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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] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In 2017, most content was h264 and 1080p. This typically made a movie about 10GB with just 5.1 sound. Same movie with DTS 7.1 and possibly 5.1 etc, would be 12-16GB. Today That same 16GB movie with H265 would be 6-8GB.

The thing is that now that movies are typically 4K and ATMOS etc (which would have been 30+GB in 2017. For the same given "quality" and bitrate settings, that movie would be ~15GB.

The thing we are seeing now in Usenet/scene releases, is that those quality settings are being pushed up. Due to unlimited internet per month and H265, allowing better quality.

So with that in mind, the answer to your question is, yes and no. I can give you an example: Fast X. I can see a UHD 4K HDR10 TrueHD for 61GB, and all the way down to 2.5GB!!

So now you get to have a choice! :D (Oh, and you can also see the traditional H264 1080p as still sitting at the around 10GB, and the basic 4K version using H265 is only 13GB)