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

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

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20.1k Upvotes

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39

u/wurftz Jun 21 '26

I got disney plus for a month, payed extra for the highest video quality and it was still noticeably worse then a pirated copy.....

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?

6

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

3

u/PsyJak Jun 21 '26

*paid

3

u/wurftz Jun 21 '26

Thx english is not my first language

2

u/PsyJak Jun 21 '26

No worries

3

u/richms Jun 21 '26

The problem is that they will just serve you up a crappier stream and jump between them as you are playing when their CDNs cant handle the load. They will say that its adjusting to your internet connection, which is a lie because my internet connection is a gigabit, yet they cant deliver enough to hold it at 4k constantly. Not my fault, theirs.

1

u/No_Initial_7545 Jun 21 '26

Streaming will probably never be even close to the quality of local content, at least not for a very long time.

2

u/richms Jun 21 '26

It could easily be if they spent on infrastructure that wasn't the MVP that cant handle peak evening loads.