StdDef DVD Postings Dropping Off

[Beck38]

I know I'm probably one of the only folks still d/l'ing headers, but the usual SD/DVD groups have really taken a nose dive lately.

Don't know if it's 'reality' or propgation somewhere in the usenet system has taken a hit. Or maybe it's just me. But it seems to have really fallen off a cliff.

[ericab]

with the avalibility of HD (bluray, hddvd) and HDTV, as well as ripping tools, its no wonder the popularity of standard definition is taking a hit. good riddance.

were you gettin' at something else beck ? (new laws inhibiting potential uploaders) ??

[unoriginal]

Ok, I'll be the first to drag out the old argument that I don't need to see everything in HiDef. If its the choice between a 700meg SD rip or a 4gig Bluray I know which one I am most likely to grab. Luckily though a lot of movies are coming out as BRRips instead that are not much bigger than SD. But I grab plenty that just isn't worth 720p when I will watch it once and then delete it as soon as I am finished.

[Beck38]

4G BluRay!?!? Pretty lean bitspace with that. Most recodes I d/l are in the 12-16GB range, if not the BD25 range.

Not to get into the eternal '720 v. 1080' debate, but get a decent display and driver, and you'll never go back to the 'lean' recodes.

Anyway, it appears that some (large?) provider somewhere was choked up a bit, and today some stuff started coning through.

On the SD v HD 'debate', I like a lot of the 'older' SDTV stuff from 'way back', that simply doesn't need to be in HD. If the mastering is done with any amount of care, and the original film stock was any good, it just doesn't need it. Hmmm, Gillian's Island or The Brady Bunch in HiDef...

Yikes! certain proof of the decline in civilization!

[unoriginal]

Well yeah the scene release 720p rips come out at just about 4GB, same as the SD rips that come out around 700MB. There is very little that I've seen that I ever plan on archiving the way you do. I will gladly download 7-10 things in the same bandwidth that you might grab one or two. But I have yet to come across anything that makes me want to get a 20-25GB rip of it no matter how nice the source material might be.

[zot]

It seems that people tend to believe the bigger-is-better mantra. MP3s have been largely replaced by FLAC, and it's hard to find videos these days that are not high-definition. My ideal size movie download is a 700MB (1-CD) rip - but most posted these days are either trojanned or very poorly encoded by obvious rank beginners. I'd hate it when the only version available is some 20 gigabyte hi-def copy ... I 'd hate to fast-forward/browse through and decide its not worth watching, and a big waste of bandwidth. I've never cared for standard DVDRs much, bought a divx disk player years ago when they first came out.

[tesco]

It seems that people tend to believe the bigger-is-better mantra. MP3s have been largely replaced by FLAC, and it's hard to find videos these days that are not high-definition. My ideal size movie download is a 700MB (1-CD) rip - but most posted these days are either trojanned or very poorly encoded by obvious rank beginners. I'd hate it when the only version available is some 20 gigabyte hi-def copy ... I 'd hate to fast-forward/browse through and decide its not worth watching, and a big waste of bandwidth. I've never cared for standard DVDRs much, bought a divx disk player years ago when they first came out.
4 gigs seems to be the best compromise between quality and file size at the moment.
The added quality of a 20gig+ rip (which I've never personally seen to be honest, I'm on a bandwith cap) is nowhere near the cost of 5 times the file size, but the SD rips look terrible after getting used to 720p.

The scene then goes where the demand is, and at the moment it's 720p x264 rips, hence the drop in DVD-R posts. It's not surprising at all...

[zot]

I don't believe in the one-size-fits-all concept. Each of us has our own needs. I think that what the scene is putting out (dicticted by scene standards) has little relation to what downloaders actually want. Any wonder why the 1-CD aXXo releases (not scene standard) were so immensely popular? On the other end of the scale, H264s have been popular with HDTV owners long before they got added to scene standards.

Obviously a person with an old CRT television (or monitor) has nothing to gain by downloading HI-DEF 720/1080 video, and the highly-compressed (resource-hogging) h.264 codec requires a fast computer if you want to watch it without pauses and skips.

The other major factors being a person's internet connection, and download speed. One reason DVDRs were never very popular on ED2K was probably the download time, because the 4 or 9 gigabyte file could easily take a week (or month) to download.

It's probably not unlike taping a show on VCR - some people will set it to the highest quality possible, giving a VHS tape 2 hours, while others prefer to get the full 8 hours per tape and are quite happy with the much lower video quality.

[Beck38]

These heavily compressed audio/video's are.... well, total ****.

It's like when mp3's first became really popular, the vast majority had a run rate of 128Kb/s, simply horrid. Of course, if one was listening to them through what passed for a portable mp3 player of the day, with earbuds or tinny microspeakers, it probably didn't sound any different than a full-bandwidth CD.

Most portable or auto systems that play compressed formats today, top out at around 320kb/s, but if it's even middle range, and despite the limitations of the intrusion of road noise and the acoustic parameters of the cabin, I recently upgraded my older (6 year old) head unit, and found that I could pretty easily tell the difference between anything lower than 240Kb/s and a full 320kb/s (AAC or MP3). The difference in size taken up on a 64GB USB thumbdrive I came to the conclusion was a wash. (My entire CD collection can easily fit in less than 50% of that space).

Same goes in spades with video. I dabbled with DIVX a bit some 10 years ago (SD) and it was as horrid for video as those low-bitrate MP3's were for audio.

All I can say is, if folks think the picture or audio quality is 'good enough' then... they haven't seen anything really good. Very possibly their HD experience has been with bit-starved cable or satellite TV, or, poorly mastered Blu-Ray discs played on a very low-end system.

Folks need to search out some good, top-line, home theater vendors in their area to get a good recalibration of their eyes and ears. Now, I don't have a top-line system anymore, having been a VERY early HD adopter, although my surround sound system is still kinda hanging in there (good receiver w/ decent power, and more importantly, excellent main and surround speakers), but which, along with my main display, will need an upgrade in the next couple of years (maybe when this 3D stuff settles down).

Meanwhile, I tend to gravitate to the higher x264 recodes, and usually find that the source Blu-ray (rented) is, when the film and the mastering (both video and audio) is top notch, blows the recode away, when the size is (at 15GB+) about half the original size or smaller.

But my equipment is not 'consumer grade'. Then again, it isn't a 50"+ plasma either. But neighbors of mine who've been over always comment on how the video is sharp and color accurate (and the audio blows them away).

Look, I've got about 4000 burned CD's with tons and tons of those 128-192K mp3 rips from 10 years ago. I'll never listen to them, and I would want anyone else to either. Yuck.
A large percentage of them have been replace with FLAC.

Again, same with those first couple of years SD-DVD's I did. And replaced. OMG, what trash.