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  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Streaming can provide decent quality, but not high quality. That’s simply too costly on scale.

    Bit rate alone doesn’t necessarily tell you quality either.

    I suggest you look for downloads and look for

    1. Release Groups that match your intentions (once you found favorites you may want to stick to them)
    2. Screenshots on releases/info pages
    3. Encoding information

    To assess encoding information, you look at file type, video codec, and encoding bit-ness.

    From high to low compatibility, and low to high compression ratio:

    1. mp4 file, AVC/x264/h.264
    2. mkv file, HEVC/x265/h.265
    3. mkv file, HEVC, 10-bit
    4. mkv file, AV1 [10-bit]

    You can consider the triplets of the codec to be different names for the same thing.

    You’ll be able to play all file and codec types on a PC, but not necessarily on other devices. If you’re streaming from PC to something else, that’s fine too.


    I’m usually looking for 10-bit HEVC releases because of their vastly superior size for quality. If that’s not available, HEVC or AVC. In most cases, it doesn’t matter too much to me.

    A video with a lot of movement or visual detail will have bigger sizes.


    If you compare an AVC release and bitrate with a HEVC 10-bit release and bitrate, they are vastly different. You can get the same quality for a fraction of file size and bitrate. More bitrate is often a waste of bandwidth and storage space.