1080p vs 720p mkv? quality vs size tradeoff?

walkman

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
267
I have a 61" 1080p DLP.

Would a 1080p BlueRay rip be noticeably better quality than a 720p rip? I've tended to go with the 720 in most cases because of the big difference in file size.
 
Why squash it at all? You have a big 61" 1080p dlp display...not giving it anything but a bit-perfect rip from blu-ray is a brutal travesty, a sin against nature, all because of saying a few bits in file size in an age where hard drive space is crazy cheap (even accounting for the recent increase in HD prices).

BTW, resolution isn't the only issue that factors into what you see. The amount of compression applied factors into the equation too. The only time I think it is worthwhile to suffer compression is when the target device is a small laptop, tablet, or phone screen. Or if you want to stream over the internet and display on a TV.
 
while technically you should be using your set to it's fullest capability by going with 1080, if you cannot see a difference other than file size, then rock out the 720
 
I prefer more hard drives. When they hit rock bottom, I got a 2TB and a 3TB.

With a 61" TV, it seems like a difference should be very apparent. If it looks fine to you though, that's all that matters.

If the day comes that you decide that you do want 1080p, you're going to have to re-download your entire library. Might be good to plan ahead.
 
Unless you're sitting 20' from that 61", you can probably tell the difference.
 
Why squash it at all? You have a big 61" 1080p dlp display...not giving it anything but a bit-perfect rip from blu-ray is a brutal travesty, a sin against nature, all because of saying a few bits in file size in an age where hard drive space is crazy cheap (even accounting for the recent increase in HD prices).
I watch MKV files in 720p as well, due to the smaller size (2-8GB vs 20-50GB).

Though I will say, 1080p video does have a noticeable difference, but both are very good and in the end it comes down to HDD storage space.
 
IMO you're wasting the TV unless you use 1080. If you paid for it, you may as well get the most out of it.

Though to be honest I can't say I've ever watched the same clip back to back 720p vs 1080p, so I don't know what the difference would really be.
 
IMO you're wasting the TV unless you use 1080. If you paid for it, you may as well get the most out of it.

Though to be honest I can't say I've ever watched the same clip back to back 720p vs 1080p, so I don't know what the difference would really be.

On a 1080p screen, 720p videos look slightly upscaled (which they are), but at a large viewing distance of 10-15 feet or more, depending on eye site, it is honestly hard to tell a large difference.

In the end, it comes down to how much storage space you have available.
2-8GB for a 720p MKV is decent, but 20-50GB+ for a 1080p video is quite the expense for those without 2TB+ drives in a RAID array.
 
If the day comes that you decide that you do want 1080p, you're going to have to re-download your entire library. Might be good to plan ahead.

This. Many years ago I had a 720p DLP and debated just doing 720p rips to save space... but glad I decided to air on the side of "future-proofing" and do 1080p... since I have had a 1080p for years and will have one (or better!) for many many more to come!
 
On my tv I am aprox. 15 ft away from my 51 inch screen and at that distance the difference between 720 and 1080 gets a lot less noticeable. That being said, I wish I were a lot closer... But it's just the way my living room works.
 
Yep, it all depends on the screen size vs viewing distnace for most people. Hell, even a clean 480p source doesn't look bad on my 55" from 25 away.

My rules are this:

1) If it is my most favorite movie that I will watch often, encode to 1080p w/ full audio
2) If it is something I don't watch often 720p w/ full audio
3) If it is something I rarely watch or not an action film, 720p w/ 2 channel audio
4) All TV is encoded down to 720p and 2 channel audio
 
I agree it's got alot to do with viewing distance. I only have a 34" TV, but I sit about 5 feet away from it, and the difference between the 2 is obvious, but when I'm standing across the room , say 12 feet away, there is essentially no difference.

That said, most of what I watch is in 720p, TV shows and stuff, and it still looks very good.
 
I would ask myself why even buy a 61" television when you're not going to take advantage of it?

Storage is cheap. Preserve quality and get a bigger drive (or drives).
 
