this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I deliberately lower streaming quality on everything I watch. If the thing is really worth it I might watch it in 720p. Everything else goes in 480p.
The push for 4k is a level of consumerism I'm not comfortable with, having the world going to shit as fast as it's going.
Why do you lower resolution below 1080p? Does your screen not support it or connection bandwidth?
I use only 1080p because my phone screen and pc monitor support it and my eyes still percive difference between 720p and 1080p
I do it too. I do it because our internet sucks and bandwidth is precious. 4k makes everything stutter. Especially if you have more than one thing in the house streaming at once.
That is a technical reason I can agree with.
Dumbing down 4k 'just because' is stupid still.
I do it too because, although I have great bandwidth, 4k on YouTube (specifically) usually stutters for me and I’d rather just watch something unimpeded at a lower resolution. Not that fussed about resolution on a YouTube vid.
I watch everything in 480p just because my internet is crap.
I perceived my 32mbps wifi as minimal requieement in 2012 -_-
Great. Try 32mbps in 2023, with 3-5+ people streaming off it, and/or gaming on it, at once.
Fuck 32mbps, try 16mbps
I used to get up in the morning at night at half-past-ten at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of freezing cold poison, work 28 hours a day at mill, and pay the mill owner to let us work there. And when I went home our dad used to murder us in cold blood, each night, and dance about on our graves, singing hallelujah.
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Low quality gang rise up!
Mostly 360p myself, varying depending on how much internet is available and whether or not I gotta read text in the video
Owning capitalists by giving them the same amount of money for worse service on purpose.
Even I don't get where you're coming from and I won't replace the 720p TV in my bedroom because I don't want to deal with some smart TV crap and the resolution is fine because it's a small TV.
But intentionally not watch it at low resolution because fuck society? Makes no sense to me.
"consumerism"? My dude, it's pre produced video files. With hardware acceleration it takes barely any real processing power to play back 4k video.
You are not changing anything or making any difference in whether the world is "going to shit". The Internet bandwidth you're getting is being artificially choked by your ISP...always.
It feels like you think it's some kind of moral victory and wanted to take some kind of arbitrary stand against "consumerism" and landed here.
Unless you actually have bandwidth limitations or don't have a screen capable of displaying the content, lowering to DVD quality is achieving nothing at all.
I don't really care for 4K. The diminishing returns isn't worth it, and it's really turning into a bandwidth problem for the major players that offer it for free.
But, I can't get behind 480p. That shit is garbage resolution, especially on a TV or computer.
Ditto. I even have an add-in that forces it to 480 unless I explicitly select something else. I like to use my bandwidth for more important things than counting pimples on an "influencer's" forehead.
And I like to use my time for more important things than counting pimples on an “influencer’s” forehead
Seriously...what a weird take. High resolution video is simply just nicer to watch, these guys are going a very strange direction with it.
High resolution video is nicer to watch when:
480p hits a decent balance for me in most cases. It makes the people in the video recognizable (like, say, the presenter in a news/comedy/pop science/whatever vlog), and most text in such a video will be readable. Sometimes when there's a lot of diagrams or when the pictures need clarity I'll boost it to 720p, but using up over double the bandwidth is just not worth it most times. I have more important things to do with that bandwidth.
For a movie with a lot of rich detail, etc, 1080p is even nicer. It might even be worth the five times the bandwidth to get to it. But here's where diminishing returns starts to kick in. 1080p is five times the bandwidth, but only a bit over twice the linear resolution. It had better be a really important doubling of resolution.
4K streaming? That's laughable. Yes it's over 4 times as high in linear resolution, but it's over TWENTY times as high in bandwidth. I could literally watch 20 simultaneous 480p streams (or 4 simultaneous 1080p streams at a paltry 2× improvement in linear resolution) for a single 4K stream.
And that's just bandwidth. Processing costs are on a similar order of magnitude. I have a computer at home that outpowers all the supercomputers that were on the planet put together when I was a child. Playing a single 4K movie sucks up most of its processing power. Again, I have better things to spend my CPU time (and/or electricity bill) on than watching some presenter's pimples on screen in fine detail.
That's the most important thing. The last two things I watched in 4K on my TV were the Avatar sequel and Community. One of those is absolutely a different experience in 4K than it is in 1080p, and the other may as well be in 720p for all the difference it makes.
I'm talking about Community, obviously. Joel McHale is dreamy and deserves 8K at minimum.
If you have more important things to do, why not just NOT watch them in the first place?
4K, 8K, 1,293K is overrated gimmicks to me. I want to see actual improvements, not just how big the resolution can get and how much detail. The last thing that wow'ed me like that were movie theater screens. I'm not really that impressed with it. Also 60FPS shows and things are so off-putting!
I'll be honest I'm with you on the world going to shit and all that but I can't use 1080p after 4k it feels like blurry vision. I don't know how you don't see it as a significant improvement.
8k+ I don't see any difference to 4k though, not at 20-30inch screen sizes anyway.
It just depends on the content. I have a 4K 65" TV that is at the upper end of mid-range in quality and 4K is definitely a noticeable improvement over 1080p in most instances, but a lot of the time it's only noticeable if you're specifically looking for it and doesn't actually improve the viewing experience all that much. I do think it's worth the upgrade though, just for the instances where it really does have a positive effect. Like, watching the Hong Kong fight scene in Pacific Rim on a good quality 4K display is just an entirely different experience than it is on a good 1080p display.
Similar mindset has been ruining video games lately. "You can see every pimple and bead of sweat on their face!" Cool, how does it run on a budget PC? "...just look at that hair! If you squint it doesn't look like steel wool at all!"
Got a 4k screen on my laptop, yeah honestly not worth it at all. Barely a difference from 1080p, and yet requires significantly more resources to use. Unless you have a massive display, really not worth it at all.