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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[–] Tehdastehdas@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I recommend you save a single frame from several versions of a film (VLC: Shift+S) and flip through them quickly in an image viewer that instantly jumps to the next image (Eye of GNOME) to see the differences.

I've found surprising differences in cropping, aspect ratio, brightness, and color tone - some people are just incompetent at encoding.

With good but heavy compression, only the finest details are blurred - especially film grain disappears when file size goes down from huge to big. That's actually a plus sometimes when there's so much grain I start itching and thinking of an ants' nest.

My Sony phone records UHD @ 120fps in h.265, 60GB/hour. I've never seen a BluRay remux take that much space, but surely they exist.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

That's a good detailed analysis. I was actually comparing two versions of a 2000s show I love, and I only had the second one because the first one was distractingly bad. I remember thinking on the old one, "Is this the Universal logo from the 1970's??" It wasn't, just really horrible compressed...