A new TV offers the possibility to watch 4k movies to me. I am thinking about upgrading my library but I’m not sure if I want to replace my 1080 collection. I’ve read that some use a separate 4k library.
Do you? How do you deal with it? I mostly add movies with trakt and radarr automatically. Do you use separate accounts?
For me only certain movies are worth the space on my server that a high quality 4k rip would take up. I do most everything in 1080 and specific films in 4k. Besides that most people aren’t going to see a real difference unless you have a good home theater set up
Same here. I don’t bother with 4k for things like comedies where the visual quality doesn’t matter. I’ve set up profiles for everything up to 4k, and select per film as I add it.
Personally i get the highest quality i can. Often 4K REMUX . If a device is not capable of showing 4K i just transcode the stream at the server.
I honestly can’t tell the difference between 4K and 1080 unless I’m right up to the screen, so I only have a few choice favorites (that are heavy on the special effects) in 4K. It’s such a massive amount more space just for a slightly better picture.
This right here. We can obviously tell a difference but the leap in quality from 1080p (Blu-ray) to 4k is not the leap that dvd to Blu-ray was. I have most in 1080p and my very few favorites or very iconic movies that benefit from the higher res, in 4k.
I think the only difference is the encoding quality of 1080p can beore noticeable, but if it’s a high quality file then it’s fine. Other than that, dark movies. Dark movies seem to greatly benefit from 4k even on 1080p displays.
Could be the encode again, but I’ve tried a few different versions of files
I’m pretty close to this, I still don’t keep 4k, I re-encode to 2k and save buckets of space for the things I want a really nice copy of. Even on my big screen I’m hard pressed to tell the difference.
I remember an article explaining 4k in theater was interesting only if your screen was over 10meter wide, it was maybe 7 or 8 years ago.
Back then the debate for theaters was should be the “next gen” be 48fps, or 4k.
I keep both but in the same library.
I do as well. Of course most of my older stuff is in 1080p. I always download 4K now whenever it’s available. I use Plex, and Plex allows me to choose which stream quality I want if I have multiple files to choose from. There is an enormous visual difference.
Set profiles for the quality of movies you’re looking to download.
Nah. My older 1080p stuff remains, but I just do 4k only now. Media server is powerful enough to transcode to 1080 on the fly for any device that can’t handle 4k, or for slower network conditions.
Nop, I don’t have a 4k library. To be honest, my TV doesn’t even know what HD ready is. It can handle 1080i, but full HD, nop. (And I already have a hard time seeing the difference between 720p and 1080p)
LOL meanwhile even if I have a 4k monitor I still choose 720p to save space and have quantity over quality
I have a lot of 720p movies that I watch on my 4k TV. I’m always surprised at how good they look.
You guys are talking about 4k meanwhile I’m digging in bargain bins and going to garage sales for DVDs.
EDIT: Didn’t see the community when I posted. It makes a lot more sense now.
I think my DVD days are mostly done. Even with a decent upscaler (Nvidia Shield) 480p looks terrible on my 4K TV.
It’s just the way I prefer it. I prefer paying for a copy if I can and downloading a copy when I can’t. I get the appeal, but if there’s a way to show companies I prefer a tangible copy over paying monthly/perpetual license I prefer going that route.
I’m not above downloading a copy if they don’t sell a copy if you get where I’m coming from. I consider it sort of abandoned at that point, even if it’s on a streaming service.
I get you. I do something similar. I love physical discs and have a healthy blu ray collection. I tend to buy older or more obscure cult movies that I’m worried may not be readily available on streaming. But I avoid DVDs specifically because of the low resolution. For some movies it just can’t be helped. Very obscure content may even only be available on VHS transfers and I’ll watch those if I’m really interested in the movie or show.
Typically I only seek out 4K content if it’s an “event” type of movie like a big budget blockbuster or something like that. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I typically don’t have a problem watching my movie collection in HD when I grew up watching beta and VHS cassettes.
I’ve replaced all my media with 4K remuxes, when available, 1080p remuxes otherwise, unless it’s a movie I’m only getting by request, then I might get an encode. Felt good to wash away all the 1080p and especially 720p stuff. 4K with HDR makes a HUGE difference. A lot of the time the picture has been remastered (maybe the for the first time, maybe more) and is exclusive to the UHD. Also, you often get upgraded with Dolby Atmos or DTS:X tracks, which rule.
I think people who have separate libraries don’t have access to hardware transcoding, or prefer not to use it. That’s the only reason I can see for it. My library is fully mixed, if a connection or device cannot support the resolution or codec, my server will transcode it in real time. Is transcoding the best quality? No, but if it’s transcoding because a device can’t handle higher quality I’m unlikely to notice the difference between a 1080p file and a live transcode of a 2160p file. We don’t have a ton of TVs in the house and the main event TV is high enough quality that I’m now downloading most things in UHD.
This is the perspective of someone with a dedicated 24/7 media server with plenty of storage that is easily expanded.
Or we don’t have the upload pipe for it. Or both.
Most people would be streaming to another TV in their home.
The OP and I are talking about hosting video for people outside our homes. I have many friends and family who use my Plex server all over the world
OP doesn’t say anything about that.
I meant the OP of the comment I’m referring to, wrong terminology I guess
You and I are the only two people in this thread, that’s why I was confused.
Clearly I am confused too
No, I can’t even tell the difference between 1080p and 4K from across the room on a normal sized TV, so I don’t bother wasting the space for 4K. If I had a nice projector with a huge screen, I would probably go for the 4K videos though.
Thats what I thought until I found out how much 4k projectors cost. Now I think 1080p is enough even for huge screens 😂 Honestly, Ive seen a movie on 80+ screen at 1080p and it looks amazing to me
Yep. My Plex server can’t handle multiple 4K streams and neither can my ISPs bandwidth. So it’s 4K download simply for stuff we watch at home and the rest of Plex content is 1080p
IMO the main reason to go for 4K is the HDR color accuracy.
Most movies are mastered in 1080p regardless, not to mention CGI effects are still mostly rendered at 2K.
But DCI-P3? If your screen can cover the color gamut or mostly cover it (90%+) then I’d go for it.
Personally I just have Radarr setup for 4K HDR and Sonarr setup for 1080p. Jellyfin transcodes 4K to 1080p and HDR to SDR just fine for my purposes (note that I have an Intel N100 box with QSV hardware transcoding and tonemapping setup)
Yes, I run two instances of Radarr and Sonarr. One caps out at 1080p, the other one only allows 2160p.
Jellyfin just has two separate libraries for them.
I’m mostly doing this to prevent unecessary transcoding away from home where streaming 4k HDR is unlikely. At some point I will merge them but bandwidth for 4k streaming is not there yet and proper HDR tone mapping is still rare.
Can I ask why your Jellyfin has two libraries for them? Why not set the naming scheme in your 4K library to do “movie title (year) - 4K.mkv” ? Then Jellyfin recognizes the two quality versions and gives you a version selector for each film that has more than one version
Yes, I don’t want external users to accidentally play the 4k version so I only give access to people who I know can handle it.
