You don’t really prefer a lower resolution, you just work within the limitations you have.

Also, I don’t notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p

Either your display is really shitty or you need (better) glasses. This isn’t like the difference between 60 and 144hz where its barely visible for untrained eyes.

I like to watch TV shows in the background where I’m not going to be watching the screen obsessively, so I have several shows in 480P or sub-480P. There are also some shows where the “official” HD versions are just awful (most 90s sitcoms) or the show was made for 4:3 and has a different feel converted to 16:9 (MASH, The Wire).

Going beyond that though, I spent years on a really limited connection (2.6m down/400k up) and my instinct for saving bandwidth and storage space is still there, along with my need to pay it forward since I ain’t no leech. I’ve become fond of making what I call “Bonsai Encodes”, where the files are small enough to be sent over damn near anything. With mono Opus and VP9 video you can cram 45 minutes of perfectly watchable content into a sub-25mb file that’ll play in Discord, with VTT subtitles even (though those won’t play in Discord itself). Looks a bit like watching it on an old tube TV, but it’s watchable.

That’s less of an opinion and more of a hardware restriction, isn’t it?

If I had a 5 Mbps connection or no display that can display 4k, I also would not download in 4k.

You’re not alone, I definitely spent the majority of my time on 720p rips. I couldn’t tell the difference between them and 1080. Though these days, actually just recently, I’ve switched over to 1080, and I can tell when it’s lower.

But most my collection is still 720 and I feel no need to go back through and update everything. Maybe when I get arr set up I’ll let it go through and do it for me 🤷‍♂️

1080p is way better if you have a screen that is a good size. Also if you are into surround sound (I am) there is a lower chance to get it on 720p rips.

I prefer 720, both for file/bandwidth reasons and for quality reasons. Once you start getting into higher quality, it starts looking like you’re actually there in the room with the actors, and I don’t like that. It’s unsettling. I want my TV and movies to look like TV and movies.

Nope. Most of my stuff is 720p because I won’t be watching it again. My library has significantly dwindled in size. Only my absolute favorites are stored in high quality. Everything else is SD and quite a bit has been deleted.

Let’s be honest, most stuff is shit and forgettable / not watching again. They are just remakes of readaptations of sequels. You know that by the time you want to watch it again, there will be a remake just as bad.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I prefer the opposite. I want the best quality I can get often 4K remux. Storage is cheap nowadays and I don’t mind waiting a few days for a movie to download. Also I do have a 500/500 connection which helps.

I prefer 1080p but if not available then 720p is perfectly fine as well. 4k is overkill and I don’t even have a monitor that could play it at native resolution. Where I do prefer “lower quality” though is framerate. I don’t like how 60fps looks so I force YouTube to play videos at 24fps.

Depends on the media.
Minimum it has to be web-dl and 1080p.

For media that needs it or I want to (e.g. Interstellar), I will search high bitrate web-dl/bluray or a remux.
If it’s something I will for certain only watch once, I’ll be fine with a regular 1080p mid bitrate file.

I am in same boat

I usually watch youtube (well via Freetube) on 480, maybe 720 when I am paying attention and 360 when I am laying down. I prefer these small file sizes because I can skip left and right in the video time with the arrow buttons like the file is local and not online. I haven’t pirated a movie in years (I would not want to watch anything new) but I download a lot of old racing from the 80s and 90s and it is already 480p, so as long as it is in english, not black/white I am happy.

It really depends on the media and my level of interest in it. I was only bothering to try and get 1080p copies of stuff I liked due to only having a 1080p TV for so long. But I did make efforts to get 1080 where possible (and based on my drives at the time) even before I had a HD TV and the only thing I had to actually watch that resolution on was my laptop. And that was because I wanted to make sure I had (at the time) the best copies of torrented encodes of stuff I really loved and would want to look good later. But I got a 4K HDR TV a few months ago as my 13yo 1080p TV started just giving black screens on all inputs. And while a lot of things are fine, the limitations of the encodes are showing much more.

If I am just checking out something that I have heard about or was told to check out by a friend. I might just grab a 1080 or even 720 copy since they are often the top seeded results. Then go back and find 4k copies if I really get into it. Though my main issue today is similar to back when I was using my laptop. Storage space. I started ripping my Blu-rays and I am the worst about dealing with compression stuff. So I really really need to get on making that media server I have been “meaning to build” for years. Get some 18TB or 20TB drives and RAID the shit out of them for redundancy. lol.

Well, 480p sucks

I don’t often go for the full 4K Blu-ray Remux releases, since they’re massive and I can’t really tell the difference over a 10-15GB rip, at least visually. Just a webrip is fine, depending on the source. Plus even my nVidia Shield Pro struggles with them at times.