RCBH928 wrote:After all this talk about saving bandwidth and speeds limits, I went to check an average movie(Dumbo) and on iTunes it says the SD version is around 2GB compared to 5GB for HD. Still 2GB is a lot for anything less than 4G speeds or anything less than real broadband speeds. I thought it might be closer to torrent rips that are sometimes as low as 650MB.
So a torrent rip is sacrificing quality to lower the file size. But if you're paying for the movie, you might not be happy getting a low quality video. 2 GB is actually pretty low considering. A single layer DVD is 4.7 GB, and any modern master of a 2 hour movie is going to fill most of that space (if not utilize a dual layer DVD). So a safe bet is that a ~2 hour movie is at least 4 GB on a DVD (sometimes more), so a 2 GB download isn't too bad at all.
Unless you're talking about the 1941 Dumbo which is only around an hour run time.
There's a lot that goes into it, that I wont even pretend to know a lot about. I mess around and do my own trial and error to see where the happy medium is for quality and file size. But there's a lot of factors. Resolution, frame rate, bit rate (including variable bit rate), and compression which might be permanent compression or how a certain codec handles compression/decompression (much like a zip file). There's "lossy" and "lossless" codecs for video, just as there are with audio (mp3 vs FLAC vs WAV for example). Point is, a torrent rip of a ~2 hour movie that is less than 1 GB definitely sacrificed something.