Just a quick query for those who watch HD films. I've just bought a Blu ray player for my home media system and I'm probably going to buy my first disc tomorrow. I've watched alot of 720p & 1080p movies downloaded through bittorrent (legal downloads of course) but I noticed the file sizes are way off the originals. Black Hawk Down (supposedly a good visual film) is about 45gb for the film, yet the torrents are around 5gb. On my 40" Samsung LED Tv, will I see a big difference between the 1080p torrent at 5gb and the original at 45gb?? Finally, I was going to buy probably 4 discs tomorrow, but can anyone give some suggestions to films with good visual and audio quality? I've probably seen the films anyway so I can chose my own genre and if I like the film, so please just the quality I'm after.

Transformers in HD is a good one to test out a system with. I too watch HD films downloaded via torrents, usually at 720p to watch on my MacBook Pro and the quality is amazing.

The reason for the difference in file size is because they have been encoded. I doubt you would really see that much difference to be honest.

Edited 21 January, 201016 yr by Harry_vRS

Lower figure lower quality as a rule, around 10 gig is pretty good, barely a difference between a size converted(fat32 for ps3) MKV, and bought Blu-ray on the PS3

I can hardly tell the difference tbh.

A 5 gig MKV is going too be noticably poorer quality imo, they will run at around 5 meg per second on the PS3 a 10 gig is more like 18-23 MBps.,so much more detail on the screen at a given point.

I was down my mates the other night and he made a comment " your HD is the best", when I aksed him WTF he babbling about, he said between his Sky movies HD and my MKV's, he thought the picture was better on MKV movie files, although we both agreed that the docu's on sky (discovery etc)were better overall, and best of the lot was Rush HD.

Not sure what kind of throughput of data A skybox bangs out tbh, as I have no way of checking too my knowledge

HTH

Lower figure lower quality as a rule, around 10 gig is pretty good, barely a difference between a size converted(fat32 for ps3) MKV, and bought Blu-ray on the PS3

I can hardly tell the difference tbh.

A 5 gig MKV is going too be noticably poorer quality imo, they will run at around 5 meg per second on the PS3 a 10 gig is more like 18-23 MBps.,so much more detail on the screen at a given point.

I was down my mates the other night and he made a comment " your HD is the best", when I aksed him WTF he babbling about, he said between his Sky movies HD and my MKV's, he thought the picture was better on MKV movie files, although we both agreed that the docu's on sky (discovery etc)were better overall, and best of the lot was Rush HD.

Not sure what kind of throughput of data A skybox bangs out tbh, as I have no way of checking too my knowledge

HTH

SkyHD only runs at 1080i or 720p. Some HD stuff through Sky is amazing (mainly documentaries as you said) but some films are good too. My gripes start when they show something filmed in the 70's and say it's HD. It might be re-mastered but still I doubt is is the same quality as a modern HD film. I've rented 4 films today to see if the Blu Ray quality is better. I've rented Surrogates, Blade Runner, Bejamin Button (for the wife) and Defiance.

The differnce between 720p and 1080p is probably less than between the MKV's and the Blu's tbh.

I think it comes down too bandwidth with sky. I may be wrong though

Don't forget on a blu some of the space is for menus, intro and extras, so the feature may only be about 20 odd gig in reality.

I usually look for mkv's around the 12 gig mark and as said they are mint.

I find older films eg Bladerunner don't look that good as the equipment wasn't a good in those days, some thing shot last week on a hd camera has too look better than something shot in 1982. I belive they just recapture the old movies onto Blu ray.

As always I am open too be corrected on my ramblings lol

I did a test with Casino Royale, particularly the opening chase sequence with an M2TS file on the PS3, and then the Blu-Ray. Couldn't see a difference at all.

You may find that on a larger screen, beyond say 42" that a difference may become apparent, but in general I find the encoded files to be an excellent substitute

Steve

some will also depend on where you are sitting in the room. I watched "21" (great film, and the HD images of Vegas are superb with all the lights) on my TV (42") and although it looked superb, it was blown away by the 'rents TV (50"), when sitting a further distance away. On older films, I can't see any major difference, apart from maybe the image is a little sharper. I just wish I had the space to add 2 more speakers to my set-up, to make it 7.1 and experience "TrueHD" sound...which is supposed to be awesome

I did a test with Casino Royale, particularly the opening chase sequence with an M2TS file on the PS3, and then the Blu-Ray. Couldn't see a difference at all.

You may find that on a larger screen, beyond say 42" that a difference may become apparent, but in general I find the encoded files to be an excellent substitute

Steve

But i thought the M2TS is uncompressed format anyway... so it would be identical and very large!

Generally i think the 15gig-ish MKVs are decent quality... the difference in size between these and the full film is usually down to the soundtrack which is vanilla DTS/DD rather than the master-HD stuff on a blu-ray

That would make sense too me :D

i saw Terminator 2 at my mates on Blu-Ray, i was stunned at the quality.

From what i've read, Bluray audio/visual quality varies very much film to film.

After reading about the best titles for picture/audio quality, i've added Casino Royale, Black Hawk Down, and Resident Evil:Apocolypse to my lovefilm list, as they are supposedly 3 of the best Bluray's you can buy for testing.

The quality of the encoding varies massively.

BHD in general is good, but the opening scenes are shockingly bad!

There is a difference between 5-10GB MKVs and a Blu-Ray disc. It will be very noticeable, but only in certain areas, and if you don't care about them, and aren't used to seeing them, you won't really notice the difference. Biggest differences tend to be macroblocking of gentle gradients of colours. The smooth transition will hold up much better on BD than on a small recompressed file.