I’m getting back into digital collecting after pretty much exhausting the local thriftstores of any movies I wanted to watch / own.

I was thinking of burning everything to DVD but then I came to my senses and just installed Jellyfin.

Question:

  • What video file sizes do you guys download and why?

  • And what is the correlation between video size and quality? I see some wild variations in file sizes even for the same res.

  • Who are y’alls downloading 20+GB movies? Are you storing all that or are you downmixing? Are you stealing your harddrives out of the recycle bin?

  • Any shortcuts for getting rich blacks for space scenes? Do I just need to suck it up eat the bytes? (I’m thinking of going this route for BSG and can’t remember if they go for video grain in space or true film black).

  • What is the obvious thing I clearly don’t understand by asking these questions?

So for me, it seems for file size, about 700MB / 90 minutes is about as low as I can go, and arguably it’s too low because I’m sometimes distracted by the low quality.

I’m a little confused by what’s going on because I’ll often watch a DVD that’s being upscaled by the player and have no complaints, and I think that’s base 480 or lower, but a labelled 720p can have some distractingly low res.

For my high end, 2GB at 1080p is about as high as I care to go unless it’s some crazy high quality cinematographic shit like Lawrence or Dune.

  • freebee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    6 hours ago

    Depends on your TV, taste, budget.

    A good movie at 480p can be watchable. A good movie at 720p is usually very fine for me.

    1080p is my upper limit.

    I have a small TV. Resolution doesn’t matter all that much if your TV isn’t 2 meters wide.

    Small files with high resolution are very strongly compressed. Some devices might struggle with playing them causing lags or difficult to fast forward or backward etc. That would be more annoying to me than a lowish resolution.

    Also depends who ripped it (did they know what they were doing?) and from which source. Webdl or DVD sourced are normally very watchable in lower resolutions if ripped by skilled people.

    • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      Maxing out most consumer TV’s days would probably fill your hard drive very quickly… I think my tv is technically 4K, but it really doesn’t need to be–my bluray doesn’t even play 4k.

      I’m at 55" about 8 ft away. It’s not too big, not too small…

      Jellyfin’s been rock solid, no problems, but I haven’t dived into a 50gb Solaris yet or anything.

      • freebee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago

        37" :')

        Filesize itself usually isn’t relevant. A high resolution video in a very large file size will rarely cause playback issues on most devices. In my experience the bottleneck of a setup is almost always first encountered with highly compressed video with a large resolution.

        Also, not everyone hoards. Some people look for 4k, watch once and delete. They don’t even seed.

        Anyhow, the main thing to me is content quality. I can watch a solid movie in poor quality, but I couldn’t watch certain crappy movies in super duper high resolution quality even I would be paid for it