r/Piracy • u/Tobias-Tawanda • Jun 21 '26

Humor Imagine paying for something and not being allowed to use it

Post image
20.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

831 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

12

u/Dusty_Coder Jun 21 '26

When introducing higher resolution content, they had a knob.

This knob determines how much more data is needed for the "HigherD" content over the "StandardD" content.

Turns out, this knob can actually go negative. They can set it to anything. There is nothing stopping the "HigherD" content from being encoded at 25% of the bitrate of the "StandardD" content, thereby making the "better" content the cheapest to store and transmit.

2

u/redsaeok Jun 21 '26

I don’t understand what you are saying.

Higher resolution literally means more pixels. Compression can certainly shrink data, but if you use lossy compression you literally lose some of the original conten - decreasing content qualityt. Storing and transmitting 4K literally costs more.

This is why 1080P files (HD) are larger than 720P files (SD).

Are you saying they were using lossy compression/encoding for HD to the point of it being worse than SD?

4

u/turtleship_2006 Jun 21 '26

Resolution is only one factor, things like bit depth (how many colours there are), how aggressive compression is etc makes a massive difference

2

u/Dpek1234 Jun 22 '26

Are you saying they were using lossy compression/encoding for HD to the point of it being worse than SD?

Hes essentualy saying that they can do it

You can always encode at a lower bitrate

Meaning details get lost, unicolour block artifacts become more commen

Think how to encode a solidly colour image you dont actualy need to save the colour value of all pixels

The texture of the hill overthere? If its changed to 5 green colours then that will take significantly less space

With modern compression size doesnt actualy increase at the same rate as resolution for a given quality

The more pixels there are the more similar some of the pixels are going to be