It's unwatchable. I'd cancel Prime because of it, if I didn't want the shipping. What is the real purpose of them limiting the stream? It can't be because of pirating. The movies and shows show up on the torrent sites BEFORE they even hit Amazon Prime. So who's going to "Record" it there? They are only hurting their customers.
Lol. Why should I pay for aggressively hostile software that requires me to install spyware on my machine for the privilege of watching throttled content? No thanks, I'll download an mkv and watch it when I want, where I want, online or offline.
I could do so with DVD and blu-ray. You don't want to let me do so via the internet? Okay, I'll do it anyways.
1080p = 2k; both are 1920x1080p. p is rows in the vertical dimension (p for progressive, as opposed to i for interlaced; e.g. NZ terrestrial TV is 1080i). k is columns in the horizontal direction, and comes from film making and visual effects (1920 rounds up to 2k and 3840 rounds up to 4k).
Wow, I didn't know this! I mistook it for 1440p (that's what my monitor is). I figure that it might be between 1080p and 4k that it was synonymous with 2k, but I'm mistaken.
Yes, k stands for thousand. Historically, 4k meant 4096 pixels wide in the context of digitised film or digital visual effects, and 2k meant 2048 pixels wide. TVs ended up 1920 pixels wide, which is "close enough" to use the same term, 2k. I think "4k" is used for marketing TVs as it's easier to remember and say than "2160p", so now we mix the terminology.
Its a loophole. UHD4k is what tv advertiser used to dilute meaning and not get sued. I believe the definition has been diluted to the point 4k is expected to be UHD.
Rounding 1920 to 2k and 3840 to 4k is not too bad. And yes it's marketing to switch from height to width, but whatever.
Rounding 2560 to 2k is massively confusing. Don't do it. 2.5k or don't use "k" at all.
And when I go look at a couple torrent sites and scroll through movies and tv shows, I'm not seeing a single 1440p in the first couple pages. Some searches show barely anything at all.
The first site I checked has 317 pages of 50x 2160p listings per page going back seven years.
The most recent entry is:
How To Train Your Dragon The Hidden World (2019) 2160p 4K BluRay 5 1-LAMA
Format : HEVC
Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 634 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.35:1
Near the top is a recent TV episode:
True Detective S04E04 Night Country Part 4 2160p MAX WEB-DL DDP5 1 DoVi x265-NTb
Format : HEVC
Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 920 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.000
What makes things problematic is the overbearing love for letterbox like aspect ratios, even pirates have standards and they're having to bundle a slew of aspect ratios together .. this comes from the production companies.
You overwhelmingly see 1280x720, 1920x1080, and 3840x2160, sometimes with a truncated height because of aspect ratio but usually advertised with the full height for consistency reasons.
There's barely any 2560x1440. Anyone going above 1080p goes directly to 4k.
Youtube is pretty much the only place I've ever seen 1440p encodes, and that's because they're super version-happy and make 20 different variants of a video.
1440p isn't really available on official streaming platforms, so it is indeed a lot more rare.
It's pretty much only available on original encodes, i.e. BluRay rips, this makes it a format that very rarely seen on currently airing shows, which are mostly webrips from official streaming platforms.
You'll often see it alongside the usual resolutions for movies that have since been released on disk.
So now 1440p = 2k, and k becomes meaningful. Problem solved!
It also gives a solution for ultrawides like 7680 x 2160p, which are 8k.
More interestingly, “8K” TVs now become 16k TVs, which marketers should like. We’ve come full circle! Now the k nomenclature also gives you an idea of how difficult that 16k display will be to drive with a video card relative to your existing monitor.
> I have a proposal for you: Take back the k from the marketers.
And how do you propose getting your definition out in front of more people than the combined marketers of all the legit sources of movie, TV and other streaming content in the world?
lol
Pick the battles you have a whelk's chance in a supernova of winning.
For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.