I've said this before, but people process resolutions wrong. Resolutions are not a promise of a minimum of quality, they are a maximum. High quality pixels at lower resolution can stand up to more processing for upscaling than garbage ones. A resolution tells when you'll top out because you've got near-100% fidelity for each one.

I have a bit of astigmatism, but I still don't wear glasses as a routine thing, and when I watch good DVDs on my 60" TV from about 8 feet away, it's fairly rare for me to be that upset by the video quality. Even after I suck some out downsampling into mp4, it's still rare for me to actively notice. DVD encoders are fairly good now.

At this point I don't care at all if something advertises a "4K" stream because I know that it's still likely to be not all that good. Tell me the bitrate of your stream, that's what I want to know. (Assuming the use of a modern codec and quality encoder.) I can get a "4K" stream with hundreds of kilobits per second. The encoder will be crying because of the shoddy job you're making it do and the decoder will look at you like you're on crack, but by golly, 4K's worth of pixels will indeed be shoveled onto the screen.

I totally agree and would go so far as to say that the 4k streams look like shit compared to good HD DVDs because they're.

Take an average 4k Stream from YouTube/Netflix/etc and look at the transfer size for the full duration. It's gonna be something around 1-3gb per hour from my observations.

A good 4k Video is usually around 5-10x that size and with good reason, because the resolution demands a lot of bits to make it shine, no matter how well you've encoded it

> High quality pixels at lower resolution can stand up to more processing for upscaling than garbage ones.

What does "high quality pixel" mean?

Bit rate vs compressed (think of jpg artifacts)

It means an actual pixel stored in data (such as in a key frame) rather than a generated pixel (such as in an interpolated frame). The amount of data generated for interpolated pixels is usually the bare minimum required; for some devices it's literally just a change in value from the previous frame.

It may be easier to think about high-quality swathes of pixels, because obviously any one pixel can't be wrong in isolation, and even to the extent it is, who cares.

However, if you look at a swathe of pixels, say a 16x16 chunk, you can reasonably talk about with what fidelity that set of pixels represents the original signal, whatever that original signal was. You get into the whole perceptual coding thing which tells us that determining the human-perceived accuracy of a chunk of pixels is more than just adding up the differences, but you can take that as a suitable first approximation for thought.

High-quality pixels have minimal deviation from the source material. Low-quality pixels have significant deviation.

Tom Scott has a good video where turns up and down the quality live so you can see it in a single video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI The video's resolution never changes, and you could say the video's bit rate never changes (it probably does because adaptive coding saves YouTube a fortune, but conceptually you could say it doesn't), but the quality of the pixels sure does.

> My nephew was going to a summer camp that didn't allow the kids to bring phones or tablets. He was allowed to bring an MP3 player, tho. So I downscaled a copy of Into the Spiderverse to 432x240 (his iPod Nano's native resolution).

You may have been inadvertently subverting his summer camp experience.

As a summer camp alumnus myself, I can assure you that finding clever ways to circumvent camp rules is itself a cherished camper tradition.

Maybe he will get caught as part of the summer camp experience. I think transistor radios at summer camp were thought to ruin the experience.

Sometimes a little bit of comfort makes being away from home easier on kids and makes the summer camp experience a positive one.