I notice and get slightly annoyed by 720p on TV's larger than ~42". For TV shows it doesnt matter, but if I'm watching a theatrical release you better believe it will be in 1080p. There is so much more detail to be seen and if you have a good display its stunning how realsitic the image can look compared to what we had not too long ago
 
I would take a 720p GOOD rip over a 1080p high compression rip any day. The compression artifacts bother me a lot more than resoution fuzziness / upscaling does.

That being said, at 61" you should see quite a big difference.

I just encode everything at 1080p with full sound to make it easy.
 
Bit-rate affects the video quality far more than the resolution does. At least between 1080p and 720p. Obviously going way below 720p in terms of resolution will look bad no matter the bit-rate.

Example, a 2 hour BluRay encoded at 720p and 1080p both 8GB in size with handbrake looks identical as far as I can tell on my 136" 1080p projector from about 15ft. The original BluRay source at 35GB looks a bit better though but it's not night and day difference IMO.

Personally I'd rather go for number of movies over having a perfect quality rip of less. My ~1000 collection of 720p rips take up about 4TB right now. It would be much, much larger to store them all at 1080p at a bit-rate increase where you would start to see any real differences. Probably double the size.
 
I don't understand why one would own a high-resolution collection and then encode with compression to lesser so to save disc space (I get it if you want to travel with in and view on laptop or tablet/phone). That defeats the reason for owning the collection. If I had to do that, I'd just not bother with the effort to transcode at all and just stick in the plastic.

Also, some have mentioned that TV gets transcoded down....well, I just got The Twilight Zone Complete Series and it is 1080p 1.33:1. I'd be damn if I squeeze that down just so I can store/stream it. I'd just stick in the blu-ray if my choice is to compress so I can stream it (I just spring for the HD space and do bit-perfect rips). After all, I bought this content. I bought the TV, the speakers, the receiver, the gigabit network. I want to see it all, even if I can't tell the difference in a double blind test (something which I have not done, btw).

Different strokes, I guess.
 
Yeah, because black and white is hard to compress ;) You are only storing luminance information. Even so, Blu-ray is compressed, and if you recompress, you have the option of using a quality-based setting, instead of specifying a size or bitrate, and relying on the encoder to choose which parts get more bit rate. I only re-encode to stay one format (h.264) and to not have letterboxing. Audio I keep lossless. All I care about relating to the video is not seeing macro-blocking on motion. The video is already ruined by being 4:2:0. Yet we keep pushing for more resolution, and keeping the same old bad habits and horrible, blurry frame rates.
 
I would ask myself why even buy a 61" television when you're not going to take advantage of it?

Storage is cheap. Preserve quality and get a bigger drive (or drives).

Just because my car can do a 160 MPH doesn't mean I drive it at that speed all the time. I do what should be the correct action for the event being driven. Honeslty, if you think a movie like "Eat, Pray, Love" is sooo much better in 1080p vs 720p, I just have to roll my eyes.

Secondarily, storage is "cheapish". The time to rip a blu-ray disc is ~60-120 minutes. If you have 100+ movies, a system failure on that would result in a stupid amount of time to rebuild. Therefore you are looking at some sort of RAID + backup.

Lets say you bought an HP microserver @ 4x2TB drives in RAID5 + another 3x2TB for backup (assume you have some sort of dock for SATA drives). You are looking @ a cost of $900 (assume some sort of free OS, pre flood prices). Thus you are loking @ ~$0.15/GB of effective storage. A 25GB movie thus costs $3.75 to store + electricity. By picking and choosing in a thoughtful manner, the average cost of storage movie is much lower and thus the cost of convenience appears to have a much better value.
 
I would rip a movie like Speed Racer in 720 and 1080 and then compare them at your normal viewing distance to see if there is a very noticeable difference in quality.
 
I would rip a movie like Speed Racer in 720 and 1080 and then compare them at your normal viewing distance to see if there is a very noticeable difference in quality.

This is a good idea. I've never done it myself. Also, my receiver up-converts everything to 1080p, so if the OP has up-conversion going on, that should be considered too.
 
BTW, resolution isn't the only issue that factors into what you see. The amount of compression applied factors into the equation too.

