It’s pretty wild. I have recently been ripping my DVD/Blu-ray collection and encoding them from a clean rip to my server. Encoding at 480p is perfectly acceptable if you’re starting with a high enough bitrate source. You can tell it’s 480p, but its so much better than Netflix’s absolute trash streams that will give you “UHD” at bitrates lower than a DVD. 360p does leave something to be desired, but they’re still perfectly watchable.
There are certainly shows and movies that deserve higher definition, but I’ve found that unless they’re from the ground up meant to be purely visually masterpieces, it’s better to have lower resolution and a matching bitrate than to ruin the experience with artifacts.
The amount of pixels doesn’t matter if the amount of information is too low. The latter is harder to quantify in a way that doesn’t make you account for the actual compressibility of the data, so people try to maximize pixels for advertising while minimizing the real amount of data to save money.
But 360p today looks far worse than 360p back then. Not only have bitrate etc. been reduced, older videos have also been re-encoded multiple times.
It’s pretty wild. I have recently been ripping my DVD/Blu-ray collection and encoding them from a clean rip to my server. Encoding at 480p is perfectly acceptable if you’re starting with a high enough bitrate source. You can tell it’s 480p, but its so much better than Netflix’s absolute trash streams that will give you “UHD” at bitrates lower than a DVD. 360p does leave something to be desired, but they’re still perfectly watchable.
There are certainly shows and movies that deserve higher definition, but I’ve found that unless they’re from the ground up meant to be purely visually masterpieces, it’s better to have lower resolution and a matching bitrate than to ruin the experience with artifacts.
The amount of pixels doesn’t matter if the amount of information is too low. The latter is harder to quantify in a way that doesn’t make you account for the actual compressibility of the data, so people try to maximize pixels for advertising while minimizing the real amount of data to save money.