For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.
The resolution that's usually behind 2k, which is 1440p as you've correctly pointed out, is usually available as torrents too.
Rounding 2560 to 2k is massively confusing. Don't do it. 2.5k or don't use "k" at all.
And when I go look at a couple torrent sites and scroll through movies and tv shows, I'm not seeing a single 1440p in the first couple pages. Some searches show barely anything at all.
Define: k = multiple of 1920x1080 pixel count
1920x1080 ~= 2M pixels = 1k 2560x1440 ~= 4M pixels = 2k 3840x2160 ~= 8M pixels = 4k
So now 1440p = 2k, and k becomes meaningful. Problem solved!
It also gives a solution for ultrawides like 7680 x 2160p, which are 8k.
More interestingly, “8K” TVs now become 16k TVs, which marketers should like. We’ve come full circle! Now the k nomenclature also gives you an idea of how difficult that 16k display will be to drive with a video card relative to your existing monitor.
And how do you propose getting your definition out in front of more people than the combined marketers of all the legit sources of movie, TV and other streaming content in the world?
lol
Pick the battles you have a whelk's chance in a supernova of winning.
Not to mention that 3840x2160 already has a (mostly) separate term : UHD-1.
There's also UHD-2 which is 4 times bigger, but I expect it to be renamed to something else soon enough.
But if you want to go down that path, instead of trying to redefine k just use megapixels.
The most recent entry is:
How To Train Your Dragon The Hidden World (2019) 2160p 4K BluRay 5 1-LAMA
Format : HEVC
Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 634 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.35:1
Near the top is a recent TV episode:
True Detective S04E04 Night Country Part 4 2160p MAX WEB-DL DDP5 1 DoVi x265-NTb
Format : HEVC
Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 920 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.000
What makes things problematic is the overbearing love for letterbox like aspect ratios, even pirates have standards and they're having to bundle a slew of aspect ratios together .. this comes from the production companies.
You overwhelmingly see 1280x720, 1920x1080, and 3840x2160, sometimes with a truncated height because of aspect ratio but usually advertised with the full height for consistency reasons.
There's barely any 2560x1440. Anyone going above 1080p goes directly to 4k.
Youtube is pretty much the only place I've ever seen 1440p encodes, and that's because they're super version-happy and make 20 different variants of a video.
If it's about finding 1440p that'd mainly be because it's not a common broadcast format to the best of my knowledge - I just don't see it about much.
Articles such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
don't mention it as a broadcast format, and articles that are specific to 1440p: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1440p
have it as :
As a graphics display resolution between 1080p and 4K, Quad HD is regularly used in smartphone displays, and for computer and console gaming.It's pretty much only available on original encodes, i.e. BluRay rips, this makes it a format that very rarely seen on currently airing shows, which are mostly webrips from official streaming platforms.
You'll often see it alongside the usual resolutions for movies that have since been released on disk.
Read the second clause!
However the extension seems to be gone.
[1] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox?tab=readm...
I could do so with DVD and blu-ray. You don't want to let me do so via the internet? Okay, I'll do it anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution#2160p_resolution
> 1k = 1920x1080
> 2k = 2560x1440
> 4k = 3840x2160
[even though it's not usually referred to as 1k, but rather 1080p directly]
You don't necessarily have to pick YIFY.
Qxr's uploads are a much better comparison. x265 encoded 1080p (with 5 - 6.5Mbps bitrate) from the highest quality sources and they look very good even on 55" 4K panels.
I still have an old 1080p 32" LG from 10 years ago and it looks fine. In fact I find the motion upscaling weird, it gives this creepy uncanny effect.
I still download H264 too because not all of my devices support H265 yet.
I was thinking about something new but they're just too expensive.
About the subject of this thread, too many paid streaming services are maybe too inconvenient. If they are, the market will fix that. That is: some of them won't make enough money and close, or sell to a competitor, or just create content and license it to streaming services.
My preference would be not to pay per month but per view. There are months when I don't watch any series and months when there is something I like. About movies, maybe no movie at all for a year or two, then a few of interesting ones, including old ones that I never watched and I feel like to watch. The last one was Gilda, 1948.
On small devices like that 4K HDR+ video is kind of meaningless.
Just do what works for you. But with lets say 'cinema experience' distance:size ratio you definitely can see the difference. I could clearly see it on Netflix 4k on tiny 55" 4k screen from maybe 2-2.5m.
But of course after 1-2 minutes it becomes meaningless difference and your brain blends it, what you should focus is not seeing big banding pixels due to low bad compression in very dynamic scenes.
On Netflix, The Sandman looked abysmally bad at 720p. The complex backgrounds became a garbled mess and the dark scenes were filled with banding.
It's just the shitty compression, not the mark of 720p.
This is extremely evident on YouTube now, for a couple of years if the source content is 4K native, they downgrade it to 1080p (so you can stream it with a comfortable bitrate), but despite a good enough resolution (1080p! 2K!) and the need to just downgrade the resolution (yes, double re-encoding, but) the 2K version looks abysmal. Especially evident on live videos with a contrast lights.
It's a real shame that the same store that sold Blu-Ray players didn't have it and I had to pirate it (and also skip buying the player).
as someone that grew up with VHS and VGA; 2-3mbps h264 720p is fine and few practical gains above 5mbps 1080p.
Only if you are lucky and everything aligns well. You can't ask customers to debug their hardware to make it work.
as much as it pains a certain set of nerds, using a dedicated stream device is still the best way to bypass the arbitrary hurdles that streamers throw at you. To build a general pc that gets Dolby vision and atmos working right requires at best some very specific hardware/software choices and at worst sometimes just don’t work at all on pc (unless you are willing to do things like hackintosh).
The audiovisual space has just always been intensely proprietary, even something as basic as divx was something you paid for or pirated back in the v3.x or v4.x days. Same story as HEVC: Fraunhofer and Dolby have been grubbing for licensing fees for decades now, and you either pay it or spend some time working around it. And if you’re a corporation then you just don’t ship that feature in your product.
Apple also does a really good job implementing those features at the margins, Apple TV is a nice device. But even if you buy (eg) something like a shield tv it’s gonna be easier than tilting at getting Netflix to send you a 4k stream on windows 10 or Linux. At some level it is platform discrimination plain and simple - they just won't send full-quality video to "open" platforms and you can either deal with it or go full pirate. Sometimes they won't stream it even if you have widevine set up properly etc - and it's all completely arbitrary and they could break it tomorrow. Or you just buy an apple tv/shield tv.
Plex, Infuse, and VLC also let you interact with plex/jellyfin on the apple tv, and there really is no question about what it can decode, the answer is "basically everything you'd interact with as a consumer", short of weird stuff (idk about something like 4:2:2 or ProRes). Ironically the A17 also might be my fastest processor (in single-thread) at the moment, lol - definitely faster than my laptop, might be faster than my gaming desktop.
Sucks but that's how it is - to this day, AMD doesn't have working HDMI 2.1 support on linux, because HDMI Forum won't do an open license. You either have closed-source blobs or firmware that implement it, or you don't get the feature. These are hard problems, and people expect to be paid to stare at them. And once you spend the time getting all the software and hardware vendors and studios onto the same page and then implement it etc you're going to want to be paid for that too.
It is one of the real problems for the linux kernel imo - not everything can be GPL licensed all, and (for obvious reasons) there is no escape valve for "ok but this vendor is really proprietary and the feature is really important...". When the unstoppable force meets the immovable object what you get is both vendors shrugging their shoulders. You want to fuck with NVIDIA over whatever GPL symbols? Then I guess you won't have HDMI 2.1 on your platform at all, then - because AMD's not gonna win that battle on licensing. The bulli approach worked with ZFS because ultimately there's diversity in filesystems, but if your hardware works best with HDMI 2.1 then you really don't have a choice in the matter. The very popular RDNA2 cards only have DP1.4, for example, so if you don't get HDMI 2.1 then you lose half the bitrate the card can support.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417
Anyway you can tilt at that, or... pay $125 for a refurb ATV4K ethernet 3rd-gen and go watch a movie. It sucks but that's kinda the reality of the space - it's only troublesome if you aren't willing to grease some palms to make the system work as designed. Do you want to consoom or not?
An hour long 30 Mbps 4k HDR+ video file will be roughly around 10-15+ GB with H.265 encoding.
As others have pointed out, a well encoded 720p or 1080p video offers a decent enough viewing experience quickly at far, far smaller sizes than a 2k or 4k videos (file sizes will be 10 to 20 times smaller at these resolutions). Note also that some pirates encode videos with the CPU, than using hardware encoders, and thus these videos tend to have a higher quality with better compression (hardware encoders, while blazing fast, tend to do a poorer job than CPU video encoding). Thus, these smaller sized video files don't require high-speed internet, can be downloaded fast and also encourages people to save the videos longer. This allows some to create their own personal video library. So a side effect of this is that people store and share these videos longer, and their smaller sizes now allow streaming torrents of popular content. Some torrent sites today have even started offering this through the browser itself - so non-techies now don't even have to download any torrent software and learn how to use it. That's near-Netflix like convenience, with more content, for "free" - and that's what these services are up against.
We also can't ignore that 4k videos are often only available at higher tier subscription plan. So even if Netflix, or other streaming services, think that some of these people can be enticed to subscribe to their services, with their high quality 2k or 4k videos, they will have to offer them at a lower price to beat the "free" model of piracy. (It's very hard to compete with "free" - just look at Google search engine's market share and its non-free competitors' market share to understand this).
All this is of course irrespective of the fact that 2k and 4k resolution HDR+ videos are also increasingly available now a days on torrents too.
Popcorn Time seems to have (already?) been based on browser techniques : JavaScript & NodeJS ? (Or is that only for today's version ?)
Also, I'm not exactly impressed because PeerTube has used WebTorrent for quite some years now (before recently abandoning it for something even better ?).
But yeah, you shouldn't expect that website to last long - but then this kind of game of whack a mole has been played by PirateBay-likes and illegal streaming sites for years now.
X265 1080p movies for both rippers are roughly 1.5-2GB per average movie, which is on average 1.5-2h long. You won't find better quality in this size range, in same way 7-10GB seems a sweet spot for 4k (especially with AV1 instead of HEVC). Not sure who & why downloads those 80GB full bluray releases.
Why? Because I want the highest-quality possible copy. Same reason I download lossless versions of albums. It’s less about being able to perceive the quality increase, and moreso about archival. Then my Plex server can transcode to appropriate streaming bitrates on the fly without having to re-encode an already heavily compressed video stream.
And building and properly maintaining some not-so-small array of massive HDDs for those capacities... I just don't see the point when I can get all I need (and ie in sound much much more), without caring more than buying a single hdd and be done for next 5 years.
Its not the bandwidth, 1gbps is easy to get here, stuff I saw in those sizes was well seeded too, but just overall all added extra work.
You don’t need a massive HDD array, I have my whole collection of 10+ years of Blu-ray remuxes on a single Seagate Exos drive in my NAS.
Even with 1080p and 2-3 downloaded modern video games per month (which are all greater than 100GB now), I tend to get up to my 1TB bandwidth cap each month. I start paying extra after that.
That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams.
ATV+ is killing it with 30Mbps 4K HDR+ video (it used to be as high as 48Mbps). Disney+ is close. The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates, 2x better than their 1080p plan. Worth paying for.