Way more movies in lower resolution. Your brain and mind will fill in the blanks automatically and lack of perfect visual acuity doesn't take away from the story one bit.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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I can watch content in lower resolutions, I can't watch content that I don't have access to at all.
In this day and age of compression, you can get a very small file in good quality.
If your hardware will run it, MKV/265 is fantastic! Especially the 10 bit rips
Every time I pirate something x265, it looks like somebody took the pixels and threw it in the blender. Like I could notice the degredation in quality and it irritates me since it's supposed to be 1080p.
I download the normal x264 and everything looks fine.
And I doing piracy incorrectly?
265 is more bandwidth efficient than 264. If you put two video streams next to each other, 100% identical, running at the same bitrate, except one is H.264 and one is 265, 265 will look better.
265 can achieve the same visual fidelity as 264 at 20-40% lower bitrate, depending on a few factors. The trade off is you need more processing.
If either are looking pixilated, you're getting ones with to much compression. I still try and get ones at around a gig or larger. Especially if you're watching on a big screen. And like I said, if your hardware will run it without getting all laggy, 10 or 12 bit is good for rgb color depth
The issue is that, while x265 is more efficient, it's not THAT much more efficient until you get to 4k or high bitrates. Encoders using x265 tend to be overly focused on file size, and prioritize it over video quality. And that sort of makes sense - x265 needs a lot more decoding power, and excludes a lot of otherwise capable devices. Why would you do that to only save a small percentage of the space needed?
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does MKV combined with H265 really do a thing?
It do do dat thang
wat thang do it do, doe?
It do da thang it do, dawg
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Definitely more at lower. I see zero point in going above 1080p and for lesser media I do 720. I have 16tb of 720-1080 stuff.
Regardless of outage, I decided quantity is better. I currently have ~5,500 movies. If I chose high grade 4k I would only have storage for ~300 of what I deem as the absolute best of cinema. With quantity>quality I can store everything that was mildly successful.
How much space does that take?
Nah, I'd go for books and music.
I'd include video games.
You can get a small roguelike that'll provide a ton of playtime.
A couple emulators and a few console's entire collection of games takes up a surprisingly small amount of space.
I think I'm in this camp. I can juggle a few roguelikes if I want to check-out from reality. My guitar/piano would be my priority though, maybe I can actually finish writing the damned song.
Id probably go for a middle ground. 720 is fine by me.
Yeah there's definitely diminishing returns but if you go too low it starts looking like shit enough to matter. 720p is probably my cutoff for that too.
Nah, you just grab a shitload of podcasts.
That is 0p resolution, and you can store a huge number of them on a small disk.
Depends on your goal: do you want to preserve what you can at its best, or do you want to ensure you have plenty of entertainment to go by?
I'd probably go with the lower quality. We watched TV in 480i and under for decades, and 720p is still quite watchable even today. In HEVC or AV1 you can really pack a decent collection.
Many years ago I was transcoding movies to fit on cd so I could watch them on my dvd player.
I agree with people saying at least 1080p but more. Upscaling is quite good now and makes little difference for the enjoyment of a film whether you can read the newspaper on the desk in the corner... Unless you're a film buff who likes Easter eggs maybe
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More stuff in lower resolution, and focus on less-popular (or less-collectible) material.
The internet isn't going to go out just for you, it's going to go out for everyone (at least in your region). You're going to be without it for the long-term, so you'll want variety in what you can watch and listen to. But your friends and family will also be looking for entertainment, so you'll be providing for a range of tastes over a long period.
You want to focus on less-popular / less-collectible material because trading networks will spring up, and the less-popular material will be the stuff that's in demand. There'll be plenty of people with a full collection of Star Trek or all the Best Picture winners, that kind of thing. But there'll also be people who suddenly realize that they want to re-watch all of Law and Order or they've always meant to watch Miami Vice and now is the perfect time.
I'll also point out that you've hypothesized that it's just the internet that's gone down. There would still be broadcast tv and radio, and I think people would re-adapt to broadcast viewing and listening.
i can have hundreds of movies in 1080p, thousands of pages of manga if I prefer that, my issue would mostly be music, last.fm shows that I listen to 2000 unique music in a month
Lower resolution and a lower resolution viewer (older TV).
I don't want to go lower than 1080p. Having said that, there are compression formats that can get you respectable 1080p but in smaller file sizes (1-2GB).
How long is a piece of string?
I used to watch movies and shows on my computer monitor, in which case 720 was mostly acceptable. Though a few years ago I switched to a NAS for storage and I use a typical TV instead... now I don't feel the need to use smaller filesizes. I tend to go with 1080 by default. The NAS is really a godsend... you can fill that thing up with whatever your want and still have room to spare.
I'm completely fine sacrificing resolution. I don't care about 4k resolutions at all, from where I sit to watch I can barely see the fly poops near the corners of the screen, and those are huge compared to the size of the pixels.
Better to own physical media and not worry about it. :) You can rip it yourself and use whatever compression you're comfortable with or just play it directly.
Up until the disc rot gets ya.
I have CDs and laser discs from the 80s that still work perfectly well. Rot is an overblown phenomenon.
There are some known issues with Warner Brothers releases from a certain period of years, but that's limited to Warner and 2006-2008.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/still-clinging-to-dvds-some-warner-bros-discs-have-started-rotting-away
If I were to prepare for the internet to be out, I would most likely do the following:
I would go with a mix of 720 for most movies/shows and my favorites at 1080. I would also go for a collection of my favorite music.
Then as an extra download Wikipedia and some Ted talks, and a bunch of YouTube videos to watch offline. I guess some e-books and or PDF. Maybe download some memes and stuff to laugh at.
Lower res, for sure. Modern GPUs/drivers and some media players can do a decent job of making them a bit nicer to look at 'on-the-fly', too.
Depends on the stuff and on what you will be watching it.
TV shows that were originally aired in SD will be fine in low resolution. Cartoons can usually be pretty low quality too. Old cartoons in SD on a CRT usually look great.
However stuff made for HD will probably need better quality to be enjoyable.
I've been collecting since the days of RealPlayer and still have lots of stuff in SD. Some shows are getting difficult to watch on a giant screen but the advantage of the small files is that they can be read by a toaster.
TLDR: More in lower resolution unless it's some modern shows or movies where HD is a necessity.
Have you ever thought of just buying and therefore owning DVDs or BDs?
Have you ever thought of just buying
owning
Um... no, I just pirate and put everything in harddrives/ssds
Harddrives takes up less physical storage than a bookshelf full of DVD/Blurays.
(Also: I'm broke lol)
But then you have to deal with physical media or rip it, and also deal with the anti theft protections. Skip all of this and simply download files.
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