For the past year or so, I have been fairly happy with the RD, Torrentio, and Stremio setup. I’ve enjoyed being able to have a mostly seamless streaming experience; just search, click, and watch with little load or wait. In the past, I’ve experimented with the -arr’s and qTorrent setup on a local machine, but I switched to RD for the convenience of being able to spontaneously watch a show or movie (like on a date night).
With the possible (maybe likely) end of RD, I have wanted to look back again at having a personal setup, but I want to see if anyone has recommendations for a setup that is as close as possible to the current one. I know, of course, that a local setup will not have the same benefit as a massive service as RD with a huge cache of torrents ready to go, but is there a way to get close? Round off some of the sharp edges and pain points?
First, good job on not having a smart TV. They’re truly awful.
I would de-emphasize the actual resolution benefits of 4K. Most of us don’t sit close enough to notice the difference.
For me, it’s about high dynamic range (HDR).
For example, when I was a kid, I was always annoyed by how the photos I took of what I thought was a gorgeous landscape, and then developed the film (yes, I’m an old) it always looked horribly bland and drab.
Watching 4K content on a TV for the first time was like looking at the beautiful landscape again. (It actually was - Netflix’s Marco Polo had the most stunning vistas!)
Must have been terrible film (or was scanned/printed badly, or maybe poor development process). I found that most pictures I’ve taken digitally (before I got a modern higher quality digital camera) looked awful, but the ones I took on film look amazing and had better color depth than many of the earlier digital cameras and especially the digital cameras on phones. Of course modern digital cameras are much better both in color depth, resolution, and also less noise in the image, and since you can reuse the picture medium, which you can’t do with film (which can get expensive if you take a lot of pictures), they’re way worth it today.
Maybe. I was a kid so probably was given crap equipment anf cheap film and likely didn’t treat it well. But the principle is the same. Having deeper shadows that preserve detail, and brighter highlights that aren’t blown out is what, for me, evokes a more visceral response when watching content, whereas Increasing the number of pixels from 1080p to 4K doesn’t.
Yeah I agree, it’s the contrast and colors that really matter, hence why OLEDs are becoming more popular and content looks much better on OLEDs even if it’s just 1080p or even 720p