I’m ending this argument with your quote. If you can afford any screen size, then why would you not just get a few extra 6TB (or larger) drives instead of destroying the original video quality (and I wonder how long the re-encode takes)… Then you are ready for the future when you upgrade.
I’m not having an argument. You’re the one who wandered into a tech support thread to tell me why my own personal opinions are wrong. FWIW, I have a 20TB NAS with oodles of space to spare. I just don’t see the point in wasting it with unnecessarily large files that don’t look appreciably different to my eye.
Happy New Year!
Well, all I can tell you then is that I regret my similar decisions when I first started to rip DVDs and decided that space was more important than quality.
I’m still having to dig out the original DVDs to re-rip them because of the horrid quality on a modern TV vs the OK quality on a old SD TV.
I’ve got other considerations too. One of the reasons I go to the effort of maintaining my own local movie collection is that I travel a lot for work, which makes streaming an unappealing option, and I’ll usually load up my 128GB iPad with movies and media for the road. If I just had uncompressed UHD rips, which come in at around 40 - 70GB per movie, it wouldn’t be practical and then I’d have to deal with the inconvenience of transferring stuff from external HDDs etc.
So when ripping, I will first shoot for an x265 CQ 20 encode @ 4K. For modern movies that are shot digitally and have little to no grain, this will actually result in some spectacularly small files, relatively speaking. As an example, Avengers Infinity War comes in at 9.4GB at this quality, and I would challenge anybody to spot the difference from the original. I kinda obsess over this stuff and I have a very tough time spotting it myself.
But this doesn’t go as well for older movies with lots of grain. The best example of this is something like the original Mission: Impossible, or Saving Private Ryan. CQ 20 @ 4K will actually usually result in a bigger file than the original for these, with some terrible artifacting to boot. The two options for reducing size are now either DNR (which looks usually looks awful, although it sometimes works quite well with the light grain in something like Escape From New York) or going for a lower resolution and using the grain tuning option.
In cases like this, 2-pass 1440p with the grain tune @ VBR 20,000 is my next shot. Usually this will result in something that is not as good as 4K, but better than 1080p, with a high enough bitrate that there’s no artifacting, and still with a reasonable file size.
If that doesn’t work, then I’ll go for 1080p. In the case of Saving Private Ryan, this was still unacceptably low quality, so that’s one of the few in my collection that remains untouched.
TLDR; everything in UHD HDR land is a compromise. Either you accept giant file sizes (which makes them difficult to port around and expensive to back up), or you make your own judgements as to what level of quality you’ll accept, especially considering that you’ll also often be watching these on the go. If you’re ever in Australia, feel free to drop by and we can do some A/B testing between my encodes and the originals. I reckon it’ll be harder to pick than you think 