40 ms·

Also, H265 encoded 1080p is hitting the sweet spot between quality and file size. About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. Its sort of like whe

by nerdix 3y ago

Also, H265 encoded 1080p is hitting the sweet spot between quality and file size. About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can create a large library very quickly. Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago because the cost per GB was just too expensive and most people weren't going to buy a NAS. But now we are starting to move past the inflection point. SSDs are bigger, H265 reduces file sizes, hardware accelerated H265 encoding is easier (meaning more H265 content), and devices that can decode H265 are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. You can install Plex on your laptop, load up on content, and have a better UX than Netflix.

Dylan16807 3y ago
If we're looking at the storage cost, I'd say the 10x decrease in flash price is doing a lot more than the maybe-2x decrease in file size.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  Few people are building flash nas though the price pressure from flash storage on hdd prices did play a big part. Before flash storage prices started pushing pressure on hdd prices per tb larger drives had become more expensive than smaller drives. We are I think just 3-4 years away from 8tb SSD being cheaper than hdd for me that is the point where we will have mass SSD adoption for Nas drives.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    I'd guess that the kind of person that makes a NAS wouldn't have been stopped by h.264 sizes. The comment I replied to seemed pretty focused on ordinary system drives.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
radley 3y ago
> About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams. ATV+ is killing it with 30Mbps 4K HDR+ video (it used to be as high as 48Mbps). Disney+ is close. The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates, 2x better than their 1080p plan. Worth paying for.
- plastic_bag 3y ago
  > That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams. You don't necessarily have to pick YIFY. Qxr's uploads are a much better comparison. x265 encoded 1080p (with 5 - 6.5Mbps bitrate) from the highest quality sources and they look very good even on 55" 4K panels.
  - tasuki 3y ago
    Are these, like, famous pirates or something?
    - porbelm 3y ago
      They are well-known pirate groups, yes.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow. For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    What do you mean by 2k? Because people should not call 2560x1440 2k, and I've never seen a download that size either.
10729287 3y ago
Sorry to focus on such a detail but VBR nevern been the standard in the Piracy scene. Back in the days it was 192kbps
- kalleboo 3y ago
  When I quit pirating music, I remember the standard being either LAME -V2 or --alt-preset standard which both are VBR https://opentrackers.org/scenerules.org/html/2007_MP3.html https://opentrackers.org/scenerules.org/html/2007_MP3.html
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    Maybe metadata is wrong? Somewhere around 2011 it started to report as cbr, but encoding options are -m j -V 4 -q 3 -lowpass 20.5
- offices 3y ago
  My memory of old what.cd's and today's Red snatch counters disagrees with you. FLAC ~ V0 > 320
- nerdix 3y ago
  That's not how I remember it but it was a long time ago and memory is unreliable so I won't claim that my statement is a fact. But I remember a period of time where basically every rip was VBR. 192kbps then took over when bandwidth and disk space were no long were no longer concerns.
getcrunk 3y ago
Av1 doing 1080p at 3-4 mbps will be reach the point of diminishing returns imo for 1080p content. I can’t wait till that become mainstream. It’ll be the perfect archival quality/space effeciency. Too bad even devices that claim av1 support … even some from the makers of said codec .. ahem chromecast w/gtv .. still stutter or fail.
Sakos 3y ago
Also AV1. I got a 1080p version of a movie encoded in AV1 and it looks pretty damn good at only 1.5GB. The x264 version I have at over 2GB has a lot of obvious artifacting by comparison.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> the privacy scene lol > Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago Huh? 500GB (and more) drives became available at 2006 and by 2008 dropped below $150. Also there was no demand for extra-high-wanna-see-every-original-pixel quality, so XviD releases with atrocious quality but a fine file size were common and were fine on 40-80-250GB drives in 2001-2005. > you can create a large library very quickly Music library and video library are a different things. While the most people 'store forever' the music they dloaded (well, they were back in 2000s, probably not so much today), the video library is mostly useless for the most, because it's dloaded for 1-time consumption.
- nerdix 3y ago
  A 500GB HDD, yes. I'm thinking of the person who had a laptop in 2010-2012 and either replaced their large capacity 2.5 inch HDD with a smaller capacity 128GB or 256GB SSD for the massive performance increase or bought one that had an SSD preinstalled. This would also be a shared drive so it isn't dedicated to media. 2010-2012 is also when most folks would have already upgraded to a HD display and so there was more demand for HD content.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    Nah, by 2012 newcomers didn't bought SSDs en masse yet, USB drives were extremely common (I think my USB3 Transcend 25M3 is from that time) and some still used mobile racks, slowly replaced by USB dock stations. Most of the time people replaced HDD to SSD in the laptops only to use ODD caddy to move their HDD there. By 2010 storage was not a problem, at all. If anything the torrenting reached it's peak ~2008 and on a slow decline (but not in absolute numbers, because the userbase is still rising) ever since, because by 2010 almost any music could be found on YouTube (popular ofc, not something obscure what is known by 3 greybeards on the whole planet) and even a lot of movies too. For the parts of the world where broadband was still costly or capped you could always go to the store and buy 5-in-1 DVD for $2 (talk about quality, eh). After that the succesful multi year campaign by Apple to convince the user what it doesn't need to own music and what it is totally okay to stream "your" music over the cellular networks, along with %he rise of the streaming services, moved the torrenting to a niche of nerds (only lossless music!), nerds (248 variants of StarWars) or nerds (anime).

