720p Movies vs TV Episodes
August 4th, 2016
I download movies in 720p MKV format and often the size is under 1 gigabyte with an excellent quality. These movies are often 2 hours in length.
The latest episode of The Walking Dead, Season 4, Episode 1 in the 720p MKV format is 2.2 gigabytes for 53 minutes of programming. Why is the file so large. This is often the case with television episodes, with 43 minute episodes of other series nearly a gigbyte. Why is there such a difference?
The movies that size are heavily compressed and some of the quality suffers because of that (you may not notice it, but compare it to a less compressed rip). A TV show that size is compressed, but not to the same extent.
I.E. you can find ‘720p’ rips of TV shows at ~300mb, and 720p rips of movies over 5 gigs.
it depends on the encoder. The software and the man/group who does it.
However less the size, less the quality.
If you download movies that are 720p and size less than a gigabyte, they are not proper 720p movies. Those are supposed to be around 4-6GB.
The <1GB movies have a really really low bitrate.
Well, for example, this is a popular 720p download of a new movie. It is 970 mb. http://www.google.com?t=18036347
Are you saying it’s not 720p. What does “really low bitrate” mean? I know that this 720p version is far and away better than the 700 mb XVID I used to download, that I can hardly stand to watch anymore.
The resolution is 1280×720, but to get a small filesize, the bitrate is kept very small. This can cause a lot of artifacts in the image, especially visible at fast moving scenes and on large screens, like a 55″ TV or a projector. On a small screen, like a laptop screen, or a 24″ monitor, you won’t notice the difference that much.
Here is an example, this is a bit extreme and it’s about two different formats but it’s the same issue here
