this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder
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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
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theres usually reasons.
First, people may still be used to getting charged insane amounts of money for internet bandwidth. Download limits and overage charges are a real problem, especially for phones.
Download speeds. Downloading a 4k movie can take hours where the 1080p could be a few minutes.
People may not have a ton of storage space. The choice is between one 4k movie, or ten 1080p movies.
There's no need for retention. You're downloading a movie for yourself, not for archiving. There's no need for the HD version.
Tech. If you don't have a 4k monitor, the 4k resolution is wasted.
Quality. Just because the file is bigger doesn't mean it's higher quality. If the show was produced at 1080p, upscaling it to 4k doesn't actually increase the quality. I've downloaded 4k anime that was upscaled from 1080p and it actually was worse quality because it had a few corrupted artefacts. Corruption on a couple frames throughout the movie because the upscaling wasn't done perfectly and you wouldn't catch it unless you sat to watch the whole thing.
This is usually incorrect in practice since 1080p uploads rarely have enough bitrate to match a 1080p monitor. Resolution is not that important, but bitrate is