Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I have cheap tv and slow internet, so I am completely comfortable with 720P or 1080P (depends which streams faster). I am also and grew up with 420P, so that helps.

I like to watch TV shows in the background where I'm not going to be watching the screen obsessively, so I have several shows in 480P or sub-480P. There are also some shows where the "official" HD versions are just awful (most 90s sitcoms) or the show was made for 4:3 and has a different feel converted to 16:9 (MASH, The Wire).

Going beyond that though, I spent years on a really limited connection (2.6m down/400k up) and my instinct for saving bandwidth and storage space is still there, along with my need to pay it forward since I ain't no leech. I've become fond of making what I call "Bonsai Encodes", where the files are small enough to be sent over damn near anything. With mono Opus and VP9 video you can cram 45 minutes of perfectly watchable content into a sub-25mb file that'll play in Discord, with VTT subtitles even (though those won't play in Discord itself). Looks a bit like watching it on an old tube TV, but it's watchable.

I prefer 720, both for file/bandwidth reasons and for quality reasons. Once you start getting into higher quality, it starts looking like you're actually there in the room with the actors, and I don't like that. It's unsettling. I want my TV and movies to look like TV and movies.

@VitabytesDev

You aren't alone. I prefer 360 or 480 p
Because:

1. It's faster and not much difference I still get the content/knowledge
2. It reduces my carbon footprint

You're not alone, I definitely spent the majority of my time on 720p rips. I couldn't tell the difference between them and 1080. Though these days, actually just recently, I've switched over to 1080, and I can tell when it's lower.

But most my collection is still 720 and I feel no need to go back through and update everything. Maybe when I get arr set up I'll let it go through and do it for me 🤷‍♂️

Well, 480p sucks

Depends on the media.
Minimum it has to be web-dl and 1080p.

For media that needs it or I want to (e.g. Interstellar), I will search high bitrate web-dl/bluray or a remux.
If it's something I will for certain only watch once, I'll be fine with a regular 1080p mid bitrate file.

Maybe you're not noticing the difference between 720p to 1080p is due to the decoding used. The rips with a lower file size often get there by means of compression, and some uploaders (such as YIFY) heavily compress the videos to where I don't even notice much of a difference, however I'm going to assume you're not downloading the 3GB (average size for HQ) 1080p film.
Then again eyesight plays a role along with display.

I wouldn't bother with 4K usually, however once I upgraded to a 1440 monitor downscaling from 4K actually provides a fair bump in overall sharpness and detail (some films more than others), however the file size is usually over 10GB per film.

You don't really prefer a lower resolution, you just work within the limitations you have.

Also, I don't notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p

Either your display is really shitty or you need (better) glasses. This isn't like the difference between 60 and 144hz where its barely visible for untrained eyes.

I don't often go for the full 4K Blu-ray Remux releases, since they're massive and I can't really tell the difference over a 10-15GB rip, at least visually. Just a webrip is fine, depending on the source. Plus even my nVidia Shield Pro struggles with them at times.

That's less of an opinion and more of a hardware restriction, isn't it?

If I had a 5 Mbps connection or no display that can display 4k, I also would not download in 4k.

I usually go for 720p to 1080p, as my monitor is at 1080p. I wouldn't really compromise quality further. But even if I had a 4k screen, I probably wouldn't go for 4k cuz downloads take too long. What I'm saying is I like balance

I have to ration disk space and internet here is typically not amazing

I am in same boat

Nope. Most of my stuff is 720p because I won't be watching it again. My library has significantly dwindled in size. Only my absolute favorites are stored in high quality. Everything else is SD and quite a bit has been deleted.

Let's be honest, most stuff is shit and forgettable / not watching again. They are just remakes of readaptations of sequels. You know that by the time you want to watch it again, there will be a remake just as bad.

Anti Commercial-AI license

1080p is way better if you have a screen that is a good size. Also if you are into surround sound (I am) there is a lower chance to get it on 720p rips.

I usually watch youtube (well via Freetube) on 480, maybe 720 when I am paying attention and 360 when I am laying down. I prefer these small file sizes because I can skip left and right in the video time with the arrow buttons like the file is local and not online. I haven't pirated a movie in years (I would not want to watch anything new) but I download a lot of old racing from the 80s and 90s and it is already 480p, so as long as it is in english, not black/white I am happy.

I prefer the opposite. I want the best quality I can get often 4K remux. Storage is cheap nowadays and I don't mind waiting a few days for a movie to download. Also I do have a 500/500 connection which helps.

It really depends on the media and my level of interest in it. I was only bothering to try and get 1080p copies of stuff I liked due to only having a 1080p TV for so long. But I did make efforts to get 1080 where possible (and based on my drives at the time) even before I had a HD TV and the only thing I had to actually watch that resolution on was my laptop. And that was because I wanted to make sure I had (at the time) the best copies of torrented encodes of stuff I really loved and would want to look good later. But I got a 4K HDR TV a few months ago as my 13yo 1080p TV started just giving black screens on all inputs. And while a lot of things are fine, the limitations of the encodes are showing much more.

If I am just checking out something that I have heard about or was told to check out by a friend. I might just grab a 1080 or even 720 copy since they are often the top seeded results. Then go back and find 4k copies if I really get into it. Though my main issue today is similar to back when I was using my laptop. Storage space. I started ripping my Blu-rays and I am the worst about dealing with compression stuff. So I really really need to get on making that media server I have been "meaning to build" for years. Get some 18TB or 20TB drives and RAID the shit out of them for redundancy. lol.

I prefer 1080p but if not available then 720p is perfectly fine as well. 4k is overkill and I don't even have a monitor that could play it at native resolution. Where I do prefer "lower quality" though is framerate. I don't like how 60fps looks so I force YouTube to play videos at 24fps.

If it is a cartoon, or even anime, I don't mind between 720p and 1080p in most cases, but that is just about that.

Only when the artifacts in 4k look bad - like black squares on a black background due to compression. 1080p in that case is preferable.

I downscale movies and shows I download to 480p and transfer them to my modded 3dsxl cuz they look good enough for me and I can fit a lot of stuff on it!

Where do you live that only has 5mbps? It must be somewhere really remote.

After like 5-10 years of ripping 4K Blu-rays without re-encoding, I just can’t go back. The only time I’ll go back to anything less is if the source material was shot in it.

I prefer them as well but if I want to keep something I usually encode to 576p I still don't really see any difference on my displays and it's just something I've been doing since I first tried encoding for the Sony Vita.

I'm totally fine with something like 540p or 480p, although I guess that's because my preference is good ol' TV shows that aired in the 90s or 00s over TV cable, so I'm fine with SDTV quality. And honestly, there's not much sense in downloading all seasons of, say, Ally McBeal in 4K when you can download 8 full glorious 90s shows with their entire seasons in SDTV in the same space.

Even with "modern" stuff, I've seldom found a movie or TV show post 2012 that merits anything higher than 720p. I don't get why don't movie codecs get a multi-res options so that for example you can get the action scenes in 1080p, even 60fps if you want, but the melancholic scenes and the quiet drama scenes and the credits in 480p. Would save lots of space without losing quality where it matters.