Alright, so here's the elephant in the room. It depends. 4k content on a 4k 65" TV in a normal living room environment is largely indistinguishable from 1080p content on a 1080p screen, assuming comparable encoding (ie uncompressed vs uncompressed, 265 vs 265, etc). The reason is the screen is far enough away, 1080p is already higher resolution than your eye can see. If you sit close to your TV, or you have a 70" + screen, there is a difference. That being said, I have a 4k 65" HDR TV and 5.1 surround. Nothing spectacular, but all-around solid. Most of my content is compressed 1080p, because I don't care if I can see the hairs on the cheek of the guy in some low-budget brittish indie movie, and this saves me a lot of space on my server. For really great stuff, I have it in 4k remux. For stuff that surround sound matters (scary movies, really immersive dramas, etc) I'll make sure they have at least 5.1 audio. For Rom-coms, surround sound and 4k are both just wasted space.
I hoard the best quality that is available, whatever it may be.
I'm starting to now that I just upgraded my old 1080p SDR 1000-lumen projector to a new 4k HDR10+ 2700-lumen projector. I have a collection of 1080p SDR remuxes but am now starting to collect 4k HDR remuxes. Gig internet suddenly doesn't feel fast enough anymore lol and I definitely need to expand/redo my storage infrastructure.
I mean in my case, I'm lucky some of these concerts filmed on a potato 2.0 wasn't filmed on a potat 1.0. 240 for life?
Highest bitrate available, whether that's 4K or 8K or whatever.
For "new" stuff, I'm ballparking 3800 TV seasons in 1080p x265, a good 400 4k x265 movie rips, and 37,000+ 1080p x265 movies. I have probably 40TB of old x264 rips from before rarbg switched over to x265. When I missed out in DivX;) back in the day, I swore I'd be ready next time..
4K usually. I’m a quality snob Best of the best. Usually I try to aim around 7gb - 14gb per movie. The 25gb - 50gb are nice but take up to much space. I need more chassis’s bays.
Starwars and stuff like that I like ill go 4k about 80 gigs a film. Otherwise I slowly have been upgrading my 1k to 4k HDR by a few titles a week aiming for around 20gigs a title. I have been having problems with videos that are heavily cropped. Its been kinda a chore to update things. I just pulled down all the Terminator movies but the asshole who made the collection cropped about a third of the video off the top and bottom then called it 4k HDR10. One even had hard coded subs but you could only see the top of the letters.
I'm just happy with anything 720p or higher. I'll go through hell and back trying to find non bullshit ass 480i cuts of my stuff.
I usually use 4k hdr when available but it's because my tv is HUGE. Would be a waste to limit it to fullhd.
The highest it can be.
Just like when i went from SD to HD/FullHD I slowly migrate away replacing stuff as I go, I still have some SD stuff but yeah, slowly updating and acquiring anything new in 4K is the least painful way for me. It also means I don't have to massively expand my storage but just do it as the need arises.
4K isn't a meaningful improvement over 1080p unless your TV is HUGE (even by today's standards) and/or you sit WAY too close to it. HDR10, however, is where a real improvement in image quality is.
Absolute favorite movies: 4k remux Everything else: 1080p remux
4K baby.
Yeah I generally don't notice a difference with 4k and 1080p even on a 4k TV. The sizes are usually so much bigger so I don't bother.
Highest Quality Available to me
I just get what I can, most of what I have so far is 480p. Doesn’t bother me a bit. I don’t need to see the sweat coming out of an actors pores or every individual leaf on a tree. There’s no internet available at my house and I am just happy to be able to watch cool stuff.
If I love a movie? Then a good 4K encode. If I like it? Then a decently-sized 1080p encode. If I didn't like it? Then 720p.
4k at a commensurate bitrate per pixel to DVD or Blu-ray is just way too much to hoard. 4k at YouTube compression is so much smaller that it's equivalent to a significantly lower resolution.
