this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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For what content? Video gaming (GPUs) has barely gotten to 4k. Movies? 4k streaming is a joke; better off with 1080 BD. If you care about quality go physical... UHD BD is hard to find and you have to wait and hunt to get them at reasonable prices... And these days there are only a couple UHD BD Player mfg left.
Seriously though, quality 4k media is hard to find outside of ... "finding it" on the internet.
Those rips are still coming from physical. If those go extinct, bye bye BD Rips...
Yeah as much as I can gloat about streaming a 100GB Bluray rip on Stremio, it's exactly that.
Is there a player other than the shield that can play them and be simple? Roku Ultra can't handle most 4k HQ streams .
That's the dumbest part of it all is that pirates seriously get the best movie/TV experience of anyone. I mean, maybe if you spend a shitton on DVD and BluRays to rip you can match that experience, but even that can be legally dubious depending on the jurisdiction
Bitrate is only one variable in overall perceived quality. There are all sorts of tricks that can significantly reduce file size (and thus bitrate of a stream) without a perceptible loss of quality. And somewhat counterintuitively, the compression tricks work a lot better on higher resolution source video, which is why each quadrupling in pixels (doubling height and width) doesn't quadruple file size.
The codec matters (h.264 vs h.265/HEVC vs VP9 vs AV1), and so do the settings actually used to encode. Netflix famously is willing to spend a lot more computational power on encoding, because they have a relatively small number of videos and many, many users watching the same videos. In contrast, YouTube and Facebook don't even bother re-encoding into a more efficient codec like AV1 until a video gets enough views that they think they can make up the cost of additional processing with the savings of lower bandwidth.
Video encoding is a very complex topic, and simple bitrate comparisons only barely scratch the surface in perceived quality.
It's because for the Average Joe, having a TV box at the end of your driveway that has the latest big number on it is important. It's how they gain their identity. Do not upset them for obvious reasons.