I would bet that a 720-upscaled dvd will look better than a low bitrate 720 stream. Hell, a 720-upscaled dvd probably looks better than a low bitrate 1080 or 4k stream. In many aspects a lower resolution video with a high bitrate will always look better than a video at higher resolution with a bitrate that’s too low. Excess compression makes visual quality turn to ugly garbage. Even just a little bit of additional compression quickly starts to cause color banding, blocky artifacts, and visual noise in motion sequences.
Eheran@lemmy.world 10 months ago
DVDs have a maximum Bitrate of 10 Mb/s. This is like 5 Mb/s with H264 or 2.5 Mb/s with H265, since the compression back then was MPEG2. Feel free to look up Bitrates of streaming services. YouTube is at roughly 15x that with 4K videos. 720p uses about the same.
Glowstick@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Bitrate per pixel is what we’re talking about. Bitrate alone tells you nothing. If you’re actually receiving a full as-advertised bitrate stream with a well-implemented compression algorithm then obviously if all else being equal then higher resolution = higher quality. But in reality many streams are overly compressed to save on their bandwidth and server costs, and often due to tech inefficiencies you won’t actually receive the full bit rate, resulting in even more additional compression losses.
Again, a perfectly-implemented, perfectly-transported stream in 720p will always look better than a dvd with a 480p video file stored on it. But in reality there are many situations where a stream is imperfectly-implemented and imperfectly-transported, sometimes to the point where visual quality worsens to below what you would get from an upscaled 480p dvd.
Eheran@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I am not always happy. But I can also see that a DVD has lower quilted than essentially any YouTube video. Of course unless it was uploaded in lower quality to begin with. The source material has to be good enough. There are more than enough 1080p videos that are only 360p. Or 4K that is only 720p. Not due to compression, just from the source material.