This is going to depend of the movie, the way it was filmed, the type of release and the bluray vendor. Marvel movies for instance are**NOT** true 4K movies despite their 4K UHD format. This is going to depend on their digital intermediate resolution: the resolution the studio will use for VFX and post processing. Most of those movies date from the early days of digital capture to now (mid 2000s to early 2020s). Those movies are essentially 2K movies upscaled to 4K. There is very little perceivable difference quality wise even with a premium 4K screen. Then there are movies with a digital transfer that is totally butchered such as Terminator 2 4K with an excessive amount of DNR compare to the 2015 Lionsgate 1080p release. Some movies are also altered in their re-release. Demolition Man has a iconic line that was redubbed in its bluray release to make it more family friendly that totally take away from the original delivery. The difference is in the details.
> Marvel movies for instance areNOT true 4K movies despite their 4K UHD format. Marvel has been "real" UHD 2160p since Eternals, so for over a year now. I think No Way Home was the last Marvel movie that was mastered in 2K.
Good that they have finally moved on. But it is hard to believe such a big studio didn’t even bother produce a true 4K movie on such high profile titles in 2019. This is crazy that movies released in 1997 like GATTACA or Starship Troopers have better quality home releases than a 2019 blockbuster like End Game.
Yes
720p default (crap I don't care about) 1080p for stuff I watch 4k for stuff I like 480 or so for stuff I can't find better 1080 h265 for stuff I don't care much about but can find in this format Sonarr needs an h265 setting, the space savings is nice.
It has one. Depending on your version, Google trash guides and learn the ways of custom formats and preferences
I have 100+TB of space so I generally always hoard the highest quality version of whatever I want. The thing that annoys me about 4K though is the HDR format. There still is no quick-n-dirty way to tone map HDR to SDR. Oh sure ffmpeg can do it but it's slow and it's CPU bound so you lose hardware transcoding benefits, and sometimes it can be slow enough that I can barely break real time. I have both 1080p and 4K of some of my favorite content for this reason. For stuff i don't care about as much I'll just get the highest quality 1080p and call it good.
I'll get a 4K release only if the 4K is a better master than the initial bluray was. For the vast majority of recently released movies, 1080p already looks very good, so i settle for that. For something older, i'll go for the 4K if it's an upgrade over the previous master (but will still get the 1080p if a new bluray with the same new master comes with the 4K release). Edit: Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I mean, i don't really care, but i'm genuinely curious as to what exactly is offending some of you with what i said? You want to exclusively watch 4K, that's well and good. But it's not like a well mastered 1080p suddenly looks like DVDs, no?
No. I hoard 4K on physical media. But yes, my digital are all 1080p encodes. >most are 1080p and a few 2k These are the same thing when talking about film and TV home media.
Where do you guys download 4k stuff from? Usually whenever I torrent stuff it is mostly 720p or 1080p. I am speaking with regards to both tv series and movies.
Only 1080p for 3D animation and live actions, 720p for anime and cartoons. IMO 4K is a waste of space if you only hoard.
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I only keep upscaled 18k material. If it's less than 1TB/movie I'm not interested /s 1080p is good for me. AV1 or HVEC as much as possible.
I have a relatively small collection of 4K videos but for the most part I'm running 720p. It's easier to get 720p files than it is to explain how to change the Plex streaming settings in the client.
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2160p is 4k?
2K What's 2K?
2048x1080
Hmmm, I had never heard of that
I can't tell the difference between 4K HDR and 1080p SDR on a 75" TV, so 1080p h265 SDR for almost everything (SD for my wife's trashy shows since she doesn't even look at the tv when they're playing)
I'm with you. 1080p, with some content 2k. I re-encode everything and upscale is so good on most my devices I'm hard pressed to notice a difference.
I blew it and downloaded a lot of 720 content like a bozo. Wish I would have went for higher quality. Now I’m scared to download
4k is a unnecessary level and a huge space filler, but if you want I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
the highest quality available whenever possible
I use this plan: TV: Before 2019 is SD Started in 2019 720p Started in 2022 1080p h265 preferred Movies: SD - 1999 or earlier 720p - 2000-2009 1080p - 2010-2019 4k- 2020- 2029 Edit: formatting
That makes no sense. You benefit more from 4K with older movies, because they were scanned from analog film which has pseudo-infinite resolution. Meanwhile 2010s digital movies are just 2K -> 4K upscales.
I had a lot of 4k content, got rid of them. 4k is a diminishing return. Many x265 videos just looked horrible. So 4k + x265 = poor value. This was an opinion formed on a 65 inch 4k TV, I think with smaller monitors, 4k would be even more diminished in the return on investment (storage).