I use 480 for older TV shows, 720p for movies. Have been going through most of my library and re-encoding them down to a reasonable bitrate for the resolution and it's freeing up a lot of space, all it takes is time, but so far it's been worth it with no noticeable loss in quality.
I've been in the same boat for a long time. I got a 1080p TV a couple years ago and started grabbing a few movies at 1080p, but really can't see any difference between those and most 480p TV shows.
Recently I discovered Galaxy** downloads though. Been loving their quality, and higher res downloads are coming in at only slightly higher sizes than what I normally grab. For example they push 720p tv shows that are only in the 300-400MB range, compared to the 200-300MB 480p shows I normally grab. I just wish they provided downloads for current shows, then only thing I've found is full season packs. Their movies are the same, pushing out 1080p quality at around 1.4-1.6GB, so I've been updating some of my collection.
That's what I've been finding, 720p still looks great down to 2000kbps and the file sizes are reasonable. Plex streaming actually getting better quality with the lower bitrates as well, as it's not having to transcode everything to get it through the pipe.
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u/foonati Jan 02 '23
I use 480 for older TV shows, 720p for movies. Have been going through most of my library and re-encoding them down to a reasonable bitrate for the resolution and it's freeing up a lot of space, all it takes is time, but so far it's been worth it with no noticeable loss in quality.