I watch a fair amount of series, but I’m not a data hoarder. I see the value in 2GB episodes, but I watch most series on my laptop, my simple 1920x1080 tv or even my phone where that value doesn’t make a difference. If I want to have a theater experience, I’ll go to the theater.
Most of the times I just want to enjoy a good story and relax before I go to bed.
I don’t have infinite storage and I hate when I want to download something new, but Im out of storage, so I have to delete stuff first.
Good enough for who? You? Sure. But not everyone watches on a small screen. Some people might actually care about the quality too. Some of us can’t goto the theatre.
2GB isn’t large by any stretch. There are 720p versions of pretty much everything (at least that’s what I see on most Usenet Indexers). You could easily get a multiple terabyte external drive if your internal storage is full.
Yeah complaining about storage space in 2023 is a bit silly. You can go on eBay right now and get a used 4TB SATA drive for $25. Even cheaper if you get SAS drives, you just need a SAS expansion card which is also around $20 or so. 6TB SAS drives are going for $30.
ISP data caps are a bigger enemy than raw storage capacity these days. It costs me $50/mo to remove my 1TB cap. Which means it is more expensive to download 6TB than it is to buy 6TB of physical storage. And even SSDs are dirt cheap now. Storage has never been cheaper.
I am using unRAID so if one dies I can just replace it. About 4 years ago I bought a lot of fifteen 3TB SAS drives and I have had them running 24/7 since then. Funny enough not a single one has died. They all had around 5 years of power-on hours and now they are up to 9 and still going strong. Honestly I expected to lose at least one per year but they are surprisingly resilient.
The good ol’ United States. Most of the major ISPs have caps here and you do not really have multiple choices because they basically have monopolies in their respective areas.
A family of 4 going to the theater is about 1TB of external SSD. Nowadays they are smaller than your regular phone.
This is going to be my new way of measuring “worth” how many TBs of SSD storage does thing X equate to lol.
Maybe try watching a 1080p HEVC or AV1 episode, 200MB for half an hour or 400MB for an hour and it looks amazing
HEVC is a great codec. Not everyone is encoding with it yet. Couple that with “fun” scene rules and we get what we get. 😅
I’d even say that going to the theater sucks balls. The picture and sound quality usually sucks compared to a high quality download on a 75" 4k TV. Even a high bit rate 1080p video looks better than the theater.
It costs ,e over $100 to take the family out for a movie. As someone on disability right now that $100 is better spent on other things (Like a years worth of Usenet service ;) )
500mb 1080p HEVC for most shows on a 75" TV, but if it’s a space sci-fi show with lots of dark scenes I need that 1GB-2GB episode.
Some shows get by on 200MB, but it depends how static the scenes are and how much lighting there is.
Surely at that size you would notice the artifacts. Just for my sake can you try a Bluray remux. I expect it’s 4k so you could just grab a 4k web-DL and see if you can notice the difference.
Not on my 65" 8k OLED they aren’t! You can absolutely tell the difference.
Smaller/low res screens though, sure.
That’s what I’m saying; not everyone watches media on their phones. I have a Plex server at home with a projector and a mediocre 5.1 (not a HTIB). No way I’m running anything less than 1080p.
Ha, yeah. I work from home, and when I’m out the last thing I want to do is look at my phone.
So I watch films at home. I paid for a high end home cinema set up, I’m gonna make the most of it. Otherwise it’s just a waste.
This may change as I’m having to downscale a bit for my new apartment…but yeah, 200mb still won’t be enough.
I paid for this 4k TV, so damn it I want all the pixels!
Seriously though, resolution is only half the equation. Bitrate, HDR, and compression methods are very important as well.
I feel you, but I also have a feeling this will be blasphemy to some.
Might as well download the episode in GIF format at that point, right guys? 😅
Too much resolution is confusing for my eyes. I need dithering and a max of 256 colors to truly enjoy television as intended.
Lmao. True. I know some people who think 1080p is still bad, and here I am content with 480 on my phone 😂
(don’t kill me, guys)
