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Comment by _zooted | Hacker News Reader

ThePirateBay is free and easier.

Considering the size of bluray rips, let alone UHD ones, TPB downloads are usually a significant step down in terms of quality vs directly ripping a disk.

With modern codecs you're unlikely to notice much difference between a 20GB download and a rip you did yourself.

The words of somebody that's never witnessed the quality of a UHD disc :)

Sell it to me! Seriously, I'd love to hear how much better the quality could be. I miss 35 mm and spot (and hear) digital artifacts often and it drives me crazy.

Get a blu ray (not even UHD) of Matrix (the 1999 one, there were never any sequels) and compare the lobby explosion scene with any torrent or stream.

Mind, it's not worth it for most movies. However, those flames are a good example of why bandwidth can matter.

But even a 20GB file? Streams are much more compressed, but I found files >20GB or so to be pretty much the same quality.

Which doesn't really matter though, you can also find 40GB files of most movies, they should (if encoded well) definitely match the quality.

It varies quite a bit, I see a lot of banding in various scenes on my TV with 20GB WEB-DLs compared to an actual 4K BR rip.

In most cases that is to be expected because WEB-DLs tend to be poorly encoded. You should be looking for a remux.

High quality torrents exist? I could download this right now: BD66 / m2ts / Blu-ray / 2160p / Scene / Dolby Atmos / Dolby Vision / HDR10. It's a 64GB file.

Yep, just search for "FraMeSToR" releases.

Yeah, at that point you're basically just downloading a bluray rip.

I bought a copy of planet earth / blue planet II to test out my new fancy oled this year. It's a damned near religious experience watching those series in 4k.

Blu-ray 1080p movies tend to be around 35-45GB per title. 4k movies tend to be around 70-100GB per title.

The disc capacity contributes a lot to disc authors tweaking codec settings to value quality above file size. Visible artifacts are fairly rare even on complex scenes. You could practically believe you're watching a lossless source.

Ignorance is bliss, and I prefer bliss ;)

This is legitimately the stance I take on audio quality, video quality above 1080p (although I do notice the difference in bitrate between streams), cars, video games, and a lot of other things.

I've been spoiling myself and forced Netflix to 1080p (due to Linux, by default it won't go over 720) and I'm starting to slowly agree higher bitrates do look nicer.

It's just that I come from VCD rips and still think that anything better than DVD is fantasticly detailed. Just never had the urge to let myself get used to better, but I'm starting to with 1080p.

It's wild to me that in 2022 people still aren't used to consuming HD media.

720p does in fact count as HD. Either that or you don't remember SD content. :)

I watch things for the story, not the pixels :)

Those pixels add up to a beautiful experience, particularly if you're watching something like Too Old to Die Young.

I think you need enough pixels to convey the story / vision of the artist. More is better but there are diminishing returns above 1080p and most of us just don't care lol

You can download UHD disks if you want. I only have a 7 year old 1080p projector @ 100", so for me a 10 - 20 GB rip is fine.

I also only have a 1080p projector, no TV... 2 GB rips (not 20 GB) at 1080p are totally fine (and way, way, way better than any streaming service).

Even on a good 4K TV, 2GB rips (and definitely the 4-6GB rips you can often also find) are really quite adequate for a lot of movies if it's a modern codec and the rip has been done well. Some movies are a bit more challenging than others, of course.

i don't use TPB, so I don't know if they are there as well, but elsewhere on torrents you can find both full blu-ray disc copies and "remuxes", which are just directly ripped from blu-ray to mkv without any loss of audio/video quality.

Not really. Even though you can get excellent quality h.265 encodes, it seems the MP3 generation's hearing is so impaired that compressing the hell out of audio and losing tons of audio quality is too common.

What's the point of a beautiful 2500 kbps h.265 video if they're going to kill the audio quality by squashing it to 128 kbps?

I do appreciate that Dolby digital 5.1 has become more common as a standard release and don't require a remux download.

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