I can absolutely tell the difference and it’s frankly annoying to collect something which will become obsolete not just within your lifespan but when you’ll likely have a lot of lifespan left to go. 4K blurays to me hold up compared to 5k/6k/8k raw footage to the point I wouldn’t be too troubled if I had an old format on my NAS when an h.267 8k version came out.

You can have a great experience by streaming videos directly off shady streaming sites and using a cheap Hisense TV but there will always be a market for people dropping tens to hundreds of grand on some elite home theatre with inky blacks and perfect sound and maybe a datacenter storage array in their garage. It’s practically a hobby.

you know, I’ve never actually bought a bluray video before, maybe I’ll pop one in my ps5 and see if I’m blown away, or more likely if the other sources start having things I cant unsee

I did recently get back into piracy, and did a couple comparisons since I figured 4gb h265 is so last decade, and I really wasnt amused by the larger bluray rips. I have 20/10 vision acuity and can also see a broad vivid colorspace. I have great monitors and screens chosen for that color space and quality too.

Honestly if we compare a 10gb compressed re-encode to a 4K bluray rip or remux I would have trouble telling the difference but 4gb is pretty small especially for certain kinds of movies.

There’s certain scenes where I can definitely see compression artifacts or whatever and others where quality differences cannot be noticed.

My guess: this probably solves the issue with compression artifacts creating annoying blocks of color in dark/black areas of the video, which is increasingly important as the past decade had movie and TV show makers all switch to shooting everything ridiculously dark.

How far away are you sitting from your TV, and how big is it?