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Are movie and show file sizes more efficient than they were years ago? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This may be a stupid question, but I just got back into pirating some shows and movies and realize that many of the QxR files are much smaller than what I downloaded in the past. Is it likely that I am sacrificing a noticeable amount of quality if I replace my files with the smaller QxR ones?

For example, I have Spirited Away from 2017 at 9.83 GB, but I see the QxR is only 6.1 GB. I also have the office from 2019 and the entire show (no bonus content) is about 442 GB, while the QxR version is only 165.7 GB. Dates are what they are dated on my hard drive, can't speak to their actual origin, but they would've been from RARBG. (Edit to add: I also can't really speak to the quality of the downloads, back then I was just grabbing whatever was available at a reasonable size, so I wasn't deliberately seeking out high quality movies and shows - a simple 1080p in the listing was enough for me).

I did some side by side on episodes of the Office (on my PC with headphones, nothing substantial), and I don't notice any differences between the two.

Thoughts on this? Are people better at ripping/compressing/whatever now that they can do so at a smaller size without sacrificing noticeable quality?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

H.265 on my phone is not 50% the size. Maybe ~25% less at maximum.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

It completely depends on the specific video file. HEVC and AV1 are more efficient in general, but most of their benefits become apparent with 4K video, which they were specifically designed to be better at handling than AVC. It also depends on your phone's software and hardware, as it might not be fast enough to encode in real-time with higher compression settings (and you don't get to use things like 2-pass encoding which can drastically lower bitrate without sacrificing visual quality).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Depends on the encoding settings

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I assume you mean H.265 recorded on your phone? That is live encoded in a single pass. It doesn't compress as much in that scenario. When you give a system more time that the real time playback of the video it can encoded things more efficiently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It can be. Heavily depends on the bitrate, which as a shooter (depending on the camera) I can often control and with a wide array of options at that.