Movie info: After a heist, four criminals lay low in a remote safehouse, waiting for orders. As paranoia builds, one thing becomes clear — the real threat may not be outside, but among them.
DVDs are 480p. For many people in the world this is a step up from the quality than they are used to.
VHS beat betamax because for most people the cost and availability of movies was more important than the picture quality and these harsh trade offs are still very real in some places.
Bit starving a 720p resolution video will look worse than a 480p video with reasonable bitrate. DVDs use the MPEG-2 video codec and have a file size of 9 GB typically. Not many retail DVDs are sold on the 4.5G size.
A good DVDrip, transcoding the the MPEG-2 video to x264, will usually have a file size of 1.5GB - 2GB for a full length movie.
e///
I want to add some math. If you do a web search for 480p x264 recommended bitrate, several video editing forums will tell you that 480p x264 will have a bitrate between 1000kbps to 2500 kbps. DVDs commonly come with an audio track which is AC-3 5.1 at 448 kbps. It is considered bad to re-encode lossy audio, so this doesn’t get changed. So we add the video bitrate + the audio bitrate to determine our estimated file size. Let’s say that a film is 90 minutes.
I spent the better part of a decade watching 700mb divx rips. I know the quality sucks but again the point is that people can and will tolerate bad picture quality when there are other considerations to factor.
Though there exist dual layer or DVD9 commercial releases they were usually either double features like 2 movies on a disk or 4 TV episodes or uncommonly long films (Lord of the Rings for example).
MOST commercially released DVDs were DVD5 or about 4.7GB in size. And this is based on oh 20 years of sample size.
On DVD encoding: Things get tricky in comparisons because AVC introduced a lot of tricks to get lower bitrates while maintaining a certain psycho-visual level of passing image quality that MPEG2/4 simply didn’t have. It may not pass detailed frame by frame study of corner elements but for most people without perceptible quality loss you can knock the bitrate down meaningfully beyond the pure compression efficiency improvements of the follow-on codecs.
Most commercial film DVDs that I have seen are on DVD9. So much so that software exists such as “DVDShrink” so that pirates could compress DVD9 movies to a 4.5GB DVD-R disk.
I’m not sure what data you are looking at to think that most DVDs are sold at DVD5. I know for a fact that your statement about DVD9 only being used in special cases is not true. I’ve seen communities that specialize in sharing raw DVD disc images and I am certain that DVD9 images exist for almost every movie.
DVDs are 480p. For many people in the world this is a step up from the quality than they are used to.
VHS beat betamax because for most people the cost and availability of movies was more important than the picture quality and these harsh trade offs are still very real in some places.
Bit starving a 720p resolution video will look worse than a 480p video with reasonable bitrate. DVDs use the MPEG-2 video codec and have a file size of 9 GB typically. Not many retail DVDs are sold on the 4.5G size.
A good DVDrip, transcoding the the MPEG-2 video to x264, will usually have a file size of 1.5GB - 2GB for a full length movie.
e///
I want to add some math. If you do a web search for 480p x264 recommended bitrate, several video editing forums will tell you that 480p x264 will have a bitrate between 1000kbps to 2500 kbps. DVDs commonly come with an audio track which is AC-3 5.1 at 448 kbps. It is considered bad to re-encode lossy audio, so this doesn’t get changed. So we add the video bitrate + the audio bitrate to determine our estimated file size. Let’s say that a film is 90 minutes.
low bit rate 480p example:
(90 * 60 * (1000 + 448) ) / 8 = 997400 =~974 mb
high bit rate 480p example:
(90 * 60 * (2500 + 448) ) / 8 = 1989900 = ~1.9 gb
I spent the better part of a decade watching 700mb divx rips. I know the quality sucks but again the point is that people can and will tolerate bad picture quality when there are other considerations to factor.
I still do this. Disk space is a premium and my eyes are getting worse
correct.
Incorrect.
Though there exist dual layer or DVD9 commercial releases they were usually either double features like 2 movies on a disk or 4 TV episodes or uncommonly long films (Lord of the Rings for example).
MOST commercially released DVDs were DVD5 or about 4.7GB in size. And this is based on oh 20 years of sample size.
On DVD encoding: Things get tricky in comparisons because AVC introduced a lot of tricks to get lower bitrates while maintaining a certain psycho-visual level of passing image quality that MPEG2/4 simply didn’t have. It may not pass detailed frame by frame study of corner elements but for most people without perceptible quality loss you can knock the bitrate down meaningfully beyond the pure compression efficiency improvements of the follow-on codecs.
Most commercial film DVDs that I have seen are on DVD9. So much so that software exists such as “DVDShrink” so that pirates could compress DVD9 movies to a 4.5GB DVD-R disk.
I’m not sure what data you are looking at to think that most DVDs are sold at DVD5. I know for a fact that your statement about DVD9 only being used in special cases is not true. I’ve seen communities that specialize in sharing raw DVD disc images and I am certain that DVD9 images exist for almost every movie.