EZTV YIFI and many more don't pack anymore the data inside rar files, and it works, you can watch silicon valley from an EZTV torrent from here http://iflix.io/#/play/ef87a3f97c653d487dece0e6ea8e60b7731a5...
Do you have a pony in this race?
e.g. for a video with a typical level of motion, if you want to achieve 1 Mbps, encoding at 854x480 is going to look significantly cleaner & sharper than encoding at 1280x720 (even when upscaled).
This is why adaptive streaming uses quality levels with varying dimensions. e.g. on Netflix, the low bandwidth streams are not 1920x1080, as that would look like garbage.