doublevr
eh what? I have to echo @VRXVR & @onyxone & @SchnuppiLilac sentiments and concern. You're gonna take away our access to the full quality 8k original downloads? From all studios or just SLRO? (If it's just SLRO then... ok... much less of a big deal 🤷. Because I do appreciate the visual quality SLRO manages to pack into the efficient files. But if it's site-wide from all creators, then alarm bells are ringing, so please take my concern all the more seriously!):
I've experimented with some ffmpeg myself and found that for video in the 120-200Mbps range, I could convert them to around 50-80Mbps depending on the video, using slow preset and crf 18. Then have my 3080 render them for my Q3 - this yields a definitely higher quality experience than watching the seemingly 30Mbps-capped vids, but obviously takes up much less space than the raw 120-200Mbps files. (fwiw if the studio's original file is less than 80Mbps or so, I may not bother doing a conversion at all)
Like, I genuinely admire how y'all have managed to push streaming quality as high as it can get within the 30Mbps range 👍️. But it's still good to have the ability to access higher bitrate than that with our subscription if we wanted sometimes! I'd like to be able to continue tinkering in the way I described above.
Getting surprised by downgrades periodically is certainly crummy - so if this is a full cutoff and not just SLRO, please reconsider. I'm not even one to argue against reasonable limits/compromises, such as the 30 files per 144 hours - that kind of thing makes sense. If I can conjure up an example of a new potential reasonable compromise: let's say we didn't have access to the full size original video anymore, but we did have the AV1 download option be at a higher cap than the 30Mbps used for streaming, that could certainly be agreeable. Say, if the downloadable file were 50-60Mbps AV1, which in my experience is very roughly comparable to 70Mbps h265 or 100Mbps h264, I could vibe with that! (no pun intended as I don't have a haptic device 🥴)
Furthermore, another thing I have tinkered with is AI interpolation to triple frame rate with really good quality results. Of course to do this, it's desirable to start with the highest bitrate original available, rather than a compressed file. I was contemplating doing some more of these transcodes, editing together top quality slow motion clips, and then seeing what it would take to become an uploader here. My fingers are crossed for confirmation that other studios' raw/full/original files will not be gated off 🤞. Because without those starting points for my editing tests, this potential side project will lose all steam and nothing will come of it.