The type of encoding used on the actual BluRay disc matters too.

MPEG-4 AVC > VC-1 > MPEG-2

And sometimes BD authors themselves make stupid compression decisions, like cramming 6.5 hours into a single disc. It may still be 1080p- but it's not going to be pretty.
 
Is that not a cartoon? Solid colored line art needs barely any bit rate. I wouldn't be surprised if you could losslessly compress cartoons and wind up with acceptable sizes. What kind of audio tracks did they use?
 
Just because my car can do a 160 MPH doesn't mean I drive it at that speed all the time. I do what should be the correct action for the event being driven. Honeslty, if you think a movie like "Eat, Pray, Love" is sooo much better in 1080p vs 720p, I just have to roll my eyes.

Secondarily, storage is "cheapish". The time to rip a blu-ray disc is ~60-120 minutes. If you have 100+ movies, a system failure on that would result in a stupid amount of time to rebuild. Therefore you are looking at some sort of RAID + backup.

Lets say you bought an HP microserver @ 4x2TB drives in RAID5 + another 3x2TB for backup (assume you have some sort of dock for SATA drives). You are looking @ a cost of $900 (assume some sort of free OS, pre flood prices). Thus you are loking @ ~$0.15/GB of effective storage. A 25GB movie thus costs $3.75 to store + electricity. By picking and choosing in a thoughtful manner, the average cost of storage movie is much lower and thus the cost of convenience appears to have a much better value.

I guess what you're saying is no two people have same requirements and/or fundings for their media center.

All of my Blu-ray and DVD are ripped in Main Movie format with quality maintained in their respective BDMV and Video_TS folder structure with copies on two separate NAS devices. I have nearly 6 or 7 terabytes of movies in storage stored on a total of two 8 terabyte NAS.

I understand your point about Eat, Pray, Love, but movies like those I tend to buy in DVD. I only buy Blu-ray blockbuster films and most foreign films like The White Ribbon, Ip Man and the Ong Bak series.
 
It's disgusting how much space is wasted on extras, and foreign languages. I don't even watch them in the first place...ever. I don't want to see what went into the movie and how things looked before they go in and make it look good...crap like that just ruins it for me, and would make me not want to see the movie ever again, and I would be back to not wanting it permanently stored.
 
Just because my car can do a 160 MPH doesn't mean I drive it at that speed all the time. I do what should be the correct action for the event being driven. Honeslty, if you think a movie like "Eat, Pray, Love" is sooo much better in 1080p vs 720p, I just have to roll my eyes.

Secondarily, storage is "cheapish". The time to rip a blu-ray disc is ~60-120 minutes. If you have 100+ movies, a system failure on that would result in a stupid amount of time to rebuild. Therefore you are looking at some sort of RAID + backup.

Lets say you bought an HP microserver @ 4x2TB drives in RAID5 + another 3x2TB for backup (assume you have some sort of dock for SATA drives). You are looking @ a cost of $900 (assume some sort of free OS, pre flood prices). Thus you are loking @ ~$0.15/GB of effective storage. A 25GB movie thus costs $3.75 to store + electricity. By picking and choosing in a thoughtful manner, the average cost of storage movie is much lower and thus the cost of convenience appears to have a much better value.

The time to rip if you are just copying (i.e., a bit-perfect rip) rather than transcoding is way less than that. Also, anyone who actually does this isn't spending 1 to 2 hours attending to a movie rip...you're doing something else. Personally, I don't see any good reason to keep raid+backup as I buy my stuff and the originals are backup. I keep track of what goes where and if I disc dies I replace just that part...and in my own time...it's not critical [to me] to have movies on a network...it is about convenience and using old tech.....if I really want to watch something, I can just load the plastic.

I'd never buy special server hardware to build a server. I use what is left over after I upgrade. I'm using a 4 or 5 year old system (mobo, power supply, case, vid card) for the core of my movie server. Only the hard drives and sata cards were added. Also, the mobo had about 8 sata ports, so I using 3TB drives, it's not nearly as much as you think.

Frankly, I would not own "Eat, Pray, Love" and I do agree with you that for that movie I would not care about 720 vs 1080 (or the bit-rate used for encodes).

