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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 lemonlemonlemon@lemm.ee to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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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[–] antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

It’s quite remarkable really. A single layer DVD stores 4.7 GB, for a movie with 576p (H.262). A while later those videos could be compressed using DivX or Xvid (H.263) down to 700 MB to fit on a standard CD, though full quality was more like 2 GB.

The Blu-ray standard came along with 25 GB per layer, and 1080p video, stored in H.262 or H.264.

Discs encoded in MPEG-2 video typically limit content producers to around two hours of high-definition content on a single-layer (25 GB) BD-ROM. The more-advanced video formats (VC-1 and MPEG-4 AVC) typically achieve a video run time twice that of MPEG-2, with comparable quality. MPEG-2, however, does have the advantage that it is available without licensing costs, as all MPEG-2 patents have expired.

Now H.265 is now even smaller than H.264, so now you could record a full 1080p movie onto a 4.7 GB DVD. Now the Ultra HD Blu-ray Discs are only slightly larger (33 GB per layer), but they store 4K video by supporting H.265 codec. I guess by now a 720p video encoded to H.265 could make a decent copy on a 700 MB CD.

[–] lemonlemonlemon@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for all of the replies, they were very insightful!

The H264 to H265 appears to account for the majority of differences that I was seeing in file sizes.

[–] BrownianMotion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 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)