this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2026
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Video file sizes: what do I need to know? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 week ago by schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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I'm getting back into digital collecting after pretty much exhausting the local thriftstores of any movies I wanted to watch / own.

I was thinking of burning everything to DVD but then I came to my senses and just installed Jellyfin.

Question:

  • What video file sizes do you guys download and why?

  • And what is the correlation between video size and quality? I see some wild variations in file sizes even for the same res.

  • Who are y'alls downloading 20+GB movies? Are you storing all that or are you downmixing? Are you stealing your harddrives out of the recycle bin?

  • Any shortcuts for getting rich blacks for space scenes? Do I just need to suck it up eat the bytes? (I'm thinking of going this route for BSG and can't remember if they go for video grain in space or true film black).

  • What is the obvious thing I clearly don't understand by asking these questions?

So for me, it seems for file size, about 700MB / 90 minutes is about as low as I can go, and arguably it's too low because I'm sometimes distracted by the low quality.

I'm a little confused by what's going on because I'll often watch a DVD that's being upscaled by the player and have no complaints, and I think that's base 480 or lower, but a labelled 720p can have some distractingly low res.

For my high end, 2GB at 1080p is about as high as I care to go unless it's some crazy high quality cinematographic shit like Lawrence or Dune.

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[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I’m pirating video because they won’t let me legally download a bluray without tons of drm. I don’t want to lose any quality and even with these ridiculously inflated prices hard drives are cheaper than buying all the blurays (which I’d also need to find a place to store) so I generally try and get remuxes or untouched streams. That said I got my drives from shucked external drives which are now going for over double what I bought them for.

HDR should help with the rich blacks if you have a monitor that supports it, I think it might with tonemapping too but it obviously will depend on how it was mastered in addition to what anyone does to encode it afterwards.

[–] LoafedBurrito@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

I was buying WD elements external drives for $290 for the 22TB drives for years. They are now $1,335... I mean WTFFFFFFFFFFF. Can't even shuck drives anymore.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Where do you source your harddrives from? And I guess you have some redundancies if you're using used drives.

Your standards are undoubtedly higher than mine. HDR might be overkill (?), but I just find it very jarring when a scene that should be uniformly dark or black turns into bunches of little squares dancing around the screen. Do I need HDR to avoid that? I mean, yes, I do love the theater blacks enough that when Rogue One went from video outer space to film outerspace it melted my brain a little, so maybe I should look into that. But, overall, I think regular BluRay is the highest I'd want to target.

The system has really fucked itself with all the controls it has, especially for high quality streaming which they absolutely cannot guarantee AND they put a lot of restrictions on it as well.

I will speak up for having a physical library. It's nice for guests to have something to pick up and hold. Of course, most of my guests these days are future and imaginary.

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

I ordered my last ones directly from seagate but it’s an awful time to buy storage in general right now, the ones I bought last year are already over twice as expensive. I use backblaze for backup as they don’t have storage limits and it’s 100/year.

As someone else said the squares are how it saves space and it usually does the black areas first as (older) monitors are bad at showing detail in black.

Yeah there’s been multiple times where I’ve pirated things for subscriptions I’m already paying for (for other people mostly) because the draconian DRM or shitty players won’t actually play it at the full quality (drm requirements for hdr/4k, desktop player not supporting surround sound etc).

Yeah I mean it’s nice to have physical things but it’s not worth it to me and my friends just use my server anyways.