720p or 1080p for BD5/9s?

[Big Vern]

I usually rip my blu-rays down to a BD5 for a 2 hour movie, and a BD9 for anything over 2 hours, these are movie only rips, as they go straight onto my media player, and are always ripped to 720p and never put onto a disc.

I have been wondering if there are any drawbacks to doing these in 1080p? Will there be any glitches if I go for 1080p, rather than 720p?

Thanks.

[Stereodude]

Bitrate / size vs. visual quality

You'll need more bitrate to achieve the same visual quality for 1080p vs. 720p simply because there's usually more detail in a 1920x1080 image than a 1280x720 one. In your case you'll be keeping the bitrate the same and increasing the amount of information you're trying to pack into it.

Ultimately there isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer, try it and see what your eyes tell you.

[hello_hello]

Unless you own a fairly large TV you probably won't see any difference between a good quality 720p encode and the original 1080p video. I encode everything at 720p myself and it's hard to see any difference using my 51 inch plasma. Even up close.
Mind you I use my PC for playback 99.9% of the time, and while I think it's output looks better playing video of pretty much any resolution, I haven't made any 720p vs 1080p comparisons using the Bluray player to work out if I can or can't see a difference when using it.

When using MPC-HC, if I switch resizers while playing 720p or SD video I can see the difference (anyone know how a TV/Bluray player resizes?), but I've got to be sitting within three or four feet of the TV as the difference is only small and only in the very fine detail.

What container do you use when converting? I'm just curious as you mentioned BD5 and BD9 but don't burn anything to disc. Given you don't burn them to disc you may be better off using CRF encoding rather than 2 pass encoding if you switch to 1080p. Most 720p encodes will still be of a very good quality while fitting on a BD5 (in fact I think it's overkill a lot of the time), but 1080p will probably be a different story.

[Ghitulescu]

Since 1080p is 1.5x 720p each axis, and since the movie material is originally available as 1080p (well, not exactly, downsized from 4k, but no consumer ever has access to 4k originals), and also since the TVs are 1080p...
then you do a double resizing. There is a lot of pixels in both formats and the resizing has plenty of space to manoeuvre, therefore the Average Joe can't normally see a difference from the normal viewing distance. It's not the number of pixels that are decisive for HD, but it's the optical resolution. You may compare the HD versions of Baraka and Life, the first one has been scanned at 8k from 70mm and downconverted to 1080p, the other has been upscaled from 720p. Not much of a visual difference, considering that 8k (8192 × 4320) comprises ~38 times more pixels than 720p (1280x720).

Since the last resizing is performed in the player or in the TV, the result also depends on their quality (and price ;)). The ultimate judge is you.

[Big Vern]

What container do you use when converting? I'm just curious as you mentioned BD5 and BD9 but don't burn anything to disc. Given you don't burn them to disc you may be better off using CRF encoding rather than 2 pass encoding if you switch to 1080p. Most 720p encodes will still be of a very good quality while fitting on a BD5 (in fact I think it's overkill a lot of the time), but 1080p will probably be a different story.

I was only using BD5/9 as a guide. In truth, I do around 4 gig for 2 hours and 8 gig for anything over.
All my films are MKV and I use AC3 640K.
I was asking as I am thinking of outing my 42inch TV for a 50inch one. After some sniffing around I have found out that a 50 inch will be fine for 720p, as the viewing distance is around 9/10 feet in our house, so I will keep the 720p's.

Thanks for all the replies.