I have absolutely no clue about all when it comes to older shows when there's half a dozen or more releases. I just look for pretty subs because I think it implies an extra level of care. For modern stuff... well, fansubs are mostly dead but I get those edits when I can, although I try to see what people are saying about them on nyaa and such first.
Hmm....

Like you, I'm watching on 1080p screens. I'm perfectly fine with EMBER releases and even the CR rips from HorribleSubs/SubsPlease.
I'm not going to notice a real difference/improvement from one release to another unless there's some substantial filtering done such as de-noising or some sharpening filter thrown on it. One thing I can't stand is black bars, though. I'll go out of my way to find a release that crops those out. Overall, though, if I look at it and think "good enough, works for me" then I'll grab it.
Personally, I don't really see why a particular release needs to have episodes at 5+ GB apiece, when there's other encodes that are virtually the same video quality for a greater space savings.
Whenever I see Nyaa comments complaining about file sizes being so small, I wonder why they even bother since they were never going to obtain that release anyway. It sometimes feels like the audiophile community where there's snobs that'll call you names for opting for an "inferior" release that is virtually the same but they used up 50+ GB of HDD space instead.

I do not understand the space argument when you can just delete after watching.
If you want to archive something, that means it's not just some "average" show that you don't really enjoy. Otherwise, the space argument goes out of the window. But if you do decide to archive a show that you really enjoy, you should be going for highest quality anyway.
So either way, as far as I can see, the space argument collapses under its own weight.

I don't need the highest possible quality for watching. For seasonal stuff, I usually go with automated rips, because these satisfy a criterion that is actually important to me: reliable releases.
I sometimes make an exception for uncensored versions or releases from groups that I trust.

For anything not-seasonal, there is no reason ever to not pic the highest quality (as far as your senses can tell). That said, I have sometimes downloaded shows in segments because I could not be bothered to put the entirety of the dozens (or hundreds) of gigs onto my drive at once.

>>123355
>If you want to archive something, that means it's not just some "average" show that you don't really enjoy.
Not really. I archive kuso shows I didn't like both for the purposes of seeding alongside just wanting to archive them. I enjoy having a personal collection, even if it's not entirely made up of stuff I personally enjoy.

>>123355
Some people are on metered connections/capped and the ISP throttles them for using too much bandwidth. Other times, it's horribly slow connections for those living in the hinterlands. Nobody wants to sit there forever waiting on huge filesize downloads.
As for saving stuff, I keep what I watch. Nothing gets deleted since I share the collection with family and it turns into a local Netflix-type thing with Jellyfin.
If I delete everything and watch to re-watch the same release, only for it to disappear due to either no seeders or it's been taken off the XDCC bots then it's not so easy to find again for that favored release.

not as i really download stuff
they closed allthe streaming platforms in my area and all those global simply dont serve it
id prefer watch streams and even still miss daisuki.net

For newer stuff, I don't really care. I just stick with SubsPlease. It's all pretty much the same anyways. Older stuff is really what the differences lie because there can be genuine differences between 480i NTSC and 576i PAL releases, DVD vs Bluray upscale, LD vs VHS, etc. Those warrant more investigation, and really are a case-by-case type thing that I don't think you can give a simple answer to.

>>123360
Agreed, new stuff is pretty much the same. SubsPlease and call it a day.
When trawling older releases, that's where the actual investigation and comparison matters.
Such as seeing BD rips where the disc itself is just a upscale and there's no point to grabbing that both quality- and size-wise, or where the encoder was a little too trigger happy with video filters on an old DVD release, etc.

>>123352
Nyaa comments tend to be really abrasive I've noticed, especially over what seems (to me) like pretty minor stuff. I can understand being passionate about it, but a lot of the users seem to fail to understand different releases exist for different people, 十人十色 and all.
But yeah, outside of the more obvious stuff I usually can't notice a difference unless I get close to the monitor. Aliasing and banding I do notice, but all the decent releases usually fix those to an extent.

>>123362
Yep, there's unfortunately some real elitists in Nyaa comments sometimes. Like man, I'm just watching cute anime girls doing cute things, calm down lol

I've been doing EMBER and other smaller stuff lately for airing things and I can't say I notice much of a difference. My monitor is 1440p if that means anything.
Most edited/fansub releases go with big filesizes so I end up with those, which makes sense because they feel strongly enough about it to not sacrifice on quality even if it's a placebo. The only time I'd notice is with a direct comparison of the same static frame, and that's similar to other things like which gaming screen to buy for the Vita and so on. For old shows I love, well, I never get the gigantic BD stuff that's like 60GB for 12 episodes unless it's the only one available, which is quite rare thankfully.
Also, for airing shows the TV bitrate stuff means that you can't really make it beautiful in particularly colorful animated scenes anyway. This is most reliably seen in Precure transformations, but the recent Jellyfish show is also this way. This show looks beautiful at times, but when you take a screenshot like I did here you really notice the bitrate problem. It's a 1.5gb file but the loss is already there in the source.

I always go for a high bitrate since I have a fairly large sized screen and a really bit-starved release sticks out a LOT when I fullscreen it. Also I tend to look for good audio quality if not lossless since bad audio is a cancer on the ears. Then, normally on older stuff, I check to see whether the BD release or DVD release is the best. Since sometimes you'll get a better quality on the DVD since the BD is retarded and just a smeared upscale (lots of sailor moon ones)

Aside from that I try to avoid the dolby vision whenever possible.

>>123381
Sadly the Jellyfish show got licensed by HIDIVE which means it has awful video and audio since they compress the hell out of it.. noticeably worse than CR even. Their version of the Jellyfish show actually has holes in the spectrogram too, which I'd never even seen before. Thankfully Okay-Subs is doing an improved version.

