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:
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What video file sizes do you guys download and why?
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And what is the correlation between video size and quality? I see some wild variations in file sizes even for the same res.
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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?
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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).
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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.


This sentence is hilarious out of context.
Is the increased size entirely do to bitrate needed to carry all those fine details or is lack of color depth (?) A big factor as well? Like are there generally fewer shades of grade or is it just that they don’t update fast enough to be clear because of the lower bitrate?
By color depth I mean the range of colors/shades/whatever availbe to display.
@Eldritch@piefed.world’s comment covers it. Dark scenes are what are hit first and most by compression which is why dark scenes in YIFY encodes look like they’re made of MegaBloks.