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Old 1st January 2023, 17:35   #68  |  Link
MaximRecoil
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Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 192
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katie Boundary View Post
"Watchable"? 700 MB per 2-hour movie was the standard. Only as movies approached 2.5 hours did you start to see the 2-CD encodes become more common.
700 MB Xvid encodes were the most common, but they weren't very good quality. The best case scenario for them, in terms of a Hollywood movie, was a short (around 90 minutes or so) 2.35:1 movie, which would typically be 640×272. A 2-pass encode with 128 kbps audio didn't have any major compression artifacts at least, but it didn't exactly preserve fine/complex detail like film grain.

Things got worse from there, i.e., a 1.85:1 movie was typically 624×336 (about 20% more pixels to encode), and a 1.33:1 movie was typically 640×480 (about 76% more pixels to encode).

"2-CD" encodes were a thing at least as far back as when I first got a PC / internet access (2001), they were just less common because internet speeds were a lot slower and hard drives were a lot smaller. It didn't usually have anything to do with the length of the movie, but rather with the preferences of the person / release group who encoded it. For example, I doubt that "aXXo" ever released a 2-CD encode, while there were people who always did 2-CD encodes regardless of the length and aspect ratio. 2-CD encodes usually had the untouched AC3 audio from the DVD, usually the 192 kbps 2-channel stream that many, if not most, DVDs included.
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