by nerdix 3y ago

Dylan16807 3y ago

If we're looking at the storage cost, I'd say the 10x decrease in flash price is doing a lot more than the maybe-2x decrease in file size.

xbmcuser 3y ago
Few people are building flash nas though the price pressure from flash storage on hdd prices did play a big part. Before flash storage prices started pushing pressure on hdd prices per tb larger drives had become more expensive than smaller drives. We are I think just 3-4 years away from 8tb SSD being cheaper than hdd for me that is the point where we will have mass SSD adoption for Nas drives.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  I'd guess that the kind of person that makes a NAS wouldn't have been stopped by h.264 sizes. The comment I replied to seemed pretty focused on ordinary system drives.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

radley 3y ago

> About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams. ATV+ is killing it with 30Mbps 4K HDR+ video (it used to be as high as 48Mbps). Disney+ is close. The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates, 2x better than their 1080p plan. Worth paying for.

plastic_bag 3y ago
> That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams. You don't necessarily have to pick YIFY. Qxr's uploads are a much better comparison. x265 encoded 1080p (with 5 - 6.5Mbps bitrate) from the highest quality sources and they look very good even on 55" 4K panels.
- tasuki 3y ago
  Are these, like, famous pirates or something?
  - porbelm 3y ago
    They are well-known pirate groups, yes.
jszymborski 3y ago
Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow. For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  What do you mean by 2k? Because people should not call 2560x1440 2k, and I've never seen a download that size either.

10729287 3y ago

Sorry to focus on such a detail but VBR nevern been the standard in the Piracy scene. Back in the days it was 192kbps

kalleboo 3y ago
When I quit pirating music, I remember the standard being either LAME -V2 or --alt-preset standard which both are VBR https://opentrackers.org/scenerules.org/html/2007_MP3.html https://opentrackers.org/scenerules.org/html/2007_MP3.html
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  Maybe metadata is wrong? Somewhere around 2011 it started to report as cbr, but encoding options are -m j -V 4 -q 3 -lowpass 20.5
offices 3y ago
My memory of old what.cd's and today's Red snatch counters disagrees with you. FLAC ~ V0 > 320
nerdix 3y ago
That's not how I remember it but it was a long time ago and memory is unreliable so I won't claim that my statement is a fact. But I remember a period of time where basically every rip was VBR. 192kbps then took over when bandwidth and disk space were no long were no longer concerns.

getcrunk 3y ago

Av1 doing 1080p at 3-4 mbps will be reach the point of diminishing returns imo for 1080p content. I can’t wait till that become mainstream. It’ll be the perfect archival quality/space effeciency. Too bad even devices that claim av1 support … even some from the makers of said codec .. ahem chromecast w/gtv .. still stutter or fail.

Sakos 3y ago

Also AV1. I got a 1080p version of a movie encoded in AV1 and it looks pretty damn good at only 1.5GB. The x264 version I have at over 2GB has a lot of obvious artifacting by comparison.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

> the privacy scene lol > Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago Huh? 500GB (and more) drives became available at 2006 and by 2008 dropped below $150. Also there was no demand for extra-high-wanna-see-every-original-pixel quality, so XviD releases with atrocious quality but a fine file size were common and were fine on 40-80-250GB drives in 2001-2005. > you can create a large library very quickly Music library and video library are a different things. While the most people 'store forever' the music they dloaded (well, they were back in 2000s, probably not so much today), the video library is mostly useless for the most, because it's dloaded for 1-time consumption.

nerdix 3y ago
A 500GB HDD, yes. I'm thinking of the person who had a laptop in 2010-2012 and either replaced their large capacity 2.5 inch HDD with a smaller capacity 128GB or 256GB SSD for the massive performance increase or bought one that had an SSD preinstalled. This would also be a shared drive so it isn't dedicated to media. 2010-2012 is also when most folks would have already upgraded to a HD display and so there was more demand for HD content.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  Nah, by 2012 newcomers didn't bought SSDs en masse yet, USB drives were extremely common (I think my USB3 Transcend 25M3 is from that time) and some still used mobile racks, slowly replaced by USB dock stations. Most of the time people replaced HDD to SSD in the laptops only to use ODD caddy to move their HDD there. By 2010 storage was not a problem, at all. If anything the torrenting reached it's peak ~2008 and on a slow decline (but not in absolute numbers, because the userbase is still rising) ever since, because by 2010 almost any music could be found on YouTube (popular ofc, not something obscure what is known by 3 greybeards on the whole planet) and even a lot of movies too. For the parts of the world where broadband was still costly or capped you could always go to the store and buy 5-in-1 DVD for $2 (talk about quality, eh). After that the succesful multi year campaign by Apple to convince the user what it doesn't need to own music and what it is totally okay to stream "your" music over the cellular networks, along with %he rise of the streaming services, moved the torrenting to a niche of nerds (only lossless music!), nerds (248 variants of StarWars) or nerds (anime).