>>123357
If your purpose is ensuring a show is available to other people, that's all the more reason to pick a quality release. It's retarded to have 50 webrip seeders when there's a BD fansub with only 5.

I'll use SP for reliability unless they do something stupid with the translation like dropping honorifics, but I never keep those files past the season they air in.

>>123362
There is an aspect of the cartel hazing people, but there's also a lot of shit getting thrown around that doesn't need to be there. Outside of filtering out reencodes, there isn't really a way to sort through things meant for you and things meant for some theoretical audience with an bizarre usecase. There's nothing more frustrating than putting effort into making something of high quality only to have a bunch of blind retards go after an objectively worse release because it's 100mbs smaller or has a green highlight.

>>123388
I do seed quality releases, just not always the best possible for reasons already given. I don't think I'm seeding a single TV or webrip actually, outside of series that haven't had a decent BDrip or whatever posted yet. From my experience most of the best releases have plenty of seeds already anyhow, like Okay-Sub's 100GB Fate/Zero release or hchcsen's Gundam remuxes. I personally don't have a need for those releases, but I do still seed quality alternatives for the series I do archive so that those with desires similar to mine can still reliably get them.

And yeah, there's a lot of useful feedback given on Nyaa too and it's helped me avoid awful releases several times, though I was mainly referring to stuff like https://nyaa.si/view/1800560 where the first commenter seems incapable of understanding that not everybody wants a large release. Notice how he didn't provide any meaningful feedback other than whining about the size?

>>123387
Oh, that makes sense then. Yeah, I saw okay-subs and got them for episode 2. I'm not sure if it's better since I'd need an equivalent scene, but it probably is.
As someone mentioned earlier I'll be deleting it after the season ends, anyway. I tend to take lots of screenshots and if I feel nostalgic I can just look at them... or something like that.

There is zero noticeable difference in quality between the ASW release and SubsPlease. People need to stop normalizing bloat. It didn't used to be like this. Everyone used to shit on group like Coalgirls for releasing bloated garbage.

>>123413
Most people dont care about bloat or kludges if it works

>>123414
>Most people dont care
Exactly. And this in turns normalizes everyone to release their stuff in a bloated state. It takes longer to download, kills your SSD/HDD with more writes and has negligible benefits. The only reason to download the SubsPlease release over ASW is that SubsPlease comes out first.

I noticed that Fran's show had a guy named Isekai that also had 'Isekai-mini' releases that were much smaller. It would be nice if people did that more often, especially with an easy to notice label.

>>123413
I generally agree with you, but it depends on the scene and your eyes. For example:
ASW: https://i.slow.pics/KB0ANuqn.png
https://i.slow.pics/Ziwob76G.png
SubsPlease: https://i.slow.pics/6LA9ZPcp.png
https://i.slow.pics/0rEqfml3.png
Granted these are cherrypicked, but during busy scenes noise is far more common in ASW releases and if you're watching on a display where that needs to be upscaled it's going to be even more noticeable. Though with non-mini encode stuff like Coalgirls vs. the next best, it's significantly less noticeable for most.

>>123418
I have to get very close to the screen to see anything though. And if you're that obsessed with quality you should wait for the BD release anyway. Just doesn't sit well with me downloading 1.4gb per ep.

>>123413
>>123416
You are way behind the times, man.
Normalization does not matter. The product that you are discussing is an automated release, a direct rip from a source that is for a completely different audience (paying customers).
Around 2010, fansubbers still pretended to be relevant by putting their own spins on the official releases. Nowadays, everybody knows that they are a marginal existence next to the official versions.
Fansubbers today exist largely to address whatever gaps open up, and that's a thankless job.
That's why whatever technical skills or standards were common back then are now mostly forgotten.

CR streams in large file sizes because that's the simplest way and is good for the greatest variety of toasters, even if it costs them bandwidth. You can boycott subsplease or complain about it on an anonymous image board. But that's not going to impress the CR leadership.

Smallest size with watchable quality
Usually just torrent Judas releases

>>123469
I know it's ripped directly from CR (that's why it always comes first).
>The only reason to download the SubsPlease release over ASW is that SubsPlease comes out first
I sometimes download the SubsPlease release based on this if I want to watch something as soon as it comes out.

CR however, was made to be streamed, not downloaded. Otherwise you're killing your poor SSD/HDD with those huge ass file size (specially SSD, don't complain if it stops working after a few years of doing that).

>>123485
The point being that it's pointless to complain about people normalizing it.

>>123486
I feel like this will cause everyone to abandon torrents and just watch streams instead (already happened to some extent, nyaa used to be more popular).

Random comments I found there about this.

>>123487
>abandon torrents and just watch streams instead (already happened to some extent
I believe that future to be inevitable to some degree. Anime being one of the few holdouts with a lot of people still downloading properly and using real players, contrasting western television that is almost exclusively watched on stream. I don't think that newcomers to anime will ever see a single reason to acquaint themselves with the tools that we use.

echoing what was already said releases literally do not matter anymore since they're all just streaming site rips and fansubs have been dead for ages

the only thing i watch out is for hidive rips, as already mentioned in this thread they're bit starved garbage and they're immediately noticeable especially if you take screenshots, and what i usually try to get then is amazon rips, i dunno how licensing works but for some reason things tend to be available there when they're not on CR
>>123485
>Otherwise you're killing your poor SSD/HDD
modern ssds have vastly better endurance than when the first drives started hitting the market
i don't really think that was even an issue for those, but for the average 1 TB ssd drive nowadays you'd have to overwrite the entire drive every day for more than a year... on that account it's really a non issue