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?

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    83·
    1 year ago

    Newer codecs are more efficient. H.265 and AV1 are often 2/3 to 1/2 the size of an H.264 file for the same quality.
    Of course there are also people uploading lower quality files as well.

    • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      As an editor I loved/hated h.265 until like…a year ago. Some NLE’s dragged their feet on support for some odd reason.

      • empireOfLove@lemmy.oneEnglish
        12·
        1 year ago

        Licensing, probably. H.265 is very not open and you have to pay the MPEG piper to actually use it.

          • Laser@feddit.deEnglish
            7·
            1 year ago

            Nothing, the licenses are for content providers and equipment manufacturers, obviously in the end you pay the license when purchasing the goods but the amount is small.

        • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          They have licensed countless other codecs and tons of cameras adopted it before they supported it. These aren’t some FOSS hobbyist projects. These are professional NLE’s for Hollywood level work. There’s no excuse if you ask me. Hell Resolve had it like 2-3 years prior I believe.

        • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
          7·
          1 year ago

          I really didn’t get it! When I got my GH5 I was pumped to do 10bit 422 h.265. Really wanted to see the latitude we could get at that compression. Premiere and FCPX in particular for like 5 years went “lol no.”

          • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yeah, beats me, I was surprised as well, like why do we still have to work with AVC clips, why can’t I just import a HEVC clip… Premiere: nope, that ain’t happenin’.

            • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              While I have you here, I recently had a project where they shipped me three separate FedEx packages of loose SD cards that were unlabeled, all .mts files. What on gods earth happened on that shoot?

              Oh and the footage was all interlaced I shit you not.

              • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Yeah, I can related to that 😔. I work in a TV station in a country that had the PAL standard, and… well, every fucking shot is interlaced 🤦. Not only that, but the output from the station is as well 🤦. Why? Backwards compatibility… what in the actual fuck 🤦… it’s a stream, the decoder doesn’t care about that, it can decode any frame rate, any frame type, it’s all digital now 🤦. Tried explaining this, nope, we’re still doing interlaced.

                And, of course, after the cable companies have their way with the signal, the output is shit… not to mention they also archive the material as interlaced 🤦… and then people from outside the station complain about the matrial being garbidge… they still don’t budge.

                Just goes to show you what management is all about these days. They have the power, so they’re gonna use it any way they see fit. Why? Cuz they’re THE BOSS GOD DAMN IT 😠.

                  • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubEnglish
                    1·
                    1 year ago

                    Lol 😂. Actually, it doesn’t take 3 seconds (well, 3 seconds for the stream output, yeah), there are workstations that need to be adjusted as well, but in a course if a day or 2, yeah, you can change the whole thing 👍. You could do the cameras last, that’s not such a big problem, they can shoot interlaced for a few days, edit it that way, export it non-interlaced.

      • Nawor3565English
        21·
        1 year ago

        It completely depends on the specific video file. HEVC and AV1 are more efficient in general, but most of their benefits become apparent with 4K video, which they were specifically designed to be better at handling than AVC. It also depends on your phone’s software and hardware, as it might not be fast enough to encode in real-time with higher compression settings (and you don’t get to use things like 2-pass encoding which can drastically lower bitrate without sacrificing visual quality).

      • roofuskit@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I assume you mean H.265 recorded on your phone? That is live encoded in a single pass. It doesn’t compress as much in that scenario. When you give a system more time that the real time playback of the video it can encoded things more efficiently.

      • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        It can be. Heavily depends on the bitrate, which as a shooter (depending on the camera) I can often control and with a wide array of options at that.