Even in this poorly made comparison shot I made you can tell the difference between streaming and "self hosting"

Man... Im watching Stargate sg1 with my kiddo. My Plex server is down for a bit.. so I switched over to prime for an episode or two..

It's dark, it's audio is horrible, it's 4:3 formatted it's horribly compressed and it has commercials.

Talk about a poor viewing experience.

Not watching is better than watching...

"it's a strange game. The only way to win is not to play."
You shoukd consider cancelling prime, bezos doesn't need more moneys ^^
- That's super tempting honestly. Idk that it benefits is at this point.
The worst part is that even buying SG1 on Bluray gives a bad experience, because they fucked up the 5.1 audio.

So what did the pirates do? Combined the Bluray video with the better DVD 5.1 audio! Best of both worlds.
- Huh I wondered. That makes a lot of sense.
  
  The version I have looks and sounds so much better than the blurays I have... Tho like you said better audio, widescreen and I'm fairly certain it's been ai upscaled as well. I'd have to go back and look but my physical disks don't hold a candle..
SG1 was shot in 4:3 until like season 8 or so.
- SG-1 was shot in widescreen from day one, on cameras that had framing marks for 4:3 and 16:9. A 4:3 cut was sent to TV networks and a 16:9 cut was canned until the show was released on DVD.
- SG1 was shot in film and mastered in 16:9. 16mm in the first 3 seasons, 35mm 3-7, and then they moved to digital HD cameras season 8 onwards.
  
  Many shows from the 90s were [edit: shot on film]. That's why you can get a widescreen HD release of Seinfeld, among others.
That's what I'm watching right now too! I rewatch every year or two.
- Such a great universe! :)

The tradeoff kinda made sense at the dawn of streaming, when the transaction was basically trading quality for better pricing and convenience.

Nowadays? Yeaaaaah I don't know about that chief

Crazy to think that we lost all the advantages that streaming offered, kept all the disadvantages, piled on a few more disadvantages on top of that, and people went "sure that makes sense 24 bucks a month worth it bro"

All these companies play the frogs in a pot game. Slowly make things shittier and shittier in tiny increments and everyone's sitting there in boiling water eventually like "this is fine." I mean there's still people with cable TV in 2024. And Netflix has done nothing but get worse for the last 3-4 years and their subscriber count just had a decent boost last year so they were like "lol sweet, we're canceling basic ad free tier in 2024, eat shit"

It's felt pretty damn nice to finally give all these companies the boot. They got too greedy. But there'll still be hordes of people just happily paying an ever rising price for this stuff I guess.
At this point even paying money to pirate stuff makes sense. Like setting up a VPS with all the Servarr components and building your own private streaming service.

streaming just has godawful UX now as well. the apps play you commercials while in the menu, you have to worry about buffering, you aren't allowed to take screenshots (which is the most numbskulled DRM i've ever seen; they allowed it in the old days and everything was fine AND either way people have ALREADY managed to rip and share the raw footage. what's the point??), 75% of the fucking content on amazon you have to pay an extra fee for, media appears and disappears at the whim of pigheaded suits, prices go up every 6 months because fuck you, the blindingly stupid netflix 'single family home' restriction....

watching tv is meant to be fun, not introduce a whole other layer of bureaucratic bullshit into our lives

And don't forget that Amazon Prime doesn't just make you pay extra, they make you subscribe to additional subscriptions. I think there's like 3 extra sunscriptions for anime alone.
IIRC the screenshot thing was the tipping point for me. Tried taking a screenshot in the Crunchyroll app for Android, and it came out black...

Looked into plex, and it's all been better ever since
Honestly, the netflix "single family home" thing isn't as bad as I first imagined. I still share my account and we never have any problems.
- That means you're not yet being affected by it.

Maybe I'm blind, maybe it's me viewing this on a phone, but I legitimately can't tell the difference.

Zoom in on the guy’s face. The one on the right is crystal clear in comparison to the left.
I can see the difference around the actor's skin and the environment, its less fuzzy. It's hard to tell the difference, definitely. It's compression quality.

What you have to understand about lossy compression is:

it throws out data you won't be able to perceive in ideal conditions (color ranges)

it throws out data that doesn't change between frames
If you're using an app, you may need to adjust image quality in the settings. I thought the same thing until I tapped the HD button in Boost.
I peeled my eyes off and i can’t see the nuance either

Yeah, if the streaming providers ever switch over to AV1 that would be an interesting comparison.

AV1? that's a codec, right? I see in the preferences section for Piped. Is better than AVC (h.2640)?
- It's also better than H.265/HEVC. Plus, it's open-source and royalty free.
- Yes, AV1 is the next big deal. You can compress the hell out of the video and it still looks near original. I've re-encode some of my locally ripped movies for fun to see how it looks and it's really impressive.
- It's h.264, just FYI.

Depends where you get your alternatively-sourced shows from. Downloaded a torrent yesterday that was so dark that I could barely see anything even with my screen's brightness turned all the way up. Downloaded another torrent of the same episode, and it was much easier to see everything.

Call me a loser for this one but I use the Pirate Bay for my high seas sailing. If there's better avenues I would love to see it.
- It’s not so much about where you find the download, but more about which person or group encoded it.
- 1337x.to is pretty good
- Sorry for the long comment incoming . I went into detail with a lot of things.
  
  The one I use costs a little bit of money and may be a little time-consuming to setup depending on the device, but it costs less than most streaming services these days, and you only need to pay for one of it (versus multiple streaming services).
  
  It's called Kodi. The program itself is free, and it technically doesn't support piracy or torrents, but it does support 3rd party add-ons and 3rd-party repositories.
  
  Here's how it works:
  
  Install Kodi on your platform of choice. It supports Windows, Android (including phones, Fire TV, and Android TV), iOS, and Mac. The steps should be about the same regardless of the platform.
  
  Sign up for a "debrid" service and subscribe. This will affect what torrents will be available for a show or movie, so choose wisely. (I personally use Real-Debrid..)
  
  Sign up for a VPN* and subscribe. (I use ProtonVPN.) Depending on where you live, some Internet Service Providers (the company you pay for Internet service) may not like you using a debrid site since it allows for very high-speed downloads, and it's generally a good idea to use a VPN anyway. Install the VPN onto the same device you installed Kodi on.
  
  Use Google to find an add-on you want to install. Many add-ons cater to different wants. For example, some cater sports, others to anime, and some to live action shows. This site has a good list of available add-ons.
  
  Start Kodi. Use this guide to install the add-on of your choice.
  
  Once the add-on is installed, start it and go to its settings. Most of them should have a section called "Accounts" or "Your Accounts" somewhere in there. In there, you should find the option to add or authorize the debrid service you subscribed to. (If it's not there, it's not supported. This is another reason to choose a good one and another reason I recommend Real-Debrid.) Follow the onscreen instructions to connect the add-on to your debrid account.
  
  Turn on your VPN. Find a show you want to watch, pick a cached torrent when/ if it asks, and enjoy. You may need to adjust your audio language and subtitle settings. If you want to choose a specific torrent, you can do so by right-clicking (on PC) or holding down the OK button (on TV) and selecting the option. It might say something about "rescraping providers".
  
  *Many debrid providers automotive or manually whitelist certain VPNs. Whatever VPN you sign up for should be compatible with the debrid service you chose. Some sites (like Real-Debrid), will list the VPNs they're compatible with, while others (like AllDebrid, another debrid service) will simply have you submit your VPN's IP address for manual approval.
  
  I realize this might seem complicated, but I think the payoff is worth it. I pay under $15 (less than $5 for Real-Debrid and $9.99 for ProtonVPN per month) for access to a TON of TV shows and movies, including shows on several different streaming services. And it costs less than most streaming services do these days.
  
  Some add-ons also support Real-Debrid's cloud functionality. Basically, Real-Debrid has the ability to download torrents on its own, and it stores them so you can download them to a storage device later if you want to. For example, you can use this if you have a long car or train ride ahead, and you need to bring some entertainment. Some Kodi add-ons can take advantage of this. They'll send the magnet link (torrent) to your Real-Debrid account, and it'll be available for you to download later. If it's a cached torrent, it'll be available immediately. If it's uncached, Real-Debrid will begin working on downloading it. I'd recommend using a VPN whenever downloading directly from a debrid service so your ISP doesn't complain to you. Anyway, I've put that to pretty good use myself. I watched an episode of the new Percy Jackson TV show recently on a train ride by downloading it beforehand via Kodi and Real-Debrid. I also got most of the episodes of an old anime I used to watch that way, too.

Hard to tell a difference on my phone, so I'm assuming most people won't care.

The big difference for me is the audio quality.

But isn't the "alternatively sourced" a rip from Amazon prime?

But indeed on my Android tv if I use Amazon prime most of times it decides to use 720p with a low bitrate

A lot of "alternative sources" are BluRay or even 4K Bluray rips. Of course there oftentimes also are Prime Video or Netflix rips but that just depends on availability. Usually there’s a choice. You can also download rips that are more compressed than Netflix would ever be but if you’re out for quality you just don’t download those unless there’s nothing better available.
- The first one or two seasons of Better Caul Saul were available as AV1 and the quality was great. It looked basically uncrompressed. Then the next season was a rip from Netflix... The drop in quality was so huge, it's insane.

I have a story, so I get wanting great video quality and why people get remuxes, but I have a friend who is borderline legally blind. His vision is so poor that he has to wear contacts and glasses at the same time. He has to get the remux version of things and complains about minor encoding artificacts from versions of things with smaller file sizes that I feel wouldn't bother 99.9% of the population. Hell years ago, before he got an updated prescription, he was driving and he mentioned how bad his vision was getting and I asked him if he could read the license plate for the car stopped in front of us and he laughed and said no. Anyway, I feel like the extra quality is wasted on him. He's like an audiophile who is hard of hearing. I just find this funny and wanted to share.