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mattwolfmatt

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 7, 2008
1,090
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I am considering buying the season pass of LOST - and am debating between HD and standard. What is the difference in how large the files are (approximately)? I hear this season has 18 hour long (42 minute long) episodes. Is HD double the size of standard? And about how big is each?

My Apple TV (160GB), Mac Mini Hard Drive (320GB), and ipod touch (32GB) are all getting smaller it seems!

Thanks!
 
HD encode sizes

Matt, I don't convert TV shows however I have converted many HD and DVD sources and can give you some stats. I use Hanbrake for all my encodes.

When I convert standard DVD's, I use the legacy AppleTV preset which uses maxbitrate of 2500 kbps and I get a file size anywhere between 2-2.5 GB.

When I convert HD content (1080p), I use the new AppleTV preset at 59% constant quality and my file sizes are between 2.5-3.5 GB.

Hope this helps.
 
I am considering buying the season pass of LOST - and am debating between HD and standard. What is the difference in how large the files are (approximately)? I hear this season has 18 hour long (42 minute long) episodes. Is HD double the size of standard? And about how big is each?

The first episode of Season 4 BSG is 1.37 gb and is 44 minutes long (720p).

My Apple TV (160GB), Mac Mini Hard Drive (320GB), and ipod touch (32GB) are all getting smaller it seems!

FW hard drives are cheap, man! You can get a 1.5 TB FW400 drive for $170.

When I convert HD content (1080p), I use the new AppleTV preset at 59% constant quality and my file sizes are between 2.5-3.5 GB.

I used to do this as well with my Blu-ray rips (down to 720p), but sometimes the files come in at 7 or 8 gb. :eek: So I now do all my Blu-ray transcodes at 5500 bit rate.
 
I am considering buying the season pass of LOST - and am debating between HD and standard. What is the difference in how large the files are (approximately)? I hear this season has 18 hour long (42 minute long) episodes. Is HD double the size of standard? And about how big is each?

It says right in the description. For Lost Season 4 it is 19.24GB for HD and 6.81GB for SD.

Partly this is because if you buy the HD Version you get the SD Files as well, also note that you can only transfer the SD Version to your iPod. So the size of your iPod is no deal breaker for buying the HD version ;)
 
It says right in the description. For Lost Season 4 it is 19.24GB for HD and 6.81GB for SD.

Partly this is because if you buy the HD Version you get the SD Files as well, also note that you can only transfer the SD Version to your iPod. So the size of your iPod is no deal breaker for buying the HD version ;)

For the record, I asked the original question 5 weeks before the first Lost episode from Season 5. No file sizes were listed at the time for the current season.

Thanks to all who replied though.
 
HD Quality

As Nightstorm mentions, I have also found 57% to work well on Bluray sources from a size and quality perspective. I personally cant tell the quality difference between Bluray sources converted at 57% vs 59%; can anyone else tell the difference. If you can tell a difference maybe you can let me know which movies you saw a difference in.

I am trying to keep the file size below 4GB for the tagging limitation of MetaX for Windows and streaming from my computer to AppleTV.
 
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