darji wrote:honestly i can not believe people still want to watch stuff in SD. To be honest it is very strange that almost every fangroup beside Drama for some reason goes for the highest quality possible and with dramas I can not even find subtitles for 720 or even 1080P files...
The major problem is encoding takes a lot of time.
From what I have seen the color space for TV shows is smaller than anime, hence, they can be encoded to a smaller size. 45min, 720P, Hi10 @ 250 MB is where quality starts to suffer. With HEVC the size can get down to 150 MB but not all players are good at playing this format nor is seeking working properly.
If the episode has lots of particle scenes e.g. snowing than there's no choice but increase quality. In any case, it takes a Dual Core2 more than 24 hours to encode a 2 GB down to 250 MB. These days it shouldn't be a problem but not everyone has the latest computer at hand.
So many just cannot or don't want to waste much time encoding.
The other issues is it makes no sense to upscale a smaller resolution source because you lose original data quality. Players resize anyway so it makes no sense to have them resize again and lower quality again when replaying.