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.

  • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zipEnglish
    3·
    16 hours ago

    I have a handful of quality levels I target, for most movies I target 1080p, with a size no more than 2.5gb/hour, as I don’t really need super HD4K Mr.Bean, but then I also have quality profiles ranging all the way up to. 4k 20gb/hour for movies that are worth the storage space.

    Since storage is so expensive, and I’m basically hardlocked at 24TB of storage for the foreseeable future, I may even decrease my “standard” quality profile to save space going forward.

      • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zipEnglish
        2·
        14 hours ago

        Oh, sorry I should have explained further. I use Radarr/Sonarr to automatically find and download torrents, and the quality profiles are what the software uses to grade whether a torrent is acceptable.

          • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zipEnglish
            3·
            13 hours ago

            I moved a few months ago, and went from 100mb with a 1.2tb monthly cap to 1gb with no cap. Its been glorious, I had added 2tb of media in the first 48 hours.

    • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      15 hours ago

      I’m thinking about Blu ray legal versions of the stuff I want in 4k… if I can get it though. It’s a short list. The downside is that apparently the releases aren’t always done the right way so film buffs say “well ackshully the audio on the LaserDisc version is better” and it can be hard to get, especially legit versions instead of pirated rips (technology connections had a video about DVDs.)

      I tried getting some 4k stuff and between the audio format and HDR and whatever else, i gave up. I need new hardware to really make use of it and it takes up SO MUCH SPACE.