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Streaming services are, for the most part, optimized to only send you a portion of the file at a time, send you lower bandwidth versions when the throughput dro

Streaming services are, for the most part, optimized to only send you a portion of the file at a time, send you lower bandwidth versions when the throughput drops below a threshold, or in the case of COVID lockdowns everyone temporarily dropped the max resolution of their services because there was a sudden surge in home media streaming. When it comes to video torrents, I suspect a lot of people would start at looking for 4k rips (even if their devices didn't support it), or fall back to standard bluray rips. That's a huge amount of bandwidth when most people probably are fine with DVD or upscaled DVD quality.

Aeolun 5y ago
Hmm, personally I look for 720p. Who needs multiple 100gb files sitting around on their disk.
- xvector 5y ago
  I spend many thousands on my AV setup so I'm inclined to max it out, even if that requires 100gb+ movies.
  - 55555 5y ago
    Wow you're really into Adult Video!
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  With reasonable encoding settings, you can get pretty nice 1080p at 2GB/hour. 720p will save what, 40% of that? I don't need space that badly. I haven't really seen much 4k to know how I'll feel about that jump. Though I've definitely seen some split-screen streams where I wished it was 4k.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Hmm, anecdotally, 1h at 720p is like 600mb, where 1 hour at 1080p is 2600mb (for me, I assume it depends on encode settings like you say).
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      I doubt those are set to the same quality. 1080p should use about twice the bandwidth for the video at most, but it's often less because there's less fine detail the higher you go, and also the audio data won't change in size. I just did a quick test with x264 at quality 20 on two different clips. On a very high motion animated sequence, it came out at 2GB/3.4GB per hour. A live-action clip of people walking and talking came out at .65GB/1.3GB per hour. So that's 40% less and 50% less, respectively. And with h.265 you can get something like h.264 720p size with h.264 1080p quality, everything else held equal.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
Torrent is still better experience (in my particular case, lol). Tried to watch Ted Lasso at peak lock down. Apple TV+ bumped the quality something to 480p since it was evening in nationwide lockdown so all streaming services are down to 40mbps (tho realistically Apple was barely moving at 3-4mbps). They do let you downloading episodes, but that's still at 1080p. Fired up WebTorrent and was watching it glorious 4k in matter of minutes...

Aeolun 5y ago

Hmm, personally I look for 720p. Who needs multiple 100gb files sitting around on their disk.

xvector 5y ago
I spend many thousands on my AV setup so I'm inclined to max it out, even if that requires 100gb+ movies.
- 55555 5y ago
  Wow you're really into Adult Video!
Dylan16807 5y ago
With reasonable encoding settings, you can get pretty nice 1080p at 2GB/hour. 720p will save what, 40% of that? I don't need space that badly. I haven't really seen much 4k to know how I'll feel about that jump. Though I've definitely seen some split-screen streams where I wished it was 4k.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Hmm, anecdotally, 1h at 720p is like 600mb, where 1 hour at 1080p is 2600mb (for me, I assume it depends on encode settings like you say).
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    I doubt those are set to the same quality. 1080p should use about twice the bandwidth for the video at most, but it's often less because there's less fine detail the higher you go, and also the audio data won't change in size. I just did a quick test with x264 at quality 20 on two different clips. On a very high motion animated sequence, it came out at 2GB/3.4GB per hour. A live-action clip of people walking and talking came out at .65GB/1.3GB per hour. So that's 40% less and 50% less, respectively. And with h.265 you can get something like h.264 720p size with h.264 1080p quality, everything else held equal.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

Torrent is still better experience (in my particular case, lol). Tried to watch Ted Lasso at peak lock down. Apple TV+ bumped the quality something to 480p since it was evening in nationwide lockdown so all streaming services are down to 40mbps (tho realistically Apple was barely moving at 3-4mbps). They do let you downloading episodes, but that's still at 1080p. Fired up WebTorrent and was watching it glorious 4k in matter of minutes...