[bscphil]

>Furthermore torrenting got really convenient and is very fast with adequate Internet (let's say 10MByte/s), so you get a decent quality movie in under 5 minutes (obviously only if there are enough seeders - but the availability of torrents completely dwarfs the availability of streaming providers - if it's really unpopular and maybe a little bit older you just won't find it on streaming services).

Small nit: with that Internet speed you could only download a 3 GB file, which is definitely not enough for a quality film. Even iTunes, which is kind of infamous for how badly their films are encoded, is usually bigger than that.

The big picture though is that it really doesn't matter anymore because quite a few clients now allow you to download the first 10% or so of the file first, so you can start streaming it instantly. There's no reason a for-pay streaming service built on to of bittorrent wouldn't do the same.

[8GB]

You need 4GB/hour, to achieve NTSC quality (640x480@32bit video + 44Khz audio) DVD bandwidth.

A DVD ISO rip of a 2 hour movie usually clocks in at 8GB, since a dual layer disc can store 4GB per layer.

The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.

[bscphil]

>You need 4GB/hour, to achieve NTSC quality (640x480@32bit video + 44Khz audio) DVD bandwidth.

That's going to depend entirely on the codec. MPEG2? Sure. With H.264 a 4GB 720p rip from a Bluray is going to be much better than anything you can get on a DVD.

>The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.

I'm pretty skeptical of that. Regardless of what media LOTR actually comes on, the extended cut of Fellowship would have a bitrate of ~29 Mbits/sec on a dual-layer disc. That's entirely acceptable, if not exactly ideal. And I'm not sure what the "two hour mark" has to do with it: Fellowship is closer to 4 hours than 3, and there are tons of two hour long films that come on a single Bluray disc.

[saiya-jin]

Yify 1080p rips offer great quality for 99% of the folks out there (ie 55" screen with nice B&W speakers) and yet they are usually under 2GB. No disturbing encoding artifacts, pixelation in fast scenes etc.

You really don't need more. And if you do and have enough computing power, h.265 goes even further in smaller package.

[crtasm]

They achieve that by discarding huge amounts of detail from the image, compare a yify 1080p to a well made 576p encode and you may find them less acceptable. They look terrible to me.

[leetcrew]

honestly if Yify is transparent to you, more power to ya. you'll save a lot of disk space. I wouldn't watch a Yify encode on anything larger than my 13" laptop.

if you want to ruin yourself, try grabbing a Sparks and a Yify encode of your favorite movie and try watching one of the dark scenes in both files. the difference is plain as day on my 27" ips panel.

[bscphil]

Honestly I think the situation is even worse on a laptop. Unless you're pretty wealthy, you and probably most people you know have a TV screen that's small enough and far enough away from your couch that your laptop sitting in your lap actually beats it in pixels / degree. I've got a (old) 50 inch plasma set, and since I'm not sitting 4 feet away from it my laptop easily beats it.

On the other hand if you really can't tell the difference between a 2 GB encode and an average sized encode, say 16 GB, it's a good hint to make an appointment with your eye doctor. (I'm nearsighted, so I can't even tell 576p from 1080p on my TV without glasses.)