Everyone has different standards for video quality. There are plenty of people who are happy to watch youtube videos that are strongly cropped, flipped, played at the wrong speed, and watermarked. There are people who won’t download anything larger than 700mb for a 1080p 2.5hour movie, and then they’ll rate the video quality a 10 out of 10. We have higher standards here, which makes sense. It’s where these things originate from. If someone wants to make any lower quality version, they can, and they don’t need to do it from the original files, because it’s not going to make a difference when you drop the settings to such low levels.

But if you can’t see an enormous difference in those screenshot comparisons, that’s rather interesting. I can see how you might not care how they look. And that’s fine. That’s just stating that there’s almost no point where video quality becomes poor enough that you won’t watch (which, again, is fine). I think the only thing those compressed shots have going for them is the fact that you can still see what’s happening on the screen and you can see that it’s a frame of the same thing. For some people, that’s really all that matters.

But for the newcomers who don’t understand why anyone would download a large file, keep in mind that the people around here are interested in versions that will replace the original blu-rays that they own. Not in copies that are simply the smallest in which you can still see what’s happening on the screen, or getting the entire trilogy to fit on your phone’s internal memory or your dropbox account or a CD-R or whatever. For the rest of us, it’s 2016 and large files aren’t a big deal. But I understand that circumstances vary.