BTW, I use a combination of MKVs, ISOs (for blu-ray), and file folders (for DVDs). If get a concert blu-ray, for example, I make an bit-perfect MKV (using MakeMKV). That way, it plays without any menus in WMC (I usually listen to this stuff a lot). However, if it is a disc of a hit film and has lots of extras, I might rip to ISO ...so I can later come back and look at the extras or listen to the commentary. Also, for TV series on blu-ray I rip to MKV so I can get the episode breakout, which I enjoy. I also strip subtitles and only keep the high-def sound track.
 
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It's disgusting how much space is wasted on extras, and foreign languages. I don't even watch them in the first place...ever. I don't want to see what went into the movie and how things looked before they go in and make it look good...crap like that just ruins it for me, and would make me not want to see the movie ever again, and I would be back to not wanting it permanently stored.

Everyone is different. I tend not to watch most extras too...but on occasion I will...but some movie collectors live for that stuff.
 
It's disgusting how much space is wasted on extras, and foreign languages. I don't even watch them in the first place...ever. I don't want to see what went into the movie and how things looked before they go in and make it look good...crap like that just ruins it for me, and would make me not want to see the movie ever again, and I would be back to not wanting it permanently stored.

The extras are one of the reasons I buy Bluray discs.
 
Spending money to back up extras is dumb. If I wanted to watch them, I would rather load the disc, than to spend the money on that much storage to back up that stuff. It's offensive how much space is wasted on a disc due to them. More quality should be attached to the main movie's video, and the extras can be slapped on another disc. Maybe they could even venture up into 4:2:2, 4:4:4, or simply better frame rates.
 
Nope, dumb. I don't need to respect anyone else's opinion, and I don't need to hide the fact that I don't. This is what makes the world go around.
 
Nope, dumb. I don't need to respect anyone else's opinion, and I don't need to hide the fact that I don't. This is what makes the world go around.

Why is it dumb?
If it's what he or anyone else wants and they have the storage capacity, so what?

Who are you to decide what is "dumb" and what is not? :rolleyes:


Spending money to back up extras is dumb. If I wanted to watch them, I would rather load the disc, than to spend the money on that much storage to back up that stuff.
That's your opinion, nothing more.
Many of us would rather have these features backed up so we don't have to mess with the removable media.
 
Because I can dictate, to me, what I think of it. I don't have to come on here and suck the teat of everyone's do-goodedness. I will let people know what I think is stupid and what is not. Don't like it, is there not any kind of ignore button? On the internet it seems like your opinion is only valid if it follows a mainstream view, and is positive. A person is supposed to like everything, everyone, and the world is made of marshmallows and unicorns.
 
Because I can dictate, to me, what I think of it. I don't have to come on here and suck the teat of everyone's do-goodedness. I will let people know what I think is stupid and what is not. Don't like it, is there not any kind of ignore button? On the internet it seems like your opinion is only valid if it follows a mainstream view, and is positive. A person is supposed to like everything, everyone, and the world is made of marshmallows and unicorns.

We never said you had to like it, but why do you think that storing extras, especially if the individual using it, is dumb?

It would be one thing if they were bitching about running out of space, didn't want to pay for more HDDs or storage, and also wanted the extras.
That would be pretty silly.

No, you don't have to like everything, but you don't have to insult it either.
 
Because I think it is dumb, and that's all that matters to me. If you don't like me insulting it, either ignore me, report me, or both. I'm not going to act like some happy yuppie to suit everyone else.
 
Well, there is a small technical difference between having an opinion and being a prick with an opinion.

If you are watching something on the PC I'd say that a 1080p rip is good so there is less scaling involved if you have a high resolution monitor. If you have a smallish HDTV and sit a good distance away (more than 6 feet) to watch, then I'd say that a 720p rip would be adequate. Then again I just queue up whatever I want to watch at the time in Netflix and wait 1 freaking day (or stream it depending) for it to arrive instead of trying to recreate the Library of Congress on my home computer :)

I keep a small library of blu-rays for my must have movies on hand though, everything else I just queue